BS, that’s fine but you are missing something. if canada is at a similar urban/rural mix as the US et al, but it does have populations that live in middle of nowhere (places you wish to write off completely for the sake of this argument), then canada’s urban/rural mix is ALREADY higher than the US et al. promoting urbanization for the 7 million who live outside of urban centres doesn’t make sense. so you want whitehorse, yellowknife, fort mac, timmins, thompson and prince albert (200k population, just a few that are considered rural) to shut down their viable and enduring resource economies and move their populations to toronto? it’s not like rural people in canada are twiddling their thumbs and living in poverty. they are working and providing products to the global economy. rural areas exist for a reason. canada is basically as urbanized as it can be.
also, by your logic, if you wish to writeoff “northern canada”, then this writeoff should only occur north of your own country’s most northernly urban area - Anchorage. if we use anchorage as the cutoff line, there is plenty of land to fill and your logic fails. there is no valid reason why population centres cannot be established up to the arctic tree line which is well above anchorage.
It’s suboptimal, although the higher rate already (which I didn’t miss in fact) is why they do perform as well as they do. You’re acting like being higher than the US means its good, there’s zero reason why the US would be a benchmark for Canada.
Russia and Australia both have resource industries that are far superior to those of Canada and far more productive, so arguing that it’s all good and you couldn’t maintain those industries with less people out there is pointless. Oil sands are a dying method anyways. When you’re at urban/rural mix of about 25% urban in line with Europe and the US which share no real geographic commonality is bordering willful ignorance. The reality is your nearest and most successful geographic and economic peers are all at ~75% urban mix, it’s not even close.
You then (and I’m blown away by your willful ignorance to nuance here) are drawing some weird comparison again in name only with Anchorage. Anchorage serves as a lone strategic outpost and is primarily a gateway to fishing and resources industries. Using its latitude to argue for inhabiting suboptimal norther lands wholesale is just arguing through ridiculous oversimplification. It’s sadly reminiscent of your use of Western Europe as a compare for rural / urban mix for Canada earlier.
Urbanization isn’t just about moving from from providence to providence it’s about achieving density even within smaller regions. Similarly China has undergone a significant shift ot >50% urban. You’re using a bogus and outdated comparison with Europe and the US, but the reality is 25% or whatever urbanization for Canada is wildly suboptimal for any modern nation and even moreso when you compare it to any other nation with similar geography, it’s not even close enough to make a credible defense.
Matt, this stuff isn’t hard, but clearly you have some preformed ideas that you didn’t really think through and don’t have an interest in weighing the realities and nuances of Canada’s landmass in forming. It seems this is political for you and you’re not willing to argue it dispassionately and it reminds me of how you argued for the Amazon headquarters definitely going to Toronto to the death with everyone and were colossally wrong or how you lectured me on gold and refused to even acknowledge that you were completely wrong even after the fact. There’s a point where you’re just going to ignore reality and argue to argue and I think we’ve found it.
Franky (not that Frankie) finally successfully trolled someone. Only took a couple years, but you did it buddy! Of course you hooked the easiest person to troll on AF, so now it’s time to step up your game. Try to get one of the Canadians riled up. They’re so damn polite that’s a real challenge for you.
bs, you wrote your last comment as if you believe only 25% of canada is urban. i assume this is a mistake. but some of your comments are in line with this assumption. please clarify.
as per this world bank website, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS, canada is 81% urban and australia is 86% urban. you’re talking about a 5% shift from rural to urban, or less than 2 million canadians. this represents less than six years of our current immigration rate. i’m not sure how your point is relevant over any timeframe considering “promoting urbanization” is a slow process outside of authoritarian regimes.
also, disregarding the geographic similarities between canada and the us is unlike you. are you actually going to tell me that somehow canada and australia are more similar than canada and the us? canada and the us share basically all the same rivers and many of the same lakes and have similar resource deposits and topography. there is a reason why australia’s rural/resource sector is more efficient. it is because those resources are more geographically concentrated (i.e. pilbara, queensland) while canada’s are much more sparse (Sudbury, James Bay, Labrador City, etc. are puny relative to Australian operations). the US similarly has more inefficient mining operating relative to australia. there is some concentration in north american energy deposits but in canada as you said these deposits are likely not viable forever and in the us the deposits are only now starting to gain scale even close to comparable to pilbara operations.
finally, canada’s rural areas have strategic military and research value that australia’s do not. hell, the us helps pay for some of the outposts that exist in canada’s north for military and research purposes.
Yeah, I wrote that backwards when i was writing it. I’m not saying their isn’t some similarity between the US and Canada but hte problem is it’s mostly the similarity between northern US and southern Canada, as you get above the say, halfway mark its just not even remotely similar. Moreover, the norther parts its similar to are sparsely populated outside cities. Yes, Australia has better resources, but that sort of speaks to the point of why Canada should just push for more urbanization, there’s even less incentive to be producing resources on the margin. I get that you can’t demand urbanization, but you can promote it through policies.
Not sure about the strategic and research value being any greater than Australia or anywhere else, seems tenuous.
OMG! I wasn’t really serious when I created this thread. It was late night after a few drinks. Anyways here we go:
MLA is unquestionably right on lack of population growth and its correlation with the economy. Back in the day the Canadian government only allowed white Europeans to emigrate but then I believe 50 years ago they opened the gates for poor folks in Asia that helped the country bring 1) cheaper labor and 2) folks who like to make babies. This change was a win-win for a majority of immigrants as in old days jobs were available and the competition was less so you could move up on the ladder pretty easily and buy a house, have a family. But now things have changed drastically. It is impossible for immigrants to afford a house in big cities and raise kids so the sole purpose of increasing population base has already been defeated by the cost of living. If most of the immigrants are landing in two or three major cities where two people with a household income of $150k can’t afford to buy a decent condo or house then how would they afford to raise kids? now, forget about folks who are driving cabs or working in low paying jobs. When you say that folks argue why immigrants don’t move to small cities and stay there. Sadly, there are no decent jobs in those areas unless you want to work in some admin/support job or some blue-collar job. There is also a lack of social integration in those areas which adds to the existing problem.
Canada needs to revamp its immigration policies and find how to actually meet the needs of the labor market. With regards to increasing population government can easily implement many solutions 1) offer more tax credits for having up to 3-4 kids 2) offer tax credits for immigrants who stay and work in rural areas 2) offer daycare system paid by taxpayers 4) make it easier and cheaper for people to have kids 5) improve public transportation 5) force people out of cities and provide benefits if they choose to live in small cities.
People are not having kids because the cost of living is rising in Toronto/GTA but wages are not keeping up. I strongly believe that in Canada most white-collar folks under 40 are severely underemployed. If white couple earning a $100k is encountering difficulties raising two kids because of insane costs associated with it then how is it even possible to expect that from immigrants who 1) mostly broke 2) lack communication skills to get better jobs 3) have no support from families to raise kids?
MLA has raised many good points but I believe immigration from South East Asia is not the solution to these issues. I’m open to reading interesting counterargument.
actually for mortagages, at least in us, the standard rule is like 4x ur income. you may be able to stretch it to 5 or 6. but 10x is unheard of. nto today honey! lol i love the funny adjectives though.
bs, just to reiterate, encouraging that canada up its urban/rural mix upward by 5% (i.e. 2 million people) is a flash in the pan for a country that is increasing it population by over 1% per year (mostly via immigration). and again, places like the ones i mentioned are viable communities. are you also calling for the abolishment of valid communities like gloucester, mass or key west, fla? you have to know that what you’re saying is silly. sure maybe 0.5% or 1% of canada’s population is inefficiently allocated but calling for self-sustaining towns that generate meaningful economic value to be shut down is really just silly. mere economics promotes urbanization. if your small community sucks, move to a bigger city where opportunity is greater. artificially stimulating migration is a weird concept coming from someone who i thought was somewhat libertarian in his beliefs.
rural australia literally has no strategic value whereas rural canada may literally have the most strategic value…
trust me, the us is going to commit inordinate resources to canada’s north in order to maintain near exclusive economic and strategic rights over the north west passage and surrounding areas.
it is actually difficult to find an article on the north west passage that doesn’t include the words “strategic value”.
Well its pretty simplistic to think migratory incentives are calling for “abolishment” of small towns or to take such a binary POV of things, albeit not surprising. It can be as simple as tax incentives/disincentives. Again, for the millionth time, I don’t think it’s a direct compare to the US, which has different economy and different geography. Also 5% of a countries population is not a flash in the pan. I am saying though that moves towards urbanization for any country are better more precise policy towards those objectives. Again, it was never binary as you keep trying to reduce it to, I stated repeatedly this was not an anti-immigration position, so any argument to the contrary is wholesale stupid.
So to recap, you made a pretty weak original statement about growth, then floundered before settling on infrastructure, drew some sloppy comparisons to Western Europe, ignoring AU and Russia, and now are completely discounting the obvious benefits of increased urbanization under some new over simplification. Nice.
AU provides access to CN. What you described however justifies a military outpost, not populating garbage land. These points are as weak as the sure thing where Amazon was going to Toronto only for them to pick three cities not in Canada.
you keep bringing up amazon and toronto without recognizing that amazon was probably deterred by google proposing the creation of a tech hub that was ~10x its original design (with goal of adding 44k tech jobs) during the amazon tendering process on the very land that was being pitched to amazon. yes various US communities ended up paying billions for a few thousand jobs while toronto paid nothing for another 600 jobs. i’d say toronto won either way. but previous calls have no basis on the fact that you just so outright wrong in this current discussion.
AU providing access to CN? doesn’t singapore do that? doesn’t korea do that? why the hell do we need to go through the australian outback to get to china? what?
the key problem is you keep talking about urbanization as if canada is not encouraging it in the same way that literally every other nation encourages it. i’m not hung up on comparisons between AU, US or Europe or wherever. the bottom line is that they are ALL very similar in their urban/rural mixes and any change is minor nuance.
and you say you’re not recommending the abolishment of viable small towns but you’re argument is entirely invalid without taking that stance. please go through the list of canadian towns and tell me which towns are not viable standalone towns. basically all of the 19% rural population in canada is the product of natural rural populations surrounding urban areas (akin to everywhere else in the world) and viable standalone towns that maintain themselves based on their standalone economies. there aren’t random people living in the middle of nowhere in Canada no more than there are random people living in the middle of nowhere in the US.
Thanks for the spot on objective take as usual filled with non-points, hyperbole and minutia. Also if you don’t recognize the difference between Singapore and AU militarily or why CN =/= US geographically, I really can’t help you.
^ you said, AU provides “access” to CN. not sure how else this could be interpreted. i assumed by “access” you meant economically. if we assume you meant economically, i am correct.
if we assume otherwise, i am also correct. are you suggesting that the US would for some reason use AU as a launchpad for a war against CN despite only having 2,000 troops in AU while already having 55,000 troops in Japan, 26000 troops in Korea, 43,000 in Hawaii and 6,000 troops in Guam. please advice with your sage military advice. tanks!
edit: also, for that matter, the 60,000 US troops in europe are basically as close to china as the 2,000 US troops in AU. are you having a seizure today?
Lol, current troop counts mean nothing. How obtuse are you? You think a war with any major country involves 50 thousand troops? They have this thing called redeployment.
AU provides deep water ports from a defensible position, Japan is far too close for either, as is Korea and Europe does nothing for the Navy. It’s amazing how quick you are to retort and how you’ll apparently attempt to do research but with the sole point of shutting your mind off and attempting to argue anything. This is why you routinely lose these big debates. Of course you’ve always got a retroactive reason later, blah blah blah, we actually won by losing in Toronto, blah blah. I lectured you on gold for 5 pages just to be completely wrong, blah blah. Eskimo super power, blah.
