So immigration is actively encouraged, which is perhaps unique among developed nations (depending only on our definition of 'actively encouraged' I suppose) which is probably 'correct' and could be massive for GDP, but.. shouldn't there also be deliberate attempts to build new cities? My outsider's limited perspective is that it seems to be mostly left to natural progress, which means.. immigrants gravitate towards Vancouver & Toronto, and everywhere that exists just gets slightly bigger and much more expensive.
Why isn't there massive intentional city building to go along with it?
Several decades ago, north of Steeles was prairies and farmlands. The IBM headquarters was moved to that area in the 80s. CGI headquartered in Markham as well. Nowadays there are condos going up all over the place along the 407 and hwy 7.
If more companies did this instead of coveting to be as near union Station as possible, I believe the metropolitan area could still expand horizontally a great deal more before ever coming anywhere near permafrost.
It doesn't even take that much willpower either. Milton, for example, could easily attract companies by offering tax breaks. A lot of talent already commutes from there.
Perhaps decades ago I'd be content with commuting out to the middle of nowhere by car to work for a large company as a lifelong employee. Perhaps those circumstances still exist, but there is a comparatively large number of people living downtown that won't touch transit-poor suburb offices with a 10-pole stick. If you're setting up shop in the suburbs, you will get a pick of only suburb residents.
On the other hand, if you're setting up shop in downtown, you get a pick of both downtown and suburb dwellers. The latter will drive anyway, so it matters comparatively little whether you drive from Mississauga to Milton or from Mississauga to Toronto. Plus a lot of people can find a GO station somewhere and get downtown that way. Good luck commuting to a Milton campus by train from Markham.
Furthermore, with Toronto in the centre of the population bell curve, it's not even just downtown employees vs. suburb employees. It's also that by building on one edge of the municipal area, you will have a harder time to attract people from the other edge. Mississauga to Milton isn't too bad, Ajax to Milton is twice the distance vs. to downtown Toronto.
So in the end, it all goes back to making a choice between locations with relatively broad appeal and a lot of competition, or niche locations that work great for a considerably lower potential selection of employees. Large international companies are finding that they are competitive enough to win employees in the downtown job market while still benefiting from the broad base of talent available there. You'd have to give them unprofitably high tax breaks to make them give up their talent pool.
Smaller shops may try out the niche strategy in the suburbs and may find it to work well for their purposes. But I guess those were not the target of your call for suburban HQs. They're also not at a size at which Milton would consider giving out tax breaks.
There can always be exceptions, although as a general tendency the house is stacked against suburb HQs. Maybe with a drawn-out WFH trend this could change, but for now I still don't see it happening.
What's interesting is that the two companies I mentioned are both very large (offices in multiple cities) and don't have butts-in-seat cultures (people already worked from home a lot even pre-pandemic).
The point about Ajax to Milton being a very long commute is quite valid though Ajax could also try to attract companies of its own. The go train point is fair, but not critical IMHO. People can and do move. And for better or for worse, these municipalities do have very strong car cultures as of today. Living in Scarborough to commute to Markham is a pain in the neck by public transit, but trivial by car (and consider that downtown traffic and parking story isn't great compared to free parking virtually everywhere in Markham, so there's some amount of mutual exclusion there). Also IMHO, the infrastructure follows demand. Some stretches of Hwy 7 have public transit lines now; there's clearly a desire to build out a local scene that isn't centered around downtown Toronto.
I think defending the idea of cramming downtown more and more is more based on status quo, and ultimately it's not going to be sustainable. Downtown Toronto has already grown upwards quite a bit; at the pace condos are going up, it's eventually going to run out of parking lots to convert to vertical space. I think developing new talent-attracting centers is going to be important regardless; better to get the ball going before it becomes an unavoidable necessity. </two-cents>
1.01^25 = 1.282 or 28.2% growth. Sounds like a good bet to try to grow economic activity in the region if the immigrants are typically educated and are net-positive contributors.
Canada's total fertility rate (TFR) is 1.47[1] which is well below the natural replacement rate of 2.1. I'm not blindly advocating that we grow at any cost, but it's important to note that as bad as the job situation seems to be across the country today, it feels like it would be much worse if our population continues to shrink indefinitely.
Japan's stagnation over the past couple of decades seems to be one possible path that would have awaited us if Canada hadn't take steps to increase the population.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200929/dq200...
Population growth (at a much lower more sustainable rate) can be incentivized by literally paying people more money to have Children. And did it occur to you that perhaps our low birthrate has something to do with the increasing lack of opportunity to improve in this country?
Finally, I am actually against the concept that the country must have constant population growth. Population growth comes in natural waves where some decades it will be high, and in others it will be low. The drop in birthrates many believe will cause a "sky to fall" scenario, which simply isn't true. It is parasitic to expect and demand constant population growth, especially at the cost of people's standard of living.
Some countries tried this approach with mixed results.[1] Given that we're both worried about the debt-to-GDP (i.e. profligate deficit spending by the federal and some provincial governments) I think the budgets are better spent attracting immigrants with skills, education and in many cases capital assets they bring to the country rather than baby bonuses.
Quebec still pays a baby bonus[2] but a Stats Canada study[3] showed their fertility rate over four decades was only 1.59 vs. Ontario's 1.46 -- still well below a steady-state no-growth replacement rate of 2.1.
>>And did it occur to you that perhaps our low birthrate has something to do with the increasing lack of opportunity to improve in this country?
This plays a role, but a lot of economic thinking (rightly or wrongly) finds a strong correlation between how developed a country is and declining TFRs even when there is a boom period of economic growth and opportunity.[4][5][6]
[1] https://www.prb.org/low-fertility-countries-tfr/
[2] https://www.rrq.gouv.qc.ca/en/programmes/soutien_enfants/pai...
[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/article...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255510/
[5] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf...
In 1985 our population was 25 million, and today it is now 38 million. Most of that population growth can be attributed to mass immigration. But we have no new cities or towns. We are simply crowding ourselves out of the minimal amount of cities and arable land along a southern strip that we can inhabit.
Also I don't think Japan is a negative example of population decline. They are an example of a country being able to maintain its standard of living, productivity, and its economy despite a stagnant population.
I strongly believe that if population growth through mass immigration continues (and mostly likely will), standards will continue to worsen across most of the country.
Perhaps to put a more human perspective, I graduated with a STEM degree during a recession and it was horrible. Many classmates had their careers set back by many years.
If I have to choose again between prosperity and economic growth that seems to be strongly correlated with a growing and educated population via immigration vs. affordable housing coupled with few economics opportunities, I'll choose the first option almost every time.
There's no point being able to afford housing if there are no economic opportunities in the area. Detroit at its peak in the 1950s had a population of 1.8M and was the 5th largest city in America, but is now a shadow of its former glory due to various factors and it's population only 680K (37% of its peak). Incidentally, nearby Windsor seems to have experienced very gradual population growth (less than Toronto) but its economic prospects still look pretty bleak.
It seems like you believe something like that could never happen to Toronto because the Golden Horseshoe is one of the few habitable places to live in Canada, in which case we'll just have to agree to disagree on this counterfactual.