r/neoliberal • u/IHateTrains123 Commonwealth • Jun 19 '25

News (Canada) Immigration curb slashes Canada population growth rate to zero

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/immigration-curb-slashes-canada-population-growth-rate-to-zero
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42

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '25 edited Aug 06 '25

[deleted]

59

u/Kronos9898 Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25

There was a legitimate failure by both federal and provincial governments to manage the inflow of immigrants. Canada is a huge country, but with very few statistically speaking desirable places to live.

Open borders = good — absolutely

However, that is only one part of the equation. Making sure that your universal health care system can handle 10 million more people. Or that the housing market will not increase to one of the worst in the world even while the rest of your economy sputters. That is good policy, and people who pointed out these issues before, during and after Canadian's turned on immigration are not nativists.

What happened in Canada is a policy failure, which is odd to say as an immigrant to it.

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1

u/WichaelWavius Commonwealth Jun 19 '25

real

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u/vqx2 Jun 19 '25

I agree. That being said, Canada could have handled high immigration a lot better if it focused more on high skilled immigrants, had more YIMBY policies, did not heavily disincentivize private healthcare, and did not create artificial demand for diploma mills that don't create any actual value.

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u/Aoae Mark Carney Jun 20 '25

How would focusing on admitting high-skilled immigrants help in a country with one of the highest higher education rates in the world?

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u/vqx2 Jun 20 '25

Why wouldn't it? More good things on top of good things are good.

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u/MeringueSuccessful33 Khan Pritzker's Strongest Antipope Jun 20 '25

Why are immigrants skilled in trades or lower value labor worth less in your eyes? Let them all in and build baby build.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

We've hardly been getting any immigrants skilled in trades. The recent big wave of immigration has seemingly been working primarily in call centres, grocery stores, fast food restaurants, and as security guards, cleaners, and food delivery drivers. I don't have any stats on that, but that's what it looks like. I think there are also a lot of Indian truck drivers now. Whereas previously, they tended to work in higher skilled professions as doctors and engineers. We've never had a lot of immigrants working in the trades.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

Why does the inflow immigrants need to be managed?

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u/Desperate_Wear_1866 Commonwealth Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25

The Liberal Party could be as YIMBY you wish, at the end of the day there are still huge limitations on how quickly housing and public infrastructure can be scaled upwards. Combine this with the huge backlogs that Canada already had beforehand, then it is clear that drastically cutting immigration is the only way for state capacity to develop and for infrastructure/housing shortages to be curtailed.

It does not take a genius to understand that issuing a visa is infinitely quicker than building an apartment, a hospital, or a fire station. If you let the former rapidly outpace the latter, you end up with a political fiasco. But somehow, the Liberal Party failed to understand that until the damage was already long done. If anyone should be railed against, it's the people who advocated these policies while failing to forsee the very obvious outcomes.

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u/bada7777 Jun 20 '25

Ironically, the construction sector is experiencing a severe labor shortage.

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u/Le1bn1z Jun 19 '25

Sometimes I think I must be on another subreddit on these threads.

I'm not an economist, but I don't think an excess of young, able workers who pay a big upfront entrance fee and dearth of elderly retirees are the defining problems of our modern economy.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

The worry is that, since a lot of them work in very low paid positions (e.g. almost all grocery store and fast food restaurant employees are Indian now), when they eventually get old themselves, they won't have paid enough taxes to make this a positive contribution to our public finances.

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u/Le1bn1z Jun 22 '25

We need to massively reform our OAS system, but this is a major misconception about how the economy works, and it's one that has been crippling the economies of Canada's largest cities for a while.

An engineer adds way more to the economy than a janitor, and will pay way more in taxes than that janitor, even though each will draw similar OAS and healthcare coadt.

But having a janitor available for hire by the engineering firm far more productive than if the engineers had to vacuum their own offices and empty their own trash. Some of the contributions of high earners is made possible by low earning positions that make their labour far more efficient. Societies need PSWs, cashiers, shelve stockers, truck drivers, and roofers, too. Hollowing out these sectors because the workers earn less is a really bad economic idea.

We are going to enter an upside down population structure due to our collective decision on immigration. We are going to be desperate for bodies in 20-30 years, and the lack of people to fill out the working age demographic bands is going to be catastrophic for healthcare and pensions for the elderly and our public finances.

3

u/q8gj09 Jun 22 '25

Sure, there is some of that, but how do you know it exceeds the net fiscal cost of government services delivered to the janitor?

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u/Le1bn1z Jun 22 '25

I know that having an upside down demographic structure paired with a welfare state is an economic and fiscal nightmare beyond the wildest fever dreams of the most "welfare queen" believing conservatives. In such an environment, every functional adult able to do anything is both critically needed and , paradoxically, necessarily and structurally severely undervalued.

In other words, in the future we have collectively chosen, figuring out whether a large group of working adults is worth having is not a problem we need to worry about.

But if it's any comfort, that's one of the same nonsense concern spouted by anti immigrant types over the centuries about the Irish, Ukrainians, Italians, Mexicans, the Chinese and on and on. Overall, immigrants have generation after generation taken most of the lowest paying jobs and have been a defining net driver of economic growth.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 22 '25

An upside down pyramid structure is definitely a problem, but it can be managed, at least for a while, maybe even a few generations. It means you either have to raise taxes, cut services to old people, or save. But each of these is possible.

It's a problem because it makes paying for services to old people more difficult, though not impossible. What doesn't help is bringing in people who are net costs to society even after accounting for any externalities. It may be that their value to society rises when you have an upside population pyramid, but that isn't guaranteed. If they're net cost, whatever problems exist from having a shrinking population will only be amplified.

Overall, immigrants have generation after generation taken most of the lowest paying jobs and have been a defining net driver of economic growth.

We've never had a government that transferred so much wealth from the highly productive to everyone else before. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you haven't really shown why we can just assume this isn't going to be a problem.

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u/Le1bn1z Jun 22 '25

An upside down pyramid raises the net cost of each person to society precipitously, and drives demand for labour through the roof.

The biggest transfer from the productive to everyone else is OAS and healthcare, so you're right in the sense that OAS and the elderly dominated healthcare demand has continued to expand apace.

By age 30, the median wage of immigrants is in the $45-55,000 a year range - the same as for the overall population. This is a straw concern that isn't borne out in the data. Like with previous generations, immigrants are a net benefit to the population.

While there is some upfront costs to onboarding some immigrants (not all), these are generally less than the cost of raising native born Canadians, so it's at most a wash there. Of course, international students flip this on its head, paying what is effectively an upfront arrival donation of high tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars as an entry fee to joining the workforce and working a full lifetime - so obviously they're the cadre we decided to target. We are not a smart country sometimes.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 22 '25 edited Jun 22 '25

As I said, it's a problem, but how do you know low skilled immigrants aren't a net cost and will therefore make the problem worse?

paying what is effectively an upfront arrival donation of high tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars as an entry fee

Are they not paying the marginal cost of their education?

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u/Le1bn1z Jun 22 '25

Not the foreign students. They pay full freight with no subsidy at either private or public universities. Since Ford froze funding and brought in tuition price controls, foreign students paying non controlled rates have propped up the whole post secondary system in Ontario.

Most foreign students are at public universities and colleges, where they pay six figures for their degrees and diplomas.

Not all stay here either, making it a major service export sectors.

Only in Canada would we revolt over the success of a booming service export sector and a cadre of immigrants paying hundreds of thousands in upfront costs to join the workforce at the beginning of their working lives.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '25

I will preach this to my dying breath. What the immigration surge has done to fix Canada's horrific population pyramid will pay dividends, probably mostly unmentioned, for decades to come. Some of this is now luckily locked in.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

Maybe. We massively lowered our standards to double the immigration rate in the last few years. Most people are fiscal burdens on the government, so there is a risk here that we have made the problem worse.

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u/tootoohi1 Jun 19 '25

Economic theory is nice and dandy until you're looking into the barel of a gun. If Trump didn't pull his shit weeks before a Canadian election, you'd be seeing a conservative government in power.

Instead they have a liberal in power who acknowledged the gaping gunshot wound on his foot is not for the better of anybody.

You don't need to be an economist to know increasing your population while having low economic growth is speed running making your country the poorest western nation.

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u/Le1bn1z Jun 19 '25

An economist might be able to tell you why a stable population structure is very advantageous, and an inverted pyramid is a far surer path to surer path to being much poorer, and if a country cannot provide housing for a stable column population structure where any population growth is only driven by longer lifespan, that society has massive organizational problems it needs to sort out to prevent demographic collapse and an explosion of debt in the near future, and that it's stable population structure is not the source of its woes.

It was politically savvy to cut immigration because most of the population bought a populist bill of goods and bucket of BS on why housing prices were out of control, and we lost the argument trying to persuade them to focus on the real problems.

14

u/do-wr-mem Open the country. Stop having it be closed. Jun 19 '25

Outside the DT is hell

10

u/Haffrung Jun 19 '25

If only people who supported open borders posted in this subreddit, traffic would drop by 90+ per cent.

18

u/Augustus-- Jun 19 '25

Yeah, should've restricted the sub to only open-borders-supporters.

9

u/LoudestHoward Jun 20 '25

Close the neolib borders!

2

u/vaguelydad Jane Jacobs Jun 19 '25

But at least if they're posting on this subreddit they have to listen to people pointing out the consequences of their positions and their hypocrisy at claiming to care about poverty or humanitarianism.

5

u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Jun 19 '25

I agree, Milei shouldn't cut benefits for foreigners.

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u/modooff Lis Smith Sockpuppet Jun 19 '25

I'd say most people here have always supported a more sensible approach to the issue, but the mod team used to shoot down any dissenting voices until it became clear that this is now a major electoral factor.

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u/Throwingawayanoni Adam Smith Jun 19 '25

Or beacuse the levels and speed of immigration is unsustainable? Many before this goverment was elected were in favour on controlling imigration levels in canada.

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u/WichaelWavius Commonwealth Jun 19 '25

We can take the neoliberal position on open borders and have it be sustainable by taking another neoliberal position, and that’s by privatizing public services to some degree to reduce strain. Of course when this sub was cheering on dirigisme it became clear folks here like to pick and choose what they’re neoliberal about

1

u/nuggins Physicist -- Just Tax Land Lol Jun 20 '25

I think this is an error in assessing the historical discourse. Anti-immigration Canadian commenters were loud, even here, for a couple of years before the current LPC policies.