Canada Needs To Grow It's Population

So there’s this war going on in Ukraine. There are pirates attacking supply ships. That whole Israel-Palestine conflict is mighty close to some key trade routes. Apparently we’re not cool with China, and China is pressuring Taiwan for more control, they already more or less kicked foreigners out of Hong Kong.

There’s also conflict all over Africa and generally international politics is in a fragile place. Guess what that affects? If you were thinking about pain and suffering, I’d agree. But I was thinking about trade routes and the transport of goods. 

In the state of our lil Canadian existence, we are slowly finding out the irrelevance of our economy in the big picture. 

All this conflict affects the price of everything

People are big mad at inflation. A lot of negative energy is thrown at political figures for how things are handle domestically. To be fair, there is valid criticism for the CERB cheques. Maybe they were a bad idea. I don’t think that is the case, but I acknowledge many people who know more than me have good reasons to feel this way. 

Let’s pretend Canada did all the things it was supposed to do correctly. The war in Ukraine alone increased the price of many things. Inflation was coming no matter what. When you look into some of the issues with the supply chain lately, you see that pretty much everything to do with import/export has gotten more expensive. 

When sanctions get thrown around willy nilly, the end result is inflation. Our whole world is designed in such a way that globalizaiton means global events affect us as much as domestic choices do. Imagine we had ignored lockdown measures, as an example, and then everyone stopped accepting Canadian goods. That would have sucked real bad for us. Maybe I’m just obsessed with those time travel arcs in sci-fi shows but when you look at the macro economic and political spheres, there are a lot of moving parts that affect everything. I find people often overlook a lot when they speculate on their what ifs. 

Another thing that matters is Canada’s population is freaking tiny.

California has more people than Canada

Canada is the second largest country in the world by land mass, granted a lot of that land mass is cold. Canada has a smaller population than the state of California. This has a huge impact on things like cost of goods and economics that should be talked about more.

Check this video:

Every single musician knows that Canada’s population spread creates some real problems. When you live in some small town in Tennessee, you can drive to like 6 big cities to perform in a single weekend. The cost of your little local tours is pretty small. The transport between places is convenient, affordable and you can probably just drive home to sleep between a lot of spots in many cases.

It takes 6 hours on average to go from downtown Montreal to downtown Toronto. The way Canada is set up, there is so much distance between the majour population centres that it becomes a lot more expensive to travel between them. All the places a 2 hour drive from Montreal with the exception of Ottawa, have like 200’000 people at best. 

Even our more busy cities don’t have enough people spread around to justify investment in better train ecosystems. As long as the country below us has on average 9 times the people we do, we are basically stunted. All our top talent is going to go to the USA. Where they will make significantly more money. 

Pick an industry, chances are, once you hit the big leagues, an American company can and will poach you. Look at Quebec and the nursing situation. We train nurses to export to the USA all the time.

I think Canada has to learn it’s place

I know we’ve been put in the same category as all the big powerful countries out there. But we have the clout we do because we live in the shadow of the USA. It’s our blessing and curse but we need more people to fill up the places that are 100-500K people now into proper metropolises. 

Our biggest growth strategy is immigration. The OG Canadian birth rate is under 2 per family. Thus, our population cannot grow without more immigration. But that really means that high-key, as wonderful as we are, we’re in a bad place. Unless our population becomes denser, quicker, a lot of financial burden is going to appear.

Canada has a lot of hubris but can’t really back it up. My next steps for my music career is to save money and go to LA to spend the money I saved. Take 5 figures of Canadian money and send that right into US pockets. There is not enough of a population here to support my artistic growth with dollars. 

I wish there was more happening, but we live in a country that doesn’t care about building enough houses for its population. The number of homeless people is drastically increasing. But none of what I mentioned in this blog is talked about. Canada focuses on this myopic lens of its influence, ignoring its place in global politics. 

All that to say, we need to be realistic about what our problems are. A lot of things feel out of touch to me so I will keep writing it out. One day string it into a coherent book.

I’m not an economist or political scientist, what in the fuck do I know anyway?

Live Long and Prosper Everyone.