I 100% concur. Canada would benefit by having a population 2-3x current. I am always amazed how in the US there are so many cities with vibrant cultures in the 50-80k range whereas in Canada you can drive vast distances and only find tiny settlements of a few thousand people and no services or culture to speak of.

Meanwhile a substantial number of Americans are envious of Canadian life and how much safer Canadian cities are. The grass is always greener.

> Canada would benefit by having a population 2-3x current

What a coincidence, this is exactly what the Century Initiative wants. Toronto would go from 8.8 to 33.5 million people. Vancouver from 3.3 to 11.9 million.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative

Well… I would distribute it differently! I’d look for dozens of more cities in the 75-300k range like the US rather than pushing the growth to 2-3 mega cities.

We don't have 'much habitable land'. Most of the 'land' is literally a rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

Hmm, that does look habitable to me. Moreover, it looks quite nice compared to a lot of places people live in.

Mars, Moon, and some places on Earth defnitely are not habitable (unless very supported), but calling most of the Canada "unhabitable" is more than a stretch.

That land is not suitable for agriculture. There is no way to build anything sustainable there, nor there is any point in that.

Most of the food I eat comes from hundreds of thousands of miles away. I'd imagine a bigger issue with inhabiting that area is lack of logistics.

> Most of the food I eat comes from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

And that's precisely the problem! Carbon footprint per capital is very high in Canada and for remote and colder locations it would be even higher!

I live in Europe but that's still the case, and apparently it doesn't really affect the carbon footprint because the majority of emissions are last mile.

That remote part of Canada would still be an issue though because it doesn't look like there are any train lines, major rivers or sea access.

Very little of the carbon emissions of food come from its transportation.[0] People living in cities have a lower carbon footprint than those living in more suburban areas.[1] We should be allowing more people to live in economically vibrant, low emission cities.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food?ins...

[1] https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-the-worst-for-ca...

Don't forget muskeg!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskeg

Need and "can accommodate" are two different things.

Can you explain why you feel this way? I'm not understanding why there needs to be more people simply because there's a lot of habitable land.

There's not really that much habitable land in Canada that's not already being used imo.

BC for example is pretty much all mountain and has dammed and flooded many of its habitable river valleys.

In the Prairies the land is already valuably used to export food across the world.

In other parts of Canada it's muskeg and inhospitably cold.

The other thing that everyone always forgets about is that all this "free" land out there is not at all free for the taking: it is under land claims by First Nations. These longstanding unresolved issues will need to be resolved before people can start cutting down forests somewhere and laying out a new main street.

There's plenty of room for more Canadians in the parts of Canada that are already developed, but not a terribly compelling reason for expansion beyond that.

In the Prairies you could put a lot of people on farmland and it wouldn't subtract very much productive capacity and would accommodate a lot of people. A square mile is roughly 800mt of grain give or take most years on prime farmland.. the economic value of that vs the sheer number of people you can house on that space with reasonable density, the tradeoff is a non-issue. (That's why developable land on the edge of Winnipeg trades at $25k/ac and the same land 10 miles away is worth 5-6k/ac.)