Canada

My municipality: There's been a large increase in the local population? Better spend millions to subsidize a luxury condominium and make school and hospital cuts.

Convert churches and empty office buildings into affordable housing. Break up the REIT monopoly in the rental market. Make it really difficult to own more than one home. Crack down on foreign investment until the market stabilizes.

Or we can blame immigrants.

We will need to drastically change our zoning rules very soon to keep up. Most sane countries allow all land use other than industrial and agricultural inside cities, and they’re better for it.

You mean going to continue to decline...

As one of those folks myself, thanks for thinking of us. The worst of it for me is our city is short on concrete workers & framers, they moved to Ontario in 2020 when things shut down. So now us downstream trades like sheetrock, electrical, & carpenters end up working part time, because projects are trickling out. I haven't worked in 2 weeks. August is usually so busy I can't even consider booking vacation. Now it's dead.

So then we exit that job, move to another industry, and the entire building capacity has shrunk when we need it to grow. So at least pay us well, so we can survive this push-pull supply chain nonsense.

I think it's the result of treating immigrants as a resource.

For example, international students pay significantly more than domestic students, so the federal and provincial governments don't have to finance post-secondary institutions properly. Meanwhile, post-secondary institutions get a much larger pool of students to draw from who pay so much more. It's win/win for politicians and administrators: someone else funds post-secondary institutions.

But the politicians and the schools don't have to worry about infrastructure for the students. We get situations like the one I linked to in the post: not enough housing and programs that don't offer the academic quality the students were promised.

I guess it's always been that way in Canada. But I thought we'd left that shit behind.

Because bringing in immigrants at scale is cheap and easy: it gooses GDP, lets you avoid interventionist policy like tax hikes or infrastructure spending, there's virtually no political blowback, their donor class (and we're talking both the CPC and LPC) likes it, and the cost of problems is causes is externalized onto other people.

If you're a neoliberal politician, it's pretty much all upside.

I mean, all upside except for the collapse of the middle class, the rise of fascism and general human misery, but again, these are all externalized costs for your average neoliberal and their donors.

Could be many reasons.

• tourism from friends and family
• automatic surge of money that they bring
• good optics to the other countries
• I'm sure there are some form of country to country politics
• ensures that when people come, there are common areas to go to automatically to fit in
• some things like schooling charge more for international students
• businesses have more customers resulting in more transactions which brings in more income everywhere

Looking at this based on the sole problem of housing probably doesn't paint the entire picture to why many countries do similar strategies.

Last year was the first outlier year in decades. If ignore last year our population growth rate (births & immigration) has been pretty flat for decades.

This isn't a new problem and it's not now being caused by immigration. Provinces have been massively under investing in infrastructure for decades and the federal government can't force them to start projects.

The current situation is essentially exactly what Canadian conservatives want, they control most of the provincial governments, and continue to cut spending on infrastructure & social programs. Then conservative media is blaming the failures on the federal government even though the federal government can only actually help if the provinces asked for it, and they have no reason to.

It's incredible how effective the conservative owned media is at spinning a story.

I'm not sure if extending the housing bubble is planned, or if it's a side effect of other policies. But it's frustrating.