There are a few reasons behind [why I think - ed] Canada spiraling out of control:

Canada is a nation owned by a handful of Oligarchs, perhaps a dozen families, which pretends it is a functioning democracy. No joke, effectively one or two billionaires hold a monopoly interest on a variety of essential industries in each province. Patterson in BC, the Richardsons in Saskatchewan & Manitoba, Irvings in the east coast, the Westons with their monopoly over groceries, the Rogers & Shaw families with telecommunications, etc etc etc. The nation is a two party system, with both the Liberals and the Conservatives working for these families. For the past 30+ years they’ve traded who is in office whenever the public gets fed up, but each successive government has expanded the exploitative programs of its predecessor regardless of ideological branding. I’ll get into the why at the end of this.
The country is wholly reliant now on a housing and consumer debt bubble which is the singular primary driver of the GDP and wealth generation and one of the worst inflated in the developed world, economically it is otherwise stagnant. A great number of people make shit wages but don’t need to worry, because they bought a house twenty years ago and the house now earns $100k/yr in value like clockwork - from which they can withdraw a HELOC loan to live more lavishly than they would otherwise. Wages haven’t moved in decades, while the house I grew up in has increased in value from $60k to $1.2 Million in only 25 years - with no improvements done to it. This house is in a small, isolated town in the interior of the province with no remaining economy other than tourism and logging. The government is unwilling to do anything to change this situation, both because they have their fingers in the pie and because wiping out homeowners with a housing crash would at this point destroy the nations economy like a nuclear bomb.

You can see the problems here, I’m sure.

Our population is rapidly aging, however due to the cost of living and lack of housing availability, nobody is having children. This threatens the holy grail of Growth Economics. If the economy stagnates, those oligarchs I mentioned start losing profits. Our pension funds and other services risk insolvency - the only solution is to tell the boomers to fuck off (politically impossible) or to massively boost the population to try and fake the GDP growth per capita.

Following the pandemic, we saw the first serious increase in wages in years due to the lack of workers as the labor market experienced the same reshuffling as it has anywhere else.
The solution from the federal government to that wage negotiation power has been swift and brutal: mass immigration at any cost with the goal of aggressive wage suppression and ensuring consistently upward-spiraling rents / housing prices. A one bedroom apartment in Vancouver in 2016 could still be found for around $800/month. Today that is $2900/month. Rents outside the lower mainland do not drop dramatically, however economic prospects sure do, so the affordability gap actually worsens the further you go from the major cities.

Over the past year the feds have increased annual immigration to between 1.45 and 2.2 Million people when you count international students, temporary workers, and refugees. This is amount the highest, if not the highest, rate of per-capita immigration in the world. Vastly outpacing the USA. The majority are not skilled immigrants, we no longer apply our skills-based immigration stream approach and are now largely importing raw and often uneducated labourers from developing nations. This has resulted in severe strain on the medical system, as we also do not recognize any foriegn medical degrees and engage in heavy protectionism of wages in this field by allowing very few domestic med school graduates per year. Last year the federal government removed any working restrictions on international students (numbering 800k last year, to suppress wages), removed most market restrictions on the “Temporary Foreign Worker Program” and increased the allowable number of them by six figures (to suppress wages). And so on and so forth. They are now handing out visas on a “just apply” basis to both tech workers and skilled trades, to try and kill wage negotiation power in the last few remaining pockets of good wages in the country.

While it’s been a great propaganda piece about how Canada “welcomes” so many refugees, the reality is quite inhumane. Greater than 40% of homeless shelter users in Toronto are refugees who were imported by the Federal government and subsequently dumped on the streets with zero support once they ran out the few months of payments and housing they receive. The goal is, again, not humanitarian: it is a strategy of wage suppression by ensuring a constant stream of desperate people willing to work for whatever is offered and remain ignorant of their labor rights out of fear and desperation. This has until very recently been swept under the rug as it harms the international propaganda value of our refugee business.

Take a look around this imploding world, that business is booming.

The country is speedrunning towards severe sectarian violence at this point, with the political class in Ottawa and various Provincial governments wholly captured by a tiny group of wealthy elite and corporate interests who cannot see beyond their own quarterly profits. Our last housing minister owned three investment properties, he has been shuffled and last week replaced by the minister responsible for opening up this mass immigration scheme.

When confronted earlier in the year about the disparity between numbers coming in and housing being built, Sean Fraser responded “Don’t worry, they’ll build their own housing”. The prime minister has said last week that housing “is not a concern of the federal government”. Today the new immigration minister says “we may need to revise the targets higher”. This is the degree of reckless tone-deafness on display. Every bank in the country, displaying an unusual degree of breaking from the narrative, agrees this is insane.

This is an extremely high level overview which does not touch on the many interlocking systemic issues underlying the how and the why things went to shit so fast in Canada. Failure to invest in housing for three decades, willful blindness towards money laundering in housing by foreign investors for decades, total lack of regulation on AirBnB and other STR’s, turning international student programs into a defacto limitless work visa stream to bypasses actual work visa caps, failure to invest in diversifying the economy out of resource extraction, closure and offshoring of add-value manufacturing, failure to invest in infrastructure while extracting profits. Etc etc etc. it’s a complete clusterfuck.

It bears repeating the above paragraph, because many will miss the point: the problem here is not immigration. We were already struggling and on the road to serious economic ruin sooner or later for well over a decade before Ottawa decided to immediately add several million people a year. But we are now absolutely on the verge of some seriously dire shit, the breaking point is already here. I am personally leaving the country next year, as I am at the top of the pay scale for my specialized industry in this country and can no longer make ends meet (I have six roommates and savings is still a struggle, as the floor for rent is $1000/room no matter how many are in the house) - but by relocating elsewhere my wage more than doubles.

Up until quite recently Canada was a relatively stable nation with a high standard of living (built on extreme consumer debt), and with an extremely developed national ego and self-delusion that it was somehow superior to other supposedly “inferior” places such as the USA. To say that the abrupt contraction in living conditions as reality sets in here has been a little hard for folks to swallow would be an understatement.

I have no interest in sticking around to see what my frankly quite-racist and generally ignorant countrymen get up to, when they decide it’s the nationality of the millions of warm bodies we’re pumping into the country who are to blame for what happens here over the next few years - rather than blaming the politicians who decided that going hard on transitioning from a nation to a post-national corporate entity, which wears the concept of a nation as a disguise, was the best way to personally cash in. After decades of these politicians pushing the rhetoric that any criticism of immigration is “racist”, the blowback here is going to be extremely severe.

That’s really the core of the problem: the minds behind Ottawa do not want to be in charge of a nation, they really don’t care about the idea of “Canada” as a country, they have zero loyalty to that idea: they want a company town which spans from shore to shore. You will pay for your housing until the very day you die, either via 70+ year mortgages or via rent towards parasitic landlords, and purchase all of your goods from a handful of consolidated options which trickle back to the same core group of oligarch families. This will force you to work, endlessly, at whatever wages and conditions you can get. The stability of the society and its demographics, sane functioning economics, etc, is wholly irrelevant here: the goal is to take a seething mass of humanity, both domestically sourced and cynically lured in from around the globe, squeeze it for whatever capital drips out, and throw more on the pile when they start to run dry.

E: u/interwebzking reminded me of this excellent article from the early pandemic, which I think is a perfect companion to what I am laying down here: https://theoutline.com/post/8686/canada-is-fake
E: Some unapologetic fascist asshole over on Twitter shamelessly plagiarized this thread and reformatted it to be an anti-immigrant screed, while using it to hock shitty t-shirts and some garbage “magazine”. I’ve never had a twitter account, and never will, so I’ll take their theft of my writing as a sign that it’s time to start publishing it elsewhere.