Canada's population reaches 40M (opens in new tab)

Agreed. This is mostly just geopolitical propaganda because China allied with Russia. And maybe COVID fallout. It's all prep to get the population onboard for more military bullying of China.

Just learned yesterday that a bachelor in my building is now $1850 (CAD), hydro and water extra. This is not a luxury building.

I second this, from Vancouver! My partner pays $1500 for less.

The provincial area figure is meaningless for computing density. It’s like calculating the density of beer in a glass that’s been poured with 99% head. The real density is in the quarter inch of beer at the bottom of the glass, not the giant blob of foam above it.

Ontario is culturally 2 provinces, southern and northern Ontario.

The north is what you normally think of Canada: rocks, trees and lakes. The south is similar to the neighbouring US states of Michigan, Ohio, and New York but with a distinct Canadian identity and a French region in the east.

Most of the population (13.4M) lives in the southern part (114,000 km^2)

It's worth noting that roughly half of Canada's population lives in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor [0] (the land between Quebec City, QC and Windsor, ON). This region is really the Canadian equivalent of the Boston-Washington corridor in the States, so imagine if nearly 150 million lived in BosWash.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Co...

You just compared apples to oranges.

~6.954 (as of 2016 so actually higher) million of those 15m people live in 8,244 km^2 in the Greater Toronto Hamilton area, which works out to 843 people per square kilometer (vs 3368 for Istanbul).

Yes, 1/4 the density, yes, but nowhere close to the bizarre comparison you gave, where you used literally uninhabitable/barely-settled areas of the province (Ontario is huge and mostly rock and lakes) and compared to one of the densest cities in the world. At least compare urban area to urban area.

Toronto is the 3rd or 4th most populated city in North America, depending on how you count. Not some quaint arctic getaway. Also sits at the same latitude as e.g. Marseille in the south of France, or Florence in Italy. So not exactly northern at all.

Also if we restrict to just the actual technical city of Toronto proper, the density is higher than what you gave for Istanbul: 2,794,356 people in 630.20km^2 == 4435 people per square kilometer.

So... Check your biases at the door.

Yet we have massive housing issues...

More Americans than Canadians live north of the southernmost point of Canada. 15% of Americans live north of Windsor, Ontario. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6pgby8/til_th...>

Livable to what standard? I think you mean “developed” and the country could easily be developed to the latitude of Edmonton or Prince George, it just isn’t because the population hasn’t reached a density that has demanded northern expansion. There’s nothing that makes it inherently un-livable.

The livable part of the US is pretty much neighbors with the livable part of Canada, in my yankee opinion.

THIS!!!*!

You'd be even more surprised to learn that 50% of Canadians live further south than much of the US ;)

http://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ca...

Fun fact: the southern-most point in Canada is further south than the northern-most point in Nevada.

In Vancouver and Toronto. Even then, SF house prices are still much higher when you consider the exchange rate.

Hard to break the law when the nearest person is over the horizon. /s

Livable != developed At least 100x more of the country than has been developed is livable, just undeveloped. I’ve driven the length of the country four times in the last three years and I assure you there are vast stretches of perfectly livable land that simply hasn’t been developed because the market demand has been in major cities and expands outward slowly.

I was skeptical, but it turns out you're right! According to Wikipedia, the Northernmost point in California is 42 degrees north, and the Southernmost point in Canada is Middle Island, which is 41.7 degrees north [1], or about 0.3 degrees farther south of the Northernmost point in California.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_Cana...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_U.S....

I'm guessing Windsor (42.3149° N), but CA's northern latitude is almost 42° N exactly, so it turns out to be Middle Island instead (41.40° N).

40% of Federal MPs own rental property. Now you know why boosting the population is big with politicians.

> to ensure [..] ecological sustainability, Canada needs to triple its population.

This is beyond farcical.

>I wonder if global warming could make it into one of the most populous countries in the distant future.

Unlikely. The parts of Canada that aren't settled (and aren't actually in or near the Arctic Circle) are that way not because of temperature, but because the soil is almost entirely unsuitable for farming: Either rocky Canadian Shield, or "swallows locomotives overnight" muskeg (plus infinite numbers of mosquitos).

>Would be funny if there is some canadian cabal trying to speed up global warming.

Canada will net benefit from global warming, yes, because the Northwest Passage will become navigable. But it is not true that temperature is the only thing keeping Canada from being able to support as many people as the US, which has almost identically sized geography.

I think our Canadian cabal is doing everything it can to speed up global warming. We have the dirtiest oil in the world (Alberta Oil Sands) and we essentially based our economy on extraction.

The shield would need to turn into farmland

Canada is both dense and sparse. It’s paradoxical. Huge landmass. Almost everyone living in a thin slice near the U.S. border. We have massive housing issues all over the place.

Nobody’s building in the great wilderness above.

Yeah pump the brakes, there’s pllllleeeeeeeentyyyyy of physical space available in Canada for settlement still, if you don’t mind the poor weather further north.

Canada currently has about 8M people (20%) born in other countries. If you add another 2 million immigrants then you need to build 5% more houses, need 5% more cars, need 5% more electricity, need 5% more infrastructure,

Capitalistically I would be interested to backtest the returns for a global macro fund that invested in countries with high immigration.

I live in New Zealand where ~30% of our population is people that were not born here (New Zealand is quite picky about who gets to come here, so we have less structural problems than some European countries that accept large numbers of refugees with little opportunity to filter for the most suitable people). New Zealand has been building housing at a fast pace to keep up with the ~50% increase in population over the “native” population.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...

It's the second largest country in the world. It has half the population of Germany and ~28x the land mass. Their problem will be actually building houses and making them affordable, not "sparseness"

The late Hans Rosling has a good presentation on this, "Don't Panic":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

* http://vimeo.com/79878808

This is not Canadians making babies, which they do below the replacement limit as in other developed countries. This is massive levels of immigration. Canadians do have a bigger per capita environment footprint, but still it’s really just moving people around.

Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.

No, it's actually not.

Housing speculation in Canada is a national industry. The assholes in both the major parties will never lift a finger to do anything about it because either they, or their baby boomer voters, are all hyper invested in making sure Number Goes Up for housing.

Look at the way Poilievre foams all apoplectic at the mouth about the BoC raising its rate (as if it's Trudeau's choice what that # is... but whatever) while at the same time blaming Trudeau for inflation. His boomer bosses need their mortgages to stay cheap and their housing prices to stay high, no matter what.

Canada is corrupt and eats its young.

Australia’s “Minister for Homelessness” owns 4 houses.

> We did 1 million just last year.

I'd note that this number gets thrown around a lot, but it was <500k permanent residents, the 1 million figure includes >600k temporary work/study permits and asylum claims.

> And our housing minister of housing in Canada just bought his second rental property.

I'm not saying this isn't true but I'm having difficulties finding a reliable source for this.