Plan for 100 Million Canadians by 2100 is on Track

44 thoughts on “Plan for 100 Million Canadians by 2100 is on Track”

1. It looks like Canada is preparing a refuge for the Global South (especially India) for when global warming starts killing 10s of millions with droughts and heat domes.

   By 2100 we may see more Indians living in Canada than in India.

2. As someone who was (and still is) concerned with overpopulaion, I now get to smile at those concerned with underpopulation. Your task is actually harder; the main remedy going strongly against the capitalist creed https://www.genolve.com/design/socialmedia/memes/declining-birth-rate-worries

3. Our delicate planet has 8 billion people now . Let’s go for 12 billion haha
   ( let Canada show the way ; why stop at a hundred million hahaha )

4. there are ABSOLUTLY no houses anymore, where do you place them?

5. The true but taboo thing to say is that Canada is nice because Canada is white. Import the third world, become the third world.

   • Not totally untrue, but I think its more about location/ history – some about having the US’s individualism so an above-average work ethic (location), some of western Europe’s leftish-capitalism which is about accepting government (immigrant history), and cold weather that demands a certain amount of cameradierie and perseverance (location). These are not found in most immigration source countries so these people have to adapt and acclimate and a certain amount of assimilation to the Originals.

   • not white is the magic word (Russia is white too and not nice) ….
     It is there “moral” which was formed ~100 years ago, Canada/US/Europe finds the root in there, not the color

     • The morals are evaporating right in front of our eyes as we speak

   • What a great concept – send everyone from the tropics to the polar arctic. Making the world a better place/s

6. I think their could be political backlash if housing and medical coverage are not improved.

   Arguments that there is not enough space is bogus – Just ontario is 3x larger than France the largest country in Europe.

   Its interesting that Canada wouldn’t seek a schengen style agreement with either EU (like norway) or USA.

   The issue is the market is just too small and growing it in Vancover and GTA doesn’t really help. EU, USA, China, and soon india are the economies which have sufficient scale. 100 million is still relatively small.

   • According to wikipedia, France is the 3rd largest country in Europe, behind Russia and Denmark.

     Admittedly, both those countries have majority areas that are not suitable for humans.

     • Ukraine is larger than France.

7. I think part of the motivation for a higher population weight in Canada is to help secure geopolitical position. That frankly needs to be paired with willingness to fund military and diplomatic presence that Canada lacks in recent times. Canada skates on US good will, having a more balanced relationship with the US could provide some assurance of that, while Canada will always be sufficienly smaller not to present a threat. A junior partner instead of a protectorate.

   • You are thinking too much. I don’t think Canada has the resources to challenge. First of all the land is uninhabitable for a large population.I read an agriculture expert write that Canada and Australia though big in area have limited opportunity for supporting huge population (Hope my comment gets posted, for some reason my comments are not appearing)

8. I won’t comment about Canada. But I don’t consider having our own US population going up to over 400 million to be desirable unless regulation is rolled back to pre 1970 standards to allow for building of lots of infrastructure quickly at low cost. The 400 miles of interstate between Portland and Boise was laid down in 24 months during the mid 1960’s. I cannot see this happening today because of all the regulatory crap. It is senseless to increase the population without being able to scale the infrastructure in proportion to the population increase.

9. On paper Canada is 2% larger in area than US. Yes not very big. Practically 90% of Canada is uninhabitable. We have to look into that. Look at that current storm even Southern Ontario had extreme cold. Vancouver which calls itself as “Southern US of Canada” got two snowstorms within a week and temperatures dipped to -15C without windchill.

10. Part of the problem here is that most of Canada is basically uninhabitable. About half of it is the Canadian Shield, lacking enough topsoil for agriculture, and most of it is too cold except along the coasts and the border with the US. A Canada with 100M people would be an extremely high population density, urbanized Canada, next to vast uninhabited expanses, because the part of the country people actually want to live in isn’t all that large.

    Currently Canada is capable of food self-sufficiency. It’s one of the few countries in the world that can say that, and one of the very few large food exporters, keeping the vast majority of the world from starving. A Canada with 100M population would probably no longer be a food exporter, but would instead be importing food.

    One thing they’re doing right, is that their immigration policy is very selective. It helps that their only land borders are with the US, third worlders can’t just walk across their border, and once having reached the US have very little incentive to try. As a result of that selective immigration process, Canadian citizens remain supportive of high levels of immigration.

    If the US were doing the same, Americans would probably still support high levels of immigration.

    On the topic of pro-natalist policies, I don’t believe any country has actually developed one that works, with the notable exception of Poland. And even Poland’s program has only been moderately successful, raising the fertility rate from 1.3 to 1.5, still well below replacement. It’s been estimated that a genuinely effective pro-natal policy, given observed sensitivity to incentives, might cost $5-10K per year per capita, a quarter to a half of US per capita federal spending.

    No wonder our government would rather just fail to enforce our immigration laws!

11. “The Century Initiative intends to reach its population goal by reversing the falling fertility rate… and through a massive increase in immigration.”

    Neither of those seems likely.

    • Immigration at least is fairly easy to set by choice. If Canada wanted to double immigration tomorrow, all they’d need to do is send an email to the people who process the visas.

      (Though, such a massive increase would almost certainly affect the quality of said immigrants.)

      Birth rates OTOH seem remarkably tough to push up. Though I don’t know that any government has tried something as hard core as tens of thousands of dollars per year in tax breaks (for example). And this would also lead to serious issues with government revenue falling off a cliff.

      • As I note above, the estimated incentive necessary is in the $5-10K range, assuming a linear response and extrapolating the effects of lesser incentives. Most countries couldn’t even begin to afford that. We could, but it would require a huge realignment of priorities.

        We’re in a kind of self-sustaining trap here: With most of the population not even reproducing at all, and being a democracy, adopting effective pro-natal policies is politically impossible.

        • I’m not sure democracy is a factor. We’re asked to vote for politician A or politician B, but not asked for any input on decision-making. And both A and B listen to the same think-tanks, so if those policy “experts” recommended going all out on natalist policies, those policies would surely be implemented.

      • Problem with the Canadian approach of importing older, richer people is that they push home prices through the roof and have less time to contribute to the tax base before becoming a draw on the government when they retire.

        I guess Canada will “fix” this by pushing every inconvenient citizen to euthanasia to reduce the government’s bottom line.

        • Sufficiently rich immigrants remain net contributors to society no matter what their age. Assuming they bring their wealth with them of course.

    • Right.

      Even India is seeing it’s population’s fertility rate dropping. More and more countries wanting immigrants to avoid adapting to older and smaller populations are going to be competing for them from fewer and fewer nations. And we are forget the effects on other countries of bleeding them of their best educated and most upwardly mobile citizens. Does Canada really want to become one of many global vampires, preying on poorer nations for their young? Maybe we can do like Russia and start kidnapping foreign citizens and distributing them to “filtration camps” inside Canada.

      As for increasing fertility the old pro-natalist policies of taking money from people who might want kids but are trying to save money and establish themselves first and giving it to the few people who already have decided to have them is, like communism, proven to be stupid but still a popular idea. So yeah, that’s going to be a massive failure.

    • Artificial wombs may radically change replacement rates for the rich countries that can afford it and need to increase the number of young people, or at least think they do:
      https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=artificial+wombs
      But most people live and work well below their potential.
      It would be better for the planet to invest in education, technology, infrastructure, policies, to improve productivity, than to simply churn out more people and accept the status quo that sees a rate of poverty of 6.4% even in Canada and twice that in the U.S., with people barely above that in both countries too.
      It’s not about people working more hours, it’s about people working smarter.
      Also, see NBF’s articles on greenhouses and lab grown meat. Cold does not have to mean no agriculture can happen.

      • Such technology can add a percent of population becoming parents every year, but it won’t remove the high cost of having kids.

        Because the ectogenic babies would still require to be raised and educated to become functional human beings, which is expensive and time consuming.

        If you want to change the population decline, you need to change the cost/benefit ratio of having kids. Either it cost sensibly less time&money to have them, or results in some concrete gain for parents.

        Actual AGI caretakers helping parents take care of the kids would improve this. Same as professional parenting, where the state funds those wanting to be stay-at-home parents full time, even making a career out of it if they want to, specially if you have baby printers waiting for willing parents to raise them.

        What? feeding and breeding the unworthy? yeah, exactly that. We might come to learn that the “unworthy” also produce some good results, and are better than towns with no one.

12. Around 10 years ago Canada ended its High-Skilled immigration program, effectively cutting off Eastern Europe immigration. The people which already inside have trouble relocating their elderly parents to them. In light of this article it kind of makes sense: middle class is unlikely to provide desired birth rate. But who is going to generate enough wealth in just a generation or so: an army of meat butchers and dish washers? That is, if they work at all.

    • Are dish washers high-skilled?

13. Again, Why? Do Canadians feel that cold and lonely? A boom in population brings big problems and pressure on services. You better watch what you wish for?

14. Why? What is so great about a large population?

    • I suppose a larger population can be a boon, but it depends. It can also be detrimental.

      A larger population of younger individuals can support the older generations. As older people retire, younger people remain employed. Of course, a population boom of people mostly in retirement age could possibly strain healthcare and economic systems. Actually, my logic is flawed, though, as the same could be said of a population boom of people under working age (i.e. babies).

      I’ve never really understood the benefit of massive populations, since we currently have only one planet and limited resources. I could see how a sudden plummeting in birthrates could adversely affect production in the short term. But, as long as the birthrate remained fairly consistent to keep our population level to say 2.x billion people on the whole, is that really so bad?

      I don’t mean like “Children of Men” low birthrates, nor am I suggesting a sudden, massive disappearance of billions of people. Just, over time, if the birth rate slowed– if we were to decrease humanity to 2.7 billion people, it would need to be done slowly to ensure we have acceptable ratios of younger to older.

      Eh, I’m really just throwing stuff at a wall with this, though.

      • Throwing some more stuff at the wall…

        First off, we are at the cusp of a robot and AI revolution that reduce the need of young to take care of the old.

        Second, we could reduce the population gradually by dampening the fall right now. This could be done by making effective measures to increase the local nativity. Tax reliefs for people having many children, a.s.o. If we then wait long enough – a couple of hundred years I believe – , natural selection will have sorted out the people that like having children and the population will once again shoot up. And we’ll face the overpopulation problem again…

        • Overpopulation is not a real problem. Lots of people like to talk about how overpopulation will destroy humanity despite the clear multi-decade demographic trend of underpopulation. Underpopulation is real and it is going to crush countries.

          • I agree, short term. I think that the Earth can support about 500 billion people, bit tjat Will be like Livin in Bangladesh.. but everywhere.

            Admittedly, it should take us a pretty long time to get there. But then again, when the normal woman has 4-5 kids, we are looking at an exponential…

            It may take humanity 4-500 years for extreme pro kid people to dominate the population, but from there on its will go fast

            • Worrying about overpopulation at this point is like somebody falling out of an airplane without a parachute worrying about their blood boiling from passing the Armstrong limit. The real threat is in the opposite direction.

    • It’s not so much a bigger population as making sure the population pyramid graph looks more a, er, pyramid than a tall tower.

      • Even the tower works, as many countries have shown this century.
        It’s when it looks like a mushroom that we are concerned about.

    • Agreed. Quick scans of stats seem to show that educational attainment and future income and job success increases in these lesser future kids/ smaller families, on top of better education and jobs with salary for the less distracted parents. Creches, late life IVFs, surrogates, etc., can bring in the hordes if needed, but I am not convinced any industry, technology, level of infrastructure, abundance of good and services will decrease significantly because population levels will be dropping, hopefully to a few bilion (more for all). Besides, ideally, you should only raise as many kids as you can afford to pay their tertiary education, first car, and first home downpayment, thus reducing the unnecessary debt and misery they need to endure — hopefully, leading them to do the same at a quicker pace. Decreasing interest paid on mortgages is a major way to increase life time disposable income.

      • Sounds better. Would be great to live in a society where homes were staying larger than 1,900 sq foot footprint on a median salary/median city (on 5,000 sq.foot lots inside of the suburbs), high-rises were staying under 20 storeys with 2,500 sq.foot units and 2 parking spots rather than 500 sq.foot and 50/50 chance of a spot for median salary. Schools with greater than 1 student per 50sq.foot classroom rather than less 20 sq.foot., and piled in 30+ per classroom. You can still have well-planned density without hyper-crammed chaos. Transit and infrastructure could be maintained on greater income per user rather than trying to fit more on a reduced cost per unit. Backyards better than common spaces. The 1950s dream – now mostly gone.

      • Pay for your children’s first car and house? What sort of delicate snowflakes are you trying to bring up?

        • I’ll attempt to gift the first house if possible – yes indeed. Better to give money with warm hands.

          • I wish that was true with most families – keep the equity in the family – even as an Investment.
            But the sad reality, even for those who want to ‘age in place’, is that the time between walker/ wheel-chair -and- near-bed-ridden is typically nearly a decade long where the costs of a nursing home are way better than having a full-time nurse and interior reno — which usually leads to liquidating the family home for cash to ensure long-term care.
            That being said, assisted-suicide is being accepted in many societies, with the possibility of pre-cryonic assisted suicide, currently not legal, as far as I am aware.

        • Wealth has nothing to do with delicacy or character. If one has the means to avoid a mortgage, he should. One’s aim should be to lend, not to borrow.

        • I think I know what you’re trying to get at.
          Hard to know how a gift will be used.
          I figure that a kid is an investment; they need to ‘earn the gift’ above basic needs.
          One of my friends has two kids; he promised each of them a free undergrad.
          One kid scraped by and partied the 4 years; never using the education.
          One kid excelled and avoided having to work at the same time (through gift), thus becoming good enough to go to grad school and get great first job.
          Family waste? or effective means to access and maximize potential not otherwise available through lower-mid-class life?

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