Wright: The Bogus Idea That Will Not Die

2025/08/06 Leave a comment

Indeed:

…What we are describing is essentially a Ponzi scheme. All Ponzi schemes ultimately collapse when it becomes impossible to recruit enough new “investors” to keep the scheme going. The longer it goes on, the bigger the eventual collapse. You can’t fix a Ponzi scheme by keeping it going.

And yet, that is essentially what the proponents of greater population growth are offering as the solution – their advice is to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

In the next few posts, we will look at this in a little more detail – how the terms of the senior promise arose, what we can do to make it sustainable going forward, and the intergenerational consequences if we instead keep the Ponzi scheme going.

Source: The Bogus Idea That Will Not Die

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Wright: Canadians don’t want to be the 51st state – and Americans don’t really want us

2025/03/11 Leave a comment

Another cathartic column for Canadians:

Canadians owe Donald Trump a debt of thanks. His musings about Canada becoming the 51st state have reminded us why we are Canadians in the first place and why we want to remain Canadians.

Still, it’s worth thinking about some of the legal steps to, and political implications of, a possible Canadian statehood.

First, Canada is a constitutional monarchy. To join the United States, it would have to become a republic. While that’s not impossible, it wouldn’t be easy. Amending the Canadian Constitution in relation to the King or Queen requires unanimous provincial consent. When was the last time all 10 provinces agreed on anything?

And what about Indigenous Peoples

Meanwhile, there are 634 First Nations governments – each with their own relationship with Canada or the Crown. Indeed, one of the mandates of the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs is to recognize and implement “treaties concluded between the Crown and Indigenous Peoples.”

If it’s difficult to imagine Indigenous Peoples agreeing to give up their treaty rights, it’s equally difficult to imagine the U.S. negotiating new treaties and nation-to-nation relationships with 634 First Nations.

For its part, Quebec will never agree to give up the substantial power and real sovereignty it has as a province, even if every other province agreed to – which they won’t. In defence of their borders and the French language, Quebecers would likely secede from Canada long before any serious move towards Canadian statehood – and who could blame them?

Of course, this assumes that American lawmakers want a 51st state – and they don’t. Certainly, Republican lawmakers don’t, for the same reason they don’t want Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. to become states.

Each state has two senators and it’s a safe bet that both Canadian senators would be Democrats or be from a separate party that would caucus with the Democrats. The GOP cannot risk becoming a minority in a closely divided Senate.

When Hawaii joined as the 50th state in 1959, there was a lot of handwringing, especially in the Jim Crow South. For example, a Mississippi senator insisted that Hawaii’s admission would mean “two votes for socialized medicine, two votes for government ownership of industry, two votes against all racial segregation and two votes against the South on all social matters.”

Canada: A potential Republican wasteland 

Republican senators have similar arguments against admitting Canada – two votes for universal, single-payer health care, two votes for abortion rights, two votes for LGBTQ+ rights, two votes for multiculturalism, two votes for science, two votes for vaccines, two votes for climate policies and two votes against tax cuts for the wealthy.

Each U.S. state also has members in the House of Representatives, according to its population. If Quebec doesn’t secede, Canada would be the most populous state in the U.S., giving it as many as 55 seats in the House which, with Canada’s admission, would have about 490 seats. If Quebec does secede, Canada would be the second most populous state, giving it as many as 45 seats.

Not all Canadian representatives would be Democrats or from a party that would caucus with them, but the majority would be, providing the Democratic Party with control over the House of Representatives into the foreseeable future.

Finally, the White House: Does anyone really think that Canadians would vote for the Republican Party in its current incarnation? Some would, but the majority wouldn’t.

In the last federal election, about 60 per cent of Canadians voted for the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc Québécois or the Green Party – all centre and centre-left parties. Even if Quebec secedes, most Canadian voters still lean centre or centre-left.

In America’s winner-takes-all presidential election, Canada’s roughly 50 electoral college votes would go to the Democratic candidate, not enough to guarantee a Democratic victory when approximately 590 electoral votes would be up for grabs, but enough to permanently narrow the GOP’s path to victory.

If Canada does become part of the United States, it won’t be as a state. It will be as an occupied territory and occupations never end well for the occupier – something Americans understand after 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bottom line: Canadians don’t want to become the 51st state and the Americans don’t want us anyways, which leaves us with Donald Trump, a troll with a large following on social media trying to own the libs and get under our skin.

My advice? Ignore him and get on with the related tasks of peace, order and good government and managing the economic fallout of his tariffs.

Source: Canadians don’t want to be the 51st state – and Americans don’t really want us

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Don Wright: Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?

2024/09/04 Leave a comment

Valid arguments:

It is three-and-a-half months since David Eby took the reins of power in B.C. There is no denying the energy and ambition he has brought to the role. Announcement after announcement has rolled out of the Premier’s Office since December 8 across a broad spectrum of initiatives in health care, housing, energy, infrastructure, increases in affordability tax credits and family benefits, and many, many more.

This column isn’t going to analyze the pluses and minuses of this ambition. Instead, I will argue that Premier Eby’s success on the big questions that will ultimately determine his political success may well be largely out of his control.

The most recent polling in B.C. shows that the most important issues are housing affordability, inflation/rising interest rates, and health care. Inflation and rising interest rates are overwhelmingly determined by federal monetary and fiscal policy, so largely outside the control of Premier Eby.  What about the other two big issues – health care and housing affordability?  While these two areas look to be within the domain of the provincial government, B.C.’s success in addressing the public’s concerns here will be largely hostage to the federal government’s immigration policy.  Let me explain.

Since it came to office, the current federal government has increased the level of immigration into Canada significantly.  Most of the attention has been focused on the increase in new permanent residents.  Last year, 438,000 people were granted permanent resident status, a 60% increase over 2015.  The federal government plans to raise this to 500,000 by 2025.

What receives less attention is another category of people coming to Canada – “non-permanent residents.”  This category includes Temporary Foreign Workers, International Students, and the International Mobility Program, which provides multi-year permits to live and work in Canada.  This category has been growing as well.  In fact, this category has been growing at a faster rate than permanent residents.  Last year there was a net increase of 608,000 in non-permanent residents. 

So, in total, the federal immigration policy resulted in an additional 1.045 million people coming to Canada – far and away the largest number of newcomers to Canada in one year ever.  Last year 160,000 of the 1.045 million came to B.C.

The rationale for these unprecedented numbers is that Canada has a “worker shortage.”  This rationale is almost entirely fallacious, but that is a subject for another column.  Let’s focus here on what this means to Premier Eby.

What is the basic problem in health care?  An inability to meet the public’s demands for medical services.  One million British Columbians don’t have a family doctor.  Waiting lists to get to see specialists and to get necessary surgery continue to get longer.  No doubt part of the problem is a result of the Covid pandemic.  But that rationalization is buying less and less forbearance by the public as we get further and further away from those dire days in 2020 and 2021.

The federal government’s prescription for this?  A rapid increase in the number of people who will need services from our health care system!

A story is spun is that the government will use the higher immigration numbers to bring in more health care professionals.  But this would only work if the proportion of qualified doctors, nurses and allied health workers in the more than one million new Canadians is significantly larger than the existing proportion of those professionals in the current Canadian population, and that they could get licenced immediately to practice in Canada.  Neither of these conditions will be met. 

The net result of this?  Premier Eby is going to have even more difficulty in delivering improved health care accessibility to British Columbians.

And then there is housing.  Almost all of the narrative around the shortage of affordable housing focuses on the supply side.  If only we could force municipalities to make permitting easier and faster, and to zone more density, our housing affordability would be solved.  The fact is, we build a lot of homes in B.C.  In Greater Vancouver – ground zero in our housing affordability problem – 365,000 homes were built in the 20 years between 2001 and 2021.  And there has been ample densification, as a walk through any of the redeveloped neighbourhoods in Vancouver shows. 

But supply is only half of the equation. Demand matters too.  And as quickly as we have built new homes, the population in our major urban centres rises as well. 

The Federal Government’s prescription for this?  Ramp up immigration numbers!

Again, a story is spun that this will actually increase housing supply because we are going to bring in more trades workers to build the houses we need.  Suffice it to say there are some pretty heroic assumptions here.  It is not going to work.

Of the 160,000 new British Columbians last year, more than 95% settled in the Lower Mainland, Southern Vancouver Island, and the Okanagan – where affordable housing was already acutely unavailable.

The net result?  Premier Eby is going to have even more difficulty in delivering more affordable housing.

This is all good for one group of British Columbians – those that are fortunate enough to already own a home.  So, thank you, Mr. Trudeau for making me wealthier and my fellow boomers wealthier. 

But if I were Premier Eby, I don’t think I would be quite as grateful.

Don Wright was the former deputy minister to the B.C. Premier, Cabinet Secretary and former head of the B.C. Public Service until late 2020. He now is senior counsel at Global Public Affairs.

Source: Don Wright: Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?

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Douglas Todd: Population growth squeezing Canada’s young adults like never before

2024/03/02 Leave a comment

More on the generation squeeze and immigration with good quotes from Wright and Skuterud:

… But that hasn’t stopped politicians and business people from constantly raising the spectre of aging baby boomers, with Ottawa making it the primary rationale for “supercharged levels of immigration,” Wright said.

“Sometimes I talk about the ‘baby boom derangement syndrome.’ So much of public policy has been driven by this apprehended catastrophe of the baby boom retiring and then putting great demands on the public purse,” he said. The trouble is it’s creating a population bubble of people under 40.

“We should not be at all surprised that all of a sudden housing markets are under great stress now. It’s absurd that politicians pretend to be surprised by it,” Wright said, pointing to a February report revealing then-Immigration Minister Sean Fraser had been warned that Canada was accepting newcomers at a far higher rate than houses could be built. Early last year Wright predicted this would affect public opinion about immigration, and that has been borne out.

“What Ottawa is doing is making it damn difficult for young people to get a proper start in life,” Wright said. “That’s primarily in the housing market, but in the labour market as well, because you’re competing with a lot of people your age.”

Ontario’s University of Waterloo labour economist, Mikal Skuterud, has been among those tracking how the federal Liberals have drastically hiked the number of guest workers and study-visa-holders, most of whom work while in Canada and intend to apply for permanent resident status.

Last year more than one million foreign students were in Canada, three times the number when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected. (B.C. had 176,000 in post-secondary schools). While wages in some sectors are up, gross domestic product per capita has been flat for six years. Skuterud suggested low-skill workers, whose wages are actually declining, could be the most impacted by the surge of new residents.

In regard to life choices, Wright also wonders how much the country’s housing crunch — including the prospect of “living in a 700-square-foot hamster cage” — might be a significant factor behind why some young Canadians aren’t having larger families.

Cardus, a think-tank, commissioned the Angus Reid Institute to conduct a poll last year of 2,700 women in Canada ages 18 to 44. It found nearly half have fewer children than they desire. Canadian women intend to have, on average, 1.85 children per woman, but desire 2.2 children.

Given such personal strains, especially for millennials and Gen Z, the National Bank’s economists have declared Canada is caught in a “population trap” in which the population is growing faster than can be absorbed by the economy, society and infrastructure.

With so many facing stagnant wages and housing distress, National Bank economists Stéfane Marion and Alexandra Ducharme said: “At this point we believe that our country’s annual total population growth should not exceed 300,000 to 500,000.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Population growth squeezing Canada’s young adults like never before

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Douglas Todd: Remarkably popular book on baby boomers distorted by politicians

2023/09/02 Leave a comment

More on some of the false or at least misleading demographic arguments underlying current government immigration policies and organizations like the Century Initiative:

Daniel Stoffman was co-author of one of the most popular books written in Canada.

Boom, Bust and Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift sold more than 300,000 copies after it was published in 1996, with a followup in 2000. Stoffman, who died this summer in Vancouver, shared the royalties equally with University of Toronto economist David Foot.

The theme of Boom, Bust and Echo was that “demographics explains two thirds of almost everything.”

Stoffman and Foot maintained the baby-boomer bulge of Canadians, born between 1947 and 1966, would have a huge impact on trends in real estate, the stock market, eating habits, health care, and leisure activities, including, for instance, the future of birdwatching.

But an odd thing happened largely because of this best-selling book. Its spotlight on Canada’s baby-boom cohort of almost 10 million people has often been misinterpreted, if not distorted, by corporate leaders and federal politicians. That did not please Stoffman, a journalist, author and secular Jew who described himself as a “radical centrist.”

Stoffman, who once worked as a reporter at The Vancouver Sun and edited the University of B.C. student newspaper, The Ubyssey, wrote 13 books before he died in Vancouver at age 78 on July 3. They included profiles of Canadian Tire, Barrick Gold, Boston Pizza and McCain Foods, plus The Money Machine, an unusually readable look at the mutual fund industry.

But the more risky book for Stoffman, in contrast to the crowd-pleasing Boom, Bust and Echo, was the one he wrote to challenge business leaders and politicians who maintain, to this day, that aging baby boomers are the No. 1 reason Canada needs one of the highest immigration rates in the world.

Most commentators, scholars and journalists have only recently been catching up with some of Stoffman’s analysis in his book Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program — and How to Fix It, which was a finalist for the Donner Prize in public policy.

Stoffman was pro-immigration. But in the early 2000s he wanted Canadians to think seriously about the complex, almost taboo subject. That’s what he did after winning an Atkinson Fellowship from his liberal newspaper, The Toronto Star, to write a groundbreaking series on it.

Today, more mainstream voices are joining Stoffman in questioning the platitudes streaming out of Ottawa, particularly from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is currently justifying increasing Ottawa’s immigration target to a record 500,000 this year, double the 250,000 when the Liberals came to power.

Stoffman also anticipated the questions pundits are now raising about the federal Liberals’ related migration decisions to allow the number of foreign students and other non-permanent residents to reach almost two million, a figure CIBC’s Benjamin Tal cited this week. That compares to about half a million when Trudeau was first elected.

Former immigration minister Ahmed Hussen, echoing Trudeau’s talking points about the need to welcome immigrants, foreign students and guest workers to “grow our economy,” often justified his approach by referring to what he characterized as the baby boom problem.

“The question is: Why do we need immigration? Well, five million Canadians are set to retire by 2035. And we have fewer people working to support seniors and retirees,” he said, echoing similar remarks by other immigration ministers about the high costs of public health care for the elderly.

Stoffman’s book, Who Gets In, laid out some of the counter arguments economists are making today, which is that high in-migration can never replace an aging workforce.

The main reason is that immigrants also age. The baby boom generation is now aged 56 to 77, a cohort that includes millions of immigrants.

The second reason is many immigrants bring dependants. That is especially true under the Liberals, who quadrupled the number of parents and grandparents that could be sponsored.

The University of B.C.’s David Green and McMaster’s Byron Spencer, both economists, have their own unique way of responding to the supposed dilemma of aging baby boomers. Wryly, they say, the only conceivable way high immigration could offset Canada’s retiring workforce would be if every newcomer was a 15-year-old orphan. That’s because it would take 50 years for the teens to reach retirement age and, as orphans, they would not seek to bring in parents or grandparents.

Stoffman maintained there are two main reasons corporate leaders lobby Ottawa to keep immigration levels high, roughly triple per capita those in the U.S.

“I think the main purpose of Canada’s high immigration policy is to lower wages — and inflate real estate values,” he said in 2015.

The authors of Boom, Bust and Echo were aware, decades ago, of the two dangers. They recognized hiking immigration rates does indeed, as the politicians boast, increase the country’s overall GDP. But it also tends to lower GDP per capita, especially for low-skilled workers.

Stoffman said struggling immigrants best understood this downward pressure because they were the ones most likely to come to him after his speeches to express their worries.

In recent years, economists like Don Wright, former head of the B.C. government’s civil service, Mikal Skuterud of the University of Waterloo, and the B.C. Business Council’s David Williams have been strongly making the argument about lagging wages.

And a host of housing analysts, such as Steve Saretsky, John Pasalis and Ben Rabidoux, have also been warning about how high in-migration, including by foreign students and guest workers, puts intense pressure on rent and housing prices, which are at crisis levels in Vancouver and Toronto.

Stoffman was among the first to argue that Canada could deal with the societal costs of a large baby boom (which once made up 31 per cent of the population, but is now down to 23 per cent) by increasing productivity through innovation. Alas, in recent years productivity has fallen.

Another way is to offer incentives for Canadians to stay longer in the workforce, which the baby boom is doing. Canada could also encourage more people to have children, he said, particularly by providing better and cheaper daycare.

What would be an optimum number of permanent residents coming to Canada, leaving aside guest workers and foreign students? Eight years ago, Stoffman suggested a balanced number for Canada would be about 150,000 new immigrants annually.

Stoffman said he understood why right-wing people — “who think wage inflation is worse than income equality, and don’t want to see cab drivers and cleaning ladies earn more” — would promote “apocalyptic visions” about the need for higher in-migration targets.

“But it’s weird,” he wrote in Who Gets In, “that so many Canadians, who pride themselves on their social consciences and progressive politics, hurl nasty names at those who call for a more limited immigration program.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Remarkably popular book on baby boomers distorted by politicians

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ICYMI: Don Wright: Why did Justin Trudeau switch sides in the ‘class struggle?’

2023/08/18 Leave a comment

More on the recent expansion of temporary foreign workers and relaxation of conditions, along with contrast when the PM was in opposition:

In 2014, Justin Trudeau wrote an op-ed arguing that the Stephen Harper government should dramatically scale back the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program.

His reasoning was sound – both in moral terms and in economic terms. He wrote: “I believe it is wrong for Canada to follow the path of countries who exploit large numbers of guest workers.” He also pointed out that large numbers of TFWs “drives down wages.”

We might have expected, therefore, that things would change under his leadership. And indeed, they have. Between 2015 and 2022 the number of TFWs in Canada doubled!

But TFWs are actually only a small fraction of total Non-Permanent Residents (NPR) with work permits in Canada. There is another category known as the “International Mobility Program” (IMP) which provides work permits for international students, graduates of post-secondary programs and other categories. The number of IMP work permit holders almost tripled between 2015 and 2022. In total, NPRs with work permits now exceed 1.1 million people – and have grown from 2.1 per cent to 5.5 per cent of the Canadian labour force.

This hasn’t happened by accident. The current government has made a series of changes that have opened the door to higher numbers of NPRs. Last year, for example, the federal immigration minister made it significantly easier for employers to get permits for TFWs.

Perhaps more significantly, he eliminated the restriction on the number of hours that international students could work while they are supposedly studying. Previously, the limit was 20 hours a week. There are no limits on the number of international students that can be granted a student permit. All they need is acceptance from a “Designated Learning Institution.” In addition to the publicly funded universities, colleges and institutions, there are a large number of private, for-profit colleges that are in this business as well.

One doesn’t have to be too cynical to imagine that some private college operators would market themselves as a way to get a work permit in Canada, with a possible path to permanent resident status down the road, with the quality of the education being offered of secondary importance. Indeed, a casual search of the web will uncover many such stories.

One needs to be only a little more cynical to conclude that this was the federal government’s intention in lifting the restriction on working while studying. What an easy way to appease the demands from many in the employer community to deal with the “worker shortage.”

The jobs that NPRs fill are disproportionately low wage positions – jobs like food counter attendants, kitchen helpers, cooks, cashiers, retail salespersons, shore shelf stockers, clerks,delivery service drivers, and the like. Statistics Canada reports that, even with high educational attainment, NPRs were in occupations requiring no formal education proportionately more than the rest of the Canadian population.

You know, this kind of sounds like something that “those countries who exploit large numbers of guest workers” would do.

And let’s not lose sight of the other point that Mr. Trudeau made back in 2014. This all serves to depress the wages of Canadian workers. In particular, it disproportionately impacts low-wage earners – if employers couldn’t rely on the large number of NPR workers, they would have to raise the wages that they offer.

Why is the federal government aiding and abetting this? Apparently because they are responding to the consistent mantra from the employer community that there is a “worker shortage.” More precisely, there is a shortage of workers willing to work at the wages that certain employers prefer to pay. But whose side should the federal government be on?

Over the past 20 years “the bosses” have done much better than the workers. For example, Statistics Canada data shows that in 2003 the category of workers defined as “senior managers” on average earned 3.9 times more than the category of workers defined as “sales and service support.” In 2023 the multiple had widened significantly to 5.1 times. Sales and service support occupations include cashiers, service station attendants, store shelf stackers, food, accommodation and tourism workers, and cleaners – typical of the positions filled by many NPR workers.

Given this trend one needs to ask: who needs more help in the struggle for fair wages – the workers or the bosses? Why did the federal government apparently change sides in this struggle?

Don Wright was the former deputy minister to the B.C. Premier, Cabinet Secretary and former head of the B.C. Public Service until late 2020. He now is senior counsel at Global Public Affairs.

Source: Don Wright: Why did Justin Trudeau switch sides in the ‘class struggle?’

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Hardin: Breaking the Immigration Taboo

2023/06/14 Leave a comment

A bit of a rant and overly rambling and unfocussed but nevertheless a signal among some who consider themselves progressive are increasingly concerned given housing and other impacts:

….And as if that weren’t enough, Justin Trudeau keeps on increasing the number of immigrants, hiking it from 400,000 annually to half a million. When Eby began the frantic drumbeating for new housing, the figure for new immigrants arriving in Greater Vancouver was an estimated 30,000 to 40,000. That had already changed by the end of 2021, when the net inflow of people to B.C. was 100,797. Of those, 33,356 people came from other Canadian provinces and territories and the remaining 67,141 from abroad, with most ending up in Greater Vancouver. Not all of them would have been immigrants; net non–permanent residents like “temporary foreign workers” and net foreign students would be in the total.

In the subsequent year, 2022, the inflow into B.C. from international migration increased to 150,783, of whom 98,763 were non–permanent residents. Canada’s population overall increased by 1,050,110 people; almost all the increase – 96 per cent – came from international migration.

Eby has mentioned what lay behind what he was facing – federal immigration policy. No wielding of the hammer on that one, however. The new housing minister, Ravi Kahlon, has belatedly gone as far as to argue with Ottawa that immigration should be tied to housing availability. But without his tackling the underlying premises impelling Trudeau and company – without even following through on his own argument – he hasn’t, as of this writing, made much headway.

The taboo is great.

Nor is Eby the only one who shies away from speaking directly to the root issue.

With some exceptions, almost everyone publicly tearing their hair out over housing unaffordability or what the attendant pressure is doing to Vancouver avoids mentioning the “i” word as something that needs to be tackled first and foremost, in the same way that everyone, except a little boy, wouldn’t say out loud that the emperor had no clothes.

What’s really behind high immigration numbers

What underlies immigration to Canada and the current numbers is not humanitarianism but economics. Indeed, immigration to Canada, save for refugees, has always largely been economic. The argument is that immigrants boost the Canadian economy and are even needed to keep the Canadian economy going. That this might be a dubious argument doesn’t discourage its promoters.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser was quite straightforward about this in a statement to Reuters late in 2021. “Canada needs immigration to create jobs and drive our economic recovery,” he said, as if simply saying so made it true.

Fraser has since doubled down on his message box, again without in fact making the case and again without addressing housing affordability and additional pressures on health care.

The need for immigrants to keep the economy going has now become a mantra, repeated casually at large (an “economic imperative,” a National Post columnist called it), to which has recently been added a submantra: the need for immigrants to fill unfilled job positions. It’s economics – unquestioned economics – again.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has also, naively, claimed we are dependent economically on immigration. He and the political left in Canada, captive to their routinized thinking on immigration, have failed to understand the dynamic at work. It’s important to realize that open immigration to serve economics isn’t left-wing at all. The free movement of labour is part of classical right-wing neoliberal doctrine, complementing free trade. If community is harmed or destabilized by the application of the doctrine, whether by free trade or inflated immigration levels, “So what?” says the market-doctrine right-winger: “It’s the market at work. You shouldn’t object.”

It’s not surprising, then, that the original recommendation for hiking the level of immigration to Canada to 450,000 annually came from the federal Advisory Council on Economic Growth, circa 2017, replete with neoliberals and with nobody as awkward as even a pale socialist or environmentalist to show any dissent. The Council was chaired by Dominic Barton, a former senior executive of management consulting firm McKinsey and Company.

The Council also recommended that Canada aim for 100 million people by the end of the century. This was without reference to the environment. The connection between another 60-odd million people in a northern, high-consuming country and its impact on global warming and the environment is not part of the neoliberal frame. The doctrine on this score – justifying immigration for economic reasons outside of the environmental context – is no different, schematically and ideologically, from justifying increased oil sands production and otherwise boosting the oil patch overall for economic reasons.

There’s a further irony underlying these other ironies. The economic rationale for immigration – the majestic declaration that newcomers are the key to the future – is faulty taken by itself.

It’s false to claim that increased immigration is essential to the Canadian economy in any ordinary sense; the evidence doesn’t sustain that and it doesn’t meet the standard of common sense.

There is nothing to prevent an economy with a stable or slowly growing population from functioning well. Indeed, it is arguable that the more stable a population, the more focus can be given to employment engagement, training and education, and downstream allocation of the workforce in order to produce the maximum economic, social and environmental payoff per capita and, at the same time, enhance the quality of life.

It also begs the theoretical question of whether Canada, and every country in the world, have to keep compounding their population growth forever and ever until Doomsday if they wish to prevent their economies from falling apart. The world’s population, then, would have to increase to 15 billion people, and then 20 billion, and so on, just to keep economically afloat – a notion that we know is absurd.

In the here and now, the argument for inflated immigration to Canada is also a counterproductive notion, economically speaking, because it measures by mass rather than by per capita economic performance and quality of life. Canada (using the International Monetary Fund measure) is 26th in the world rankings of GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), as of current estimates. Denmark, which has strictly limited immigration, is 11th. Norway is seventh, Switzerland sixth, the United States eighth and so on. All the Scandinavian countries are higher than Canada; so are Austria and Taiwan. Singapore is second.

In 1986, just prior to immigration to Canada spiking, Canada was 15th; we’ve lost 11 places since. Our GDP per capita in 1986, again adjusted for purchasing power parity, was 89 per cent of the American one; since then it has fallen to 75 per cent.

Perhaps more instructive are the IMF’s projections through to 2027, where Canada is projected to fall to 28th place. It will also have lost, once more, a few percentage points to the United States, which itself is predicted to fall a few places in the IMF rankings. By way of explanation, the OECD has Canada dead last among the 38 OECD members in GDP per capita growth for 2020–30 (and also dead last for 2030–60).

Don Wright, former deputy minister to B.C. Premier John Horgan and a Harvard-trained economist, takes this one step further in a recent paper for the Public Policy Forum. Wright points out that by counting on immigrants and foreign workers for low-wage jobs, average per capita income and what goes with it (from quality of life to per capita tax revenue) are lowered and the professed desire to help the middle class is betrayed. He references stagnant real wages, their direct relationship to housing unaffordability and the coincidental ascendancy of neoliberalism. Raising the per capita standard of living should be the goal, he argues. He goes on to debunk the argument of the open-ended need for more and more labour:

When businesses complain about having difficulty finding enough workers, what this really means is that they cannot easily find the workers they want at a wage they want to pay. But, within reasonable limits, this is a good thing. It forces employers to pay higher wages, provide better working conditions and drives the creative destruction that leads to higher productivity, more valuable products and better business models.

A subsequent study in Policy Options by labour economists Fabian Lange of McGill, Mikal Skuterud of the University of Waterloo and Christopher Worswick of Carleton elaborated on the argument, focusing in particular on the economic case against low-wage temporary foreign workers.⁶

The submantra that we need inflated immigration levels to fill unfilled jobs nevertheless keeps resurfacing, cited as a given both by ostensible experts and by politicians desperate to rationalize consequences like the housing crisis. David Eby himself, just before being sworn in as B.C. Premier, mentioned it by way of explaining why he needed to act aggressively on housing.

It overlooks how the necessary adjustment in the labour market would happen, per Don Wright’s thesis. It’s as if there is no alternative to the neoliberal ideological fix behind the current excessive immigration level.

Well here, schematically, is the alternative, as would happen in a normal economy. Jobs are posted and if they’re more important relative to other jobs, the market or public allocation rises until they’re filled. At the same time, other jobs that cannot compete, because they’re relatively unimportant or not important at all, so that they don’t have sufficient competitive draw on the market or on public revenue, disappear. Over time, one ends up with a far more productive economy and a far more appropriate economy that dynamically follows market demand and public need.

But none of the alternatives to the current immigration level can be properly discussed, nor can a proper public debate take place, until we bury for good the neoliberal legend that we need immigration to keep our economy going. Once we do that, we can then get started on framing public policy accordingly, dramatically cutting back immigration and freely charting another course. We might even conclude that what makes most sense, for a high-energy-use country like Canada, is a stable population. But that’s for another analysis.

Source: Breaking the Immigration Taboo

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Vaughn Palmer: B.C. wants federal housing dollars tied to immigration patterns

2023/04/01 Leave a comment

Good to see the discussion happening at the political level and that Don Wright’s assessment getting attention (https://www.theorca.ca/commentary/don-wright-will-trudeau-make-it-impossible-for-eby-to-succeed-6762001):

Finance Minister Katrine Conroy expressed disappointment this week that the federal budget did not respond to B.C.’s calls for more funding for housing.

“There doesn’t seem to be funding for the housing that we have been asking for,” she told reporters Tuesday.

Ottawa did allocate new money to an Indigenous housing plan, valued at $4 billion.

Conroy was “really happy to see more funding for that,” though she noted B.C. already funds Indigenous housing.

Based on what she didn’t see in the budget, it appeared to her that B.C. would be left on its own to fund other types of social housing as well as develop housing for middle income levels.

“We need to be in a partnership with the federal government, municipal governments and our provincial government to ensure that we have enough housing for people,” said Conroy.

However, federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland had a ready explanation for the apparent shortfall when she visited B.C. on Thursday.

There was no new money for the housing crisis in this year’s budget, because Ottawa is still rolling out the $10 billion commitment in last year’s budget.

“This was a multi-year plan,” Freeland told a news conference in Surrey. “You don’t deploy $10 billion in one month or in one year.”

The plan includes the $4 billion “housing accelerator program” that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched in mid-March.

The goal is to accelerate construction of 100,000 homes over 10 years.

To tap the fund, municipalities must submit plans for fast-tracking housing units, with an emphasis on affordability.

“Tell us what your plan is to get more homes built,” said Freeland. “Tell us how some of that money can help you build those homes, and we will write a cheque. And $4 billion will mean we can write a lot of cheques.”

Premier David Eby, who shared the platform with Freeland, took a more conciliatory tone than his finance minister had done earlier in the week.

“There are very significant parcels of federal housing funding from the last budget that have yet to be deployed in a significant way in British Columbia,” he acknowledged. “B.C. needs to see our fair share of that funding. We have partnered with the federal government on many projects and many more to come.”

By way of a hint, the premier added: “If they have surplus from other provinces that is unspent, bring it to British Columbia, because we’re going to put it to work right here. We’re an excellent partner for that.”

On the fairness question, Eby was referring to his government’s argument that B.C. is entitled to a disproportionate share of housing funding because the province receives a disproportionate share of immigrants to Canada.

B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon made the case at the beginning of the year, and he’s reinforced it at every opportunity since.

“I’ve spoken to the federal ministers multiple times, urging them to consider tying their immigration numbers to both housing starts and affordable housing,” he said recently.

“We know it is going to be critical to build that stock for the amount of people that are coming, not only the new immigrants but also the temporary residents that are being approved to come to Canada.”

Kahlon’s concern was reinforced this week in an opinion piece from Don Wright, who headed the provincial public service in the first term of the John Horgan NDP government.

“B.C.’s success in addressing the public’s concerns here will be largely hostage to the federal government’s immigration policy,” Wright wrote in an article Monday in the online Orca publication that asked, “Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?”

His point was that the federal government’s ambitious immigration targets will add to existing pressures on the supply of doctors and housing, two challenges Eby is pledged to address.

Wright challenged the conventional wisdom that housing affordability is best addressed by the supply side of the housing equation.

“Demand matters too,” he wrote. “And as quickly as we have built new homes, the population in our major urban centres rises as well.”

“The federal government’s prescription for this? Ramp up immigration numbers!” said Wight.

“A story is spun that this will actually increase housing supply because we are going to bring in more trades workers to build the houses we need,” notes Wright, before knocking down the “heroic assumptions” in that statement.

“It is not going to work,” he wrote. “Of the 160,000 new British Columbians last year, more than 95% settled in the Lower Mainland, Southern Vancouver Island, and the Okanagan — where affordable housing was already acutely unavailable.”

Net result, concludes Wright: “Premier Eby is going to have even more difficulty in delivering more affordable housing.”

Wright did not conclude his piece with a call for Ottawa to slam the brakes on immigration.

In less judicious hands, it might come to that. But the New Democrats don’t want it to come to that.

Hence their argument that B.C. should get a greater share of federal housing dollars in recognition that the province also welcomes a greater share of Canada’s newcomers.

Source: Vaughn Palmer: B.C. wants federal housing dollars tied to immigration patterns

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Don Wright: Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?

2023/03/30 Leave a comment

Another “pointing out” the contradictions between immigration policy, levels set by the federal government, and housing, healthcare, infrastructure etc, largely under provincial jurisdictions:

It is three-and-a-half months since David Eby took the reins of power in B.C. There is no denying the energy and ambition he has brought to the role. Announcement after announcement has rolled out of the Premier’s Office since December 8 across a broad spectrum of initiatives in health care, housing, energy, infrastructure, increases in affordability tax credits and family benefits, and many, many more.

This column isn’t going to analyze the pluses and minuses of this ambition. Instead, I will argue that Premier Eby’s success on the big questions that will ultimately determine his political success may well be largely out of his control.

The most recent polling in B.C. shows that the most important issues are housing affordability, inflation/rising interest rates, and health care. Inflation and rising interest rates are overwhelmingly determined by federal monetary and fiscal policy, so largely outside the control of Premier Eby.  What about the other two big issues – health care and housing affordability?  While these two areas look to be within the domain of the provincial government, B.C.’s success in addressing the public’s concerns here will be largely hostage to the federal government’s immigration policy.  Let me explain.

Since it came to office, the current federal government has increased the level of immigration into Canada significantly.  Most of the attention has been focused on the increase in new permanent residents.  Last year, 438,000 people were granted permanent resident status, a 60% increase over 2015.  The federal government plans to raise this to 500,000 by 2025.

What receives less attention is another category of people coming to Canada – “non-permanent residents.”  This category includes Temporary Foreign Workers, International Students, and the International Mobility Program, which provides multi-year permits to live and work in Canada.  This category has been growing as well.  In fact, this category has been growing at a faster rate than permanent residents.  Last year there was a net increase of 608,000 in non-permanent residents. 

So, in total, the federal immigration policy resulted in an additional 1.045 million people coming to Canada – far and away the largest number of newcomers to Canada in one year ever.  Last year 160,000 of the 1.045 million came to B.C.

The rationale for these unprecedented numbers is that Canada has a “worker shortage.”  This rationale is almost entirely fallacious, but that is a subject for another column.  Let’s focus here on what this means to Premier Eby.

What is the basic problem in health care?  An inability to meet the public’s demands for medical services.  One million British Columbians don’t have a family doctor.  Waiting lists to get to see specialists and to get necessary surgery continue to get longer.  No doubt part of the problem is a result of the Covid pandemic.  But that rationalization is buying less and less forbearance by the public as we get further and further away from those dire days in 2020 and 2021.

The federal government’s prescription for this?  A rapid increase in the number of people who will need services from our health care system!

A story is spun is that the government will use the higher immigration numbers to bring in more health care professionals.  But this would only work if the proportion of qualified doctors, nurses and allied health workers in the more than one million new Canadians is significantly larger than the existing proportion of those professionals in the current Canadian population, and that they could get licenced immediately to practice in Canada.  Neither of these conditions will be met. 

The net result of this?  Premier Eby is going to have even more difficulty in delivering improved health care accessibility to British Columbians.

And then there is housing.  Almost all of the narrative around the shortage of affordable housing focuses on the supply side.  If only we could force municipalities to make permitting easier and faster, and to zone more density, our housing affordability would be solved.  The fact is, we build a lot of homes in B.C.  In Greater Vancouver – ground zero in our housing affordability problem – 365,000 homes were built in the 20 years between 2001 and 2021.  And there has been ample densification, as a walk through any of the redeveloped neighbourhoods in Vancouver shows. 

But supply is only half of the equation. Demand matters too.  And as quickly as we have built new homes, the population in our major urban centres rises as well. 

The Federal Government’s prescription for this?  Ramp up immigration numbers!

Again, a story is spun that this will actually increase housing supply because we are going to bring in more trades workers to build the houses we need.  Suffice it to say there are some pretty heroic assumptions here.  It is not going to work.

Of the 160,000 new British Columbians last year, more than 95% settled in the Lower Mainland, Southern Vancouver Island, and the Okanagan – where affordable housing was already acutely unavailable.

The net result?  Premier Eby is going to have even more difficulty in delivering more affordable housing.

This is all good for one group of British Columbians – those that are fortunate enough to already own a home.  So, thank you, Mr. Trudeau for making me wealthier and my fellow boomers wealthier. 

But if I were Premier Eby, I don’t think I would be quite as grateful.

Don Wright was the former deputy minister to the B.C. Premier, Cabinet Secretary and former head of the B.C. Public Service until late 2020. He now is senior counsel at Global Public Affairs.

Source: Don Wright: Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?

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Wright: About that worker ‘shortage’: Why are governments helping drive down wages?

2022/12/10 Leave a comment

Feeling a bit less of a lone voice in the wilderness as we see more critical voices of current immigration policies:

For almost 50 years Canada has done a thoroughly crappy job – to use the technical term in economics – of fostering a labour market that would provide for steady, year-over-year increases in real pay for working Canadians. I calculate that in 1976 it would have taken a worker earning the median employment income six years to save enough for a down payment on a typical single-family home. In 2020 it would have taken 17 years. If that worker lived in Greater Toronto or Vancouver, it would have taken 28 and 30 years, respectively.

Given this history, one might think that governments would welcome the prospect of a change in labour market dynamics that would turn this around. Instead, we are seeing concerted government actions that undercut the prospect of Canadian workers getting decent pay raises.

The federal government, supported by most provinces, has decided to oblige the business lobby with significant changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, increasing the number of hours per week that international students can work, as well as pushing immigration levels higher. In other words, they are engineering an increase in the supply of labour to hold down wages.

That has come after a virtually non-stop narrative over the last few years about a “worker shortage” in Canada. Businesses are regularly quoted complaining that they cannot find enough workers, and business associations constantly lobby governments to do something about it – usually by bringing in more workers from other countries, either on a temporary or permanent basis.

But in economics, the notion of a shortage of supply in any market is, at best, half-baked. A market balances supply and demand. If there is a “shortage” of supply, then the price in that market rises until the amount supplied is equal to the amount demanded.

In the labour market, if the supply is workers, then the price amounts to what employers pay for them: the package of pay, benefits, and working conditions provided by the employer. For simplicity, let’s call it the wage. So, if an employer is facing a “shortage” of workers, there is a simple solution: offer higher wages.

To be sure, before raising wages, the employer can search harder for employees willing to work at the prevailing wage. In particular, the employer can look to groups that have historically had more difficulty finding employment – for example, people with disabilities or people experiencing discrimination. That would seem to be a good thing. But with unemployment as low as it is, firms have arguably exhausted this option. The only real solution is, again, to raise wages.

Of course, if the employer does have to raise wages, its costs will go up. If the employer is a for-profit firm, this will lower profits. But the firm has options: it could invest in new equipment, or new products or a new business model that would increase workers’ productivity or the value of what its workers produce. Then it could afford to pay those higher wages. Given Canada’s desultory record in productivity improvement, one might think that nudging businesses to be more innovative – through raising wages – would be a good thing.

Alternatively, the firm could raise its prices. If the firm is selling into the international market, there may be some constraint on this. But if the firm is selling into a domestic market that doesn’t face international competition (e.g., restaurants), and the firm’s domestic competitors have raised their wages, too – likely, because of the same worker “shortage” – then it will still be as competitive as it was before.

This would increase the cost to Canadian consumers of that industry’s product, but consider the implications of that. Most of the industries that fit into this category – restaurants, accommodation and janitorial services, for example – already pay below-average wages. On balance, this would mean people would pay marginally more for goods and services so that those with lower incomes could earn more. Would that be such a bad thing?

The final concern about higher wages is that some companies would go out of business. This would certainly lead to some temporary dislocation. But amid that, other, more competitive firms will expand, and new ones will start up. If it happens at a time when labour markets are tight, the adjustment will be relatively painless. It shouldn’t take long for resources to be reallocated to industries that can afford to pay the higher market wage.

This is the very creative destruction business lauds, and the primary driver of a rising standard of living. We used to think this was a good thing.

If businesses must compete for workers, the market will respond with greater innovation and productivity, leading to higher wages. So, shouldn’t we just let the dynamics of a worker “shortage” sort themselves out?

I can understand why businesses want to avoid raising wages. What mystifies me is why Canadian governments are so willing to protect those businesses from the market pressure to raise their productivity game and, finally, reverse decades of depressingly slow wage growth.

Don Wright is a fellow with the Public Policy Forum and a former deputy minister to the premier and head of the public service in British Columbia. He has held senior executive positions in business, government and academia.

Source: About that worker ‘shortage’: Why are governments helping drive down wages?

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