As Canadian doomsday scenarios go, it’s a bit of a letdown. But you’d never know it by the headlines.
First prize goes to the American news site Politico: Apocalypse Now. Runners-up: The Toronto Sun’s “Government report predicts 2040 dystopia: Collapsed economy, hunting for food,” Alberta’s Todayville went with Breaking: The Federal Brief That Should Sink Carney, and the Better Dwelling webzine chose Canada To Become A Dystopian Nightmare, Households Will Flee: Gov Report.
The report was first brought to light by Blacklock’s Reporter, which was more usefully succinct: Fed Report Predicts Collapse.
These accounts are all reasonable enough except for a couple of odd things about the report itself.
It was produced by something called Policy Horizons Canada, an organization that serves Employment and Social Development Canada with what the veteran journalist Paul Wells calls scenarios to broaden the horizons of politicians and policy makers. Or rather, as Wells put it, “to make sh*t up,” which, to be fair, in the narrowest context, is not as unworthy an exercise as it might seem.
One of the odd things about it: The dystopian predicaments described in gradations of likelihood 15 years down the road resemble quite closely the conditions that prevail in Canada already.
Here’s one of the report’s frightening scenarios, for instance: “In 2040, owning a home is not a realistic goal for many.” You suppose?
A similar exercise in peering into the possibilities of future civil disturbances was undertaken by the RCMP and acquired last year through an access to information request, in redacted form, by assistant law professor Matt Malone of British Columbia’s Thompson Rivers University. Citing the already-existing dysfunctions that could cause things to go haywire down the road: “For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live.”
In the Policy Horizons report, among the many monstrous things that might prevail in Canada in the years to come: Upward social mobility is “almost unheard of.” Few people believe they can build a better life for their children. Homebuyers require help from family members, sometimes taking out intergenerational mortgages or forming multigenerational households; a growing number of property owners oppose policies to expand the housing supply, or to freeze rents, and society degenerates into divisions among those that own and those that don’t.
In this brutish future world, workers find it hard “to save enough to start a business,” people increasingly “struggle to afford rent, bills, or groceries,” and the stress results in growing mental health challenges that place strains on social services.
How is this not a reasonable description of Canada in 2025?
Then there’s this: “People may lose faith in the Canadian project.” That describes not just the present but the recent past. Last year, an Ipsos poll found that seven in ten Canadians agreed with the proposition that “Canada is broken,” with younger Canadians and Conservatives coming in at 78 per cent and 96 percent.
Another odd thing about the report is some of the really bad things the report’s authors imagine occurring by 2040 don’t sound that bad at all, all things considered. “Housing, food, childcare, and healthcare co-operatives may become more common.” This would ease burdens on social services, the report concedes, but wait. Cooperatives could also challenge “market-based businesses.”
Barter systems might grow in popularity, but hold on. That would mean “reducing tax revenues.” People might turn to “hunt, fish, and forage on public lands and waterways,” but they might not be especially assiduous about obtaining the proper licences. “Small-scale agriculture could increase.” This would be a bad thing? One must be wary of “grassroots solutions,” the report suggests. “Governments may come to seem irrelevant.”
So?
Reliable soothsaying requires a tremendous degree of patience and foresight, and foreseeing economic upheavals isn’t what you could call an exact science. You could be the former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, in the case of Liberal Leader Mark Carney, for instance, and still be thick as a post.
In one study, the International Monetary Fund’s Prakash Loungani found that economists are absolutely awful at predicting things. His study found that economists had failed to predict 148 of the previous 150 recessions. A lot of that’s got to do with fear of bucking the consensus. Going back just three months, did anyone predict that the Conservatives would be fighting tooth and nail just to head off a Liberal majority in the current federal election campaign?
To cut the Policy Horizons fortunetellers some slack, it is exceedingly difficult to argue that the whole world, especially with a crazy man in the White House, is not going to hell in a damn handcart at the moment, taking Canada along with it.
But the Canadian dystopia would still be a real and present nightmare even if Donald Trump had been drawn and quartered by the Harris Democrats last November.
Both the Liberals and the Conservatives have elucidated an amazing array of ambitious remedies and tax incentives and massive prefab-housing corporations and stick-and- carrot applications to build hundreds of thousands of new homes in Canada. But there’s no evidence that “build, build build,” by either Pierre Poilievre’s formulae, or Carney’s, will make housing affordable.
It’s not like there hasn’t been any house construction going on. The result is thousands of empty condominiums that no one can afford in Greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver.
Stats Can’s “population clock” counted 41,627,154 people who live in Canada as of Wednesday afternoon, up from 35,851,800, in 2015. Much of that growth — roughly three million people — occurred in the last four years.
Canada has one of the worst ratios of income to housing costs among the 29 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The average cost of rent has doubled across Canada over the past decade. Just to purchase an average home in Canada you’d need a minimum income of $150,500 to afford the mortgage, and the median household income is $124,672. But the houses just aren’t there.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reckons the capacity of Canada’s construction industry, full bore, is about 225,000 homes per year. Firing “gatekeepers” and slashing development fees and taxes is all very well and good but none of these things will cut very deeply into the crippling speculative price of land.
Worse than that, for all of the scandals and controversy about what even the Liberal government finally agreed last year was an “out of control” immigration system, Canada still admitted 483,591 permanent residents in 2024, the highest number since 1972, along with 291,000 non-permanent residents.
That brings Statistics Canada’s tally of the known non-permanent population to 3,020,936. Among them are 457,285 asylum claimants stuck in various stages of the system, up from 328,606 from this time last year. Ottawa doesn’t even know how many temporary visa holders have overstayed their welcome from the past few years, but the federal consensus is it’s at least 500,000.
A Leger poll commissioned by the Association for Canadian Studies last December showed that roughly two-thirds of Canadians say there are simply too many immigrants being admitted to Canada, and nearly half the respondents favor mass deportation.
This is a horribly dystopian scenario, and it’s not something somebody imagined might prevail in 2040. It’s already upon us, and it’s hard to say whether any of our politicians want to admit it.
National Post
