Statistics Canada Reports II

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

Oh come on now, pretty much everyone, and especially governments, have known for decades that there would be a mass die-off of Canadians that would need to be replaced. Why aren't you asking why no leader did anything about the problem prior to our current pm?

+1

Precisely. Demographers and analysts had been warning Canadian governments for 20+ years about the consequences of inaction on the demographic front but were met with next to no response at all. Successive Federal Governments have been tone deaf. They kept punting the problem down the road for so long that these same pundits had to start sounding the alarm bells 10+ years ago. The longer we waited the more drastic a response would be needed.

Finally, a Federal Government took noticed and took action. It was too much too fast but this is what happens when looming issues get ignored for decades.. I'm no fan of Justin Trudeau but it's a bit rich to now be complaining about large scale immigration when NO government till recently bothered addressing this. We've known about this for a very very long time.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

Oh come on now, pretty much everyone, and especially governments, have known for decades that there would be a mass die-off of Canadians that would need to be replaced. Why aren't you asking why no leader did anything about the problem prior to our current pm?

That sound you hear is Boomer saying "I'm not dead yet!"...

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by isaidso

+1

Precisely. Demographers and analysts had been warning Canadian governments for 20+ years about the consequences of inaction on the demographic front but were met with next to no response at all. Successive Federal Governments have been tone deaf. They kept punting the problem down the road for so long that these same pundits had to start sounding the alarm bells 10+ years ago. The longer we waited the more drastic a response would be needed.

Finally, a Federal Government took noticed and took action. It was too much too fast but this is what happens when looming issues get ignored for decades.. I'm no fan of Justin Trudeau but it's a bit rich to now be complaining about large scale immigration when NO government till recently bothered addressing this. We've known about this for a very very long time.

LOL, "Finally, a Federal Government took noticed and took action". Yes, I'm sure that was exactly Trudeau and the Liberals motivation.

[someone123]

Adding immigrants to make up a labour shortfall is one possibility but so are middle aged people staying in the workforce longer and productivity gains. Canada taxes real estate wealth very lightly while charging punishingly high tax rates on the most productive workers and productivity has been flat or falling for many years.

[whatnext]

Maybe Trudeau just needs to start hanging out with Elon Musk more:

ELON WANTS YOU TO HAVE MORE BABIES
-Musk, father of at least 12, has been quietly buying mainstream respectability for fringe theories about a coming population collapse.
By Sophie Alexander and Dana Hull
June 21, 2024 at 5:00 AM PDT

Even if you don’t write about Elon Musk for a living, you probably have some sense of his very public political tilt over the past few years. Musk, once a left-of-center capitalist known largely for his environmentalism, now regularly chats with Donald Trump and publicly amplifies a wide range of right-wing talking points and conspiracy theories, especially online. The guy’s almost got a checklist: border security, vaccine skepticism, pronoun jokes, red pilling, stop-the-stealing. Last fall he endorsed an antisemitic “replacement theory” trope, setting off a minor advertiser boycott. Name a mind virus, and he’s probably posting about it.

If you’ve paid unhealthily close attention, you may have also noticed another pattern. It’s become rarer and rarer for Musk to get through an interview or meet a world leader without bringing up babies, sometimes with his young son X in tow. In Musk’s mind, global fertility rates are not just a crisis, but the crisis. In 2022 he tweeted that “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.”...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2...&sref=x4rjnz06

[saffronleaf]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

My guess is these growth rates won't stay stable, though. If the feds follow through with a reduction in temporary immigation, it'll cut signfiicantly into growth numbers nationwide. We're also seeing in Nova Scotia a tempering of the interprovincial influx that's dominated for the past eight or nine years. (Last Q3 saw a slight interprovincial decline, the first in almost a decade. Then it was back into a strong positive in Q4, but this past Q1 was a modest decline.)

I'm guessing that as housing costs have grown in Nova Scotia, it's less attractive for people seeking a cost-of-living refuge, so from now on we'll see a mix of up quarters and down quarters for interprovincial migration, for a more flat trend overall. The cost advantage is still there, but less so than in the recent past. That seems to bear out in the stats. There hasn't been meaningful uptick in outmigration, what we're seeing is mostly a decline in IN-migration. That might also explain why New Brunswick, where housing is still significantly cheaper, is still posting big interprovincial gains.

also maybe because some companies are requiring remote workers to live proximate to their office

[theman23]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

Oh come on now, pretty much everyone, and especially governments, have known for decades that there would be a mass die-off of Canadians that would need to be replaced. Why aren't you asking why no leader did anything about the problem prior to our current pm?

Not sure where you’re getting this from? No one is predicting a “mass die off”. Boomers aren’t literally dinosaurs. They will eventually die, but no quicker than any previous generation and have been outnumbered by millennials for some time. If there is a real demographic crisis, itll occur after the millennials and gen Z who had no children reach their sunset years. Importing a bunch more of them does nothing to solve this. It’s also really weird to characterize our immigration policies prior to 2015 as non existent. We had one of the most generous immigration programs (note the emphasis) in the western world and with that fairly favourable demographics for a western country.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

re: Alberta, I agree that for many reasons, the rush to Alberta will probably wane, just as the rush to the Maritimes has, mainly because: A: Housing is rapidly losing its affordability advantage (in southern Alberta, anyway) and B: The job market is good but not so clearly superior to the rest of the country anymore.

It's interesting how in the recent past, interprovincial migration was primarily driven by economic factors: a healthy economy with an abundance of good jobs would grow; ones with fewer jobs & lower pay would shrink. And depending on the place, the good times would come in spurts and stops.

In the past 5 years or so though, it seems to have become primarily driven instead by the search for affordable housing. People keep moving to the next-best place they can afford, until that one fills up and the prices rise; and then it's on to the next place down the line.

Calgary seems to be reaching that point now, and then it'll be Edmonton. Once Edmonton is no longer a good deal, then I guess it'll be Saskatchewan & Manitoba that become the beneficiaries of interprovincial growth. And once those get expensive too, then who knows - maybe it'll finally be Nunavut's time in the spotlight?

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by isaidso

+1

Precisely. Demographers and analysts had been warning Canadian governments for 20+ years about the consequences of inaction on the demographic front but were met with next to no response at all. Successive Federal Governments have been tone deaf. They kept punting the problem down the road for so long that these same pundits had to start sounding the alarm bells 10+ years ago. The longer we waited the more drastic a response would be needed.

Finally, a Federal Government took noticed and took action. It was too much too fast but this is what happens when looming issues get ignored for decades.. I'm no fan of Justin Trudeau but it's a bit rich to now be complaining about large scale immigration when NO government till recently bothered addressing this. We've known about this for a very very long time.

Canada has had pretty large-scale immigration for a long time though. Pre-2015 we still had one of the highest immigration rates in the world and above-average population growth for a developed country.

We've all known that a time would come where the Boomer bulge would retire en masse, and then start dying in large numbers (we've reached the former, but aren't at the latter yet. Natural population growth is still positive in Canada - for a few more years at least), and the Liberals actually had a fairly reasonable plan to address that: by gradually increasing the annual number of permanent residents admitted to the country from about 250,000 in 2015 to 500,000 by 2025 - enough to address the coming labour gap, without totally overwhelming the country's infrastructure & housing supply.

Instead though, we got a bit of a bait-and-switch and got a nearly four-fold increase in the number of students & TWFs, in addition to the above PR growth. I don't recall any pundits asking for this - on the contrary, it's a move that's been almost universally panned by economists and warned against by bureaucrats. The most likely scenario is that this was the result of collective incompetence and oversight, and not some stroke of political genius or necessity.

[ssiguy]

^^Exactly!

Before Trudeau, both the Tories & Liberals had kept the rate of immigration at around 1% a year. It was one of the few policies they agreed upon. This kind of continuity means that demographers and hence planners could make reasonable expectation of future needs and the appropriate levels of social & physical infrastructure needed to meet those needs.

Then came Trudeau who decided to throw that consensus out the window by not only tripling our immigration levels but also changing the demographics of who we were letting in. It was always, generally speaking, the case the Canada allowed in only very highly skilled labour that would be beneficial for our future economic growth but Trudeau also threw this consensus out the window by allowing near endless levels of TFW/refugees/family reunification/students to the point of nearly the only qualification you needed to get into the country and stay here was the ability to fog a mirror and buy the airline ticket.

[someone123]

I keep seeing the argument that we were about to hit some demographic catastrophe but not a lot of numbers. If you look at the population pyramid, the Boomer peak is still not quite at retirement age and there's a healthy demographic in the 25-55 range. There aren't a lot of kids but the housing crisis and weak economy probably don't help there.

On a more fundamental level, overtaxing the young and bringing in lots of immigrants is obviously a pyramid scheme that can't be sustained in the long run.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by someone123

I keep seeing the argument that we were about to hit some demographic catastrophe but not a lot of numbers. If you look at the population pyramid, the Boomer peak is still not quite at retirement age and there's a healthy demographic in the 25-55 range. There aren't a lot of kids but the housing crisis and weak economy probably don't help there.

On a more fundamental level, overtaxing the young and bringing in lots of immigrants is obviously a pyramid scheme that can't be sustained in the long run.

It's true that there's often not a lot of data present with these discussions. But one thing I'll point out is that in contrast to some claims, the problem isn't about people dying off so much as it is about people aging and therefore placing a greater strain on social services such as healthcare and assisted living programs. There's a big difference between people retiring or dying and leaving a void in the labour market, compared to there being an strain on important labour sectors due to the need for significantly increased services. Services that will need to be performed and paid for by a smaller number of working age people. Which of course over taxes the young. The fact that the boomer peak is "not quite at retirement age" which implies that it's getting close, isn't a great comfort in that regard.

[WarrenC12]

Boomers are age 60-78 right now. They are absolutely retiring en masse.

[theman23]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

Boomers are age 60-78 right now. They are absolutely retiring en masse.

Completely meaningless statement.

The fattest age cohort in this country is 30-34 year olds, followed by 25 to 29 and 35 to 40. This also happens to be the group we’re bringing in. What demographic crisis are we trying to avoid by doing this?

Despite the stereotype, our fertility rate has also tanked in the face of mass immigration. Perhaps immigration may have bolstered this when we brought in family units and there was still economic mobility in this country but unfortunately it appears that the millions of financially tenuous men that we’re bringing over are struggling to become pregnant too.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by theman23

Completely meaningless statement.

The fattest age cohort in this country is 30-34 year olds, followed by 25 to 29 and 35 to 40. This also happens to be the group we’re bringing in. What demographic crisis are we trying to avoid by doing this?

Despite the stereotype, our fertility rate has also tanked in the face of mass immigration. Perhaps immigration may have bolstered this when we brought in family units and there was still economic mobility in this country but unfortunately it appears that the millions of financially tenuous men that we’re bringing over are struggling to become pregnant too.

I’d be more worried about those who aren’t having kids now because of the insane cost of housing (and living in general). That’s going to create a huge demographic hole.

You also have to wonder if non-stop negativity from the climate doomers aren’t discouraging young people from having kids.

[rdaner]

Two excellent reports on the growth of Canadian cities over the last year and how we are continuing to diverge from the US.


https://www.torontomu.ca/content/dam...2024_final.pdf

https://urbantoronto.ca/news/2024/06...-america.56316

[theman23]

Originally Posted by whatnext

I’d be more worried about those who aren’t having kids now because of the insane cost of housing (and living in general). That’s going to create a huge demographic hole.

You also have to wonder if non-stop negativity from the climate doomers aren’t discouraging young people from having kids.

The drop off is in the under 20 population. Thankfully for millennials, they’ll enter retirement age sometime in the middle of Xavier Trudeau’s prime ministership.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by rdaner

Two excellent reports on the growth of Canadian cities over the last year and how we are continuing to diverge from the US.


https://www.torontomu.ca/content/dam...2024_final.pdf

https://urbantoronto.ca/news/2024/06...-america.56316

The American Big Three metros all lost population:
Los Angeles: -71037
NYC: -65549
Chicago: -16602

The Canadian Big Three all grew by over 100K apiece:
Toronto: 221588
Montreal: 126264
Vancouver: 119650

Shout out to Calgary and Edmonton for proportionately even greater growth figures.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

The American Big Three metros all lost population:
Los Angeles: -71037
NYC: -65549
Chicago: -16602

There's an interesting disconnect between population losses and home prices and rents in some markets.

"In May 2024, Los Angeles home prices were up 10.9% compared to last year, selling for a median price of $1.1M. '
[redfin.com]

"In May 2024, New York home prices were down 0.61% compared to last year, selling for a median price of $810K"
[redfin.com]

"In May 2024, Chicago home prices were up 7.9% compared to last year, selling for a median price of $367K. "
[redfin.com]

Zumper shows median rents in Los Angeles were down 3% to $2,905, in New York were up 3% to $4,340, and in Chicago were up 6% to $2,320.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by theman23

The drop off is in the under 20 population. Thankfully for millennials, they’ll enter retirement age sometime in the middle of Xavier Trudeau’s prime ministership.

Thankfully I will likely be dead by then. I couldn't handle another Trudeau........