immigration and housing, and how immigration has affected housing, is going to be a major issue in the next canadian election. unfortunately, we are going to be presented with the choice between being pro-immigrant (and voting to worsen the status quo) or being anti-immigrant (and also voting to worsen the status quo), when the issue is really not about immigration, but about the inevitable consequences of embracing neo-liberalism.

i randomly watched this video on youtube last night, for no good reason other than that it was in the sidebar:

is canada in a similar situation to china in the 1980s? not yet, but it is moving in that direction. what i want to draw attention to is not a comparison of china and canada but a discussion of what china did to reverse it's housing deficit into a housing supply.

we are going to need to do something similar in canada, or we will end up in the same situation as china.

increasing or decreasing immigration does not address the issue at hand, and these are subtle economic arguments that are more stochastic than causal. i mean, you can make a great argument for one approach or the other, and then something like covid happens, and everything you said becomes meaningless. increasing immigration even further might be good for the economy if a bunch of random stuff happens, or decreasing immigration might be better if a bunch of other random stuff happens, instead. you're not getting anywhere trying to make predictions when you don't have laboratory conditions. our smartest brains have utterly failed to turn economics into a science, and the people we elect to run our parliaments are very far from our smartest brains.

it's going to be very hard to break through this broken dichotomy.

but we need to strenuously avoid the temptation to politicize this and make about immigration policy. yes, immigration is putting strains on our housing, but we have 40 million people in a giant, vast land. we should be underpopulated. dramatically. yet, we've somehow overpopulated ourselves by making bad resource allocation decisions and very poor land use planning.

we need to find a way to build, build, build, build and not be distracted by the politics of migration or immigration, even as we should be apprehensive about letting too many social conservatives into the country, lest we wake up in iran, or texas.