Why Canada Should Join the EU • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#581

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:05 AM UTC

dblohm7 wrote: post #59

fidotron wrote: post #31

Canada has less free trade between provinces than the EU does between countries. The two are not compatible.

This is true, but I'd love to see something happen to force Canadian provinces's hands to improve this. To dream the impossible dream...

Why? Until its recent immigration debacle, Canada was one of the most efficiently governed countries in the world. 15-20 years ago, Canada had lower non-defense government spending per capita than the U.S., despite having a universal healthcare system. Canadian federalism has been incredibly effective, with the majority of all spending happening at the provincial level and meaningful differences between provincial policy reflective of local concerns.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#582

Post by crote » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:07 AM UTC

sumedh wrote: post #332

louwrentius wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NL the housing shortage is blamed on immigrants whereas the actual reason for said shortage is absolutely the politics of the right-wing cabinets for the last 15 years who did nothing significant to improve the speed of housing construction. It’s not that strange as one of the political parties basically explicitly protects business interests and oh boy did they profit. It’s political nihilism.

> the politics of the right-wing cabinets for the last 15 years who did nothing significant to improve the speed of housing construction. Is the population rising because NL natives are having more kids or because new people coming in?

It doesn't matter either way. The population growth is lower now than it has been during pretty much the entire 20th century. If we could build houses to keep up with a 1.3% growth in the 1960s, why can't we build enough to keep up with a 0.5% growth in the 2020s?

Maybe it has something to do with the Ministry of Housing and Planning being abolished because the minister believed the "country was finished", or a minister telling a woman who asked how she was supposed to afford a home to "find a rich boyfriend", or all construction being blocked because the country has been violating NOx emission laws for decades, or an insanely high tax specifically on social housing, or...

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#583

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:07 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #156

darth_avocado wrote: post #72

Canada needs people? I thought the recent controversy is all about Canada having too many people and the pro immigration government also taking a more tempered immigration stance?

Canada has a population of 40 million in a land area larger than the USA. That's hardly "too many people". Too many people in a handful of dense urban centers maybe, but overall the country is basically empty.

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Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#584

Post by BeetleB » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:09 AM UTC

BJones12 wrote: post #8

> Europeans could learn from Canada how to allow immigration in a fashion that the population embraces rather than tolerates Clearly the author is ignorant. Canadians are sick of immigration. Young Canadians doubly so. Racism is becoming more acceptable by the day.

> Indeed.

Every Canadian I know who emigrated there is sick of immigration.

And no. That's not a joke (i.e. they want do say that) but a bit of irony.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#585

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:09 AM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #580

tsimionescu wrote: post #6

> Canada’s inclusive treatment of its indigenous peoples, at least in recent decades, could be emulated by Europeans (though First Nations Canadians might fairly object to closer ties with ex-colonists) I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most popula…

The irish. The scots. Basically everyone who wasnt related to the vikings after 1066. The welsh trying to protect thier language are basically quebec. The scots talking about leaving, but never actually doing it, are basically alberta. And thats just similarities in the british isles. Then there are all the little counties bordering giant countries (finland) that see parallels to the canada-us relationship.

[deleted]

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#586

Post by userbinator » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:10 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #554

kccqzy wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoyed the article as an interesting thought experiment. The discussion here isn't great but that's a problem solved by downvoting comments.

Downvoting doesn't solve much in cases like this—all the top-level comments are political to one degree or another (mostly very political), and they're pinned to the top at this point by upvotes from politically like-minded people. There are a bunch of downvoted comments from the less-popular political perspectives in the threads, but them being downvoted only decreases the quality of the conversation, because the gr…

mostly very political

The article itself is political, so why wouldn't the discussion be? The real question is whether HN wants political discussion, which at least in the past has been "no".

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#587

Post by Tiktaalik » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:13 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #466

Tiktaalik wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the classic thing where people are unhappy due to unrelated systemic problems and they lash out and blame the latest people to show up. Canadians are suffering due to decades on decades of poor housing policy and a continued reluctance to seriously engage in the problem. Suddenly immigrants are to blame. Never mind the fact that long ago, before this government even touched immigration numbers, or were even elec…

I'm not that familiar with Canadian economics, but doesn't Canada have a below replacement birth rate like most of the developed world? How did they even manage to end up in a housing crisis?

Well two things:

1. Canadian household size is decreasing as more people are staying single, and people are living longer and becoming widowed. So even if population was completely flat Canada would need more homes over time.

2. Of course Canada has always had immigration and the population has thus always been increasing regardless of the birth rate. This is not a remarkable issue and easily accommodated by building more housing, but the severe systemic barriers to creating housing has made it more scarce and expensive than it should be. This was already the case in the major cities all the way back to the mid 2010s and the last government. The dominant problem here is bad housing policy dating back to the 1990s, not a sudden increase in immigration numbers in the last two years.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#588

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #566

lotsofpulp wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth. The working age population is the wealth. For example, you can have a country with 90 retired people and 10 working people. The 90 retired people can have $1M or $1B or $1T in their accounts, but it isn't going to matter if they have insufficient products/services to buy. The money just provides a relative ranking of what proportion of product/servic…

Canadian wealth is dominated by real estate, mostly land, which isn't directly a product of labor.

Valuable land is a product of labor, even if only due to being within the boundaries of a secure and orderly society.

Armies, judicial systems, etc, plus labor to bring about the goods and services. Plenty of examples of prime land decreasing in price due to the labor around it not being of sufficient quality/quantity.

It might even be that a society decreasing in wealth (real wealth, in the form of ability to create desirable goods and services) will try to inflate the value of land to preserve the purchasing power of those towards the top of the socioeconomic order.

But that probably won’t work in the long term.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#589

Post by bpodgursky » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:17 AM UTC

xqt40 wrote: post #577

bpodgursky wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to shoehorn the Sami into this comparison because they really only colonized the Nordic countries contemporary with the majority "European" populations. They weren't, in the same sense, indigenous, just... less western.

No. What you are refering to might be in regards to Uralification, while 50% of Saami undeniably have been indigenous population and were there before Uralics arrived there. And Nordics encroached on lands where even partly Uralized Saami were first. No one is arguing that Saami are indigenous to Oslo, but they were first in 80% of Scandinavia.

I don't think that 80% is true in either the geographic [1] or more practical sense. It's maybe 50% by landmass.

But more significantly, it's not the arable or densely inhabited parts; the vast majority of Scandinavians do not live on land where Sami ever lived. This is just a vastly different than Canada where every square inch was native land at one point. For example, Vancouver has Squamish-owned and developed land right in the middle of downtown, it's a big controversy!

I'm not trying to dispossess or trivialize the Sami or the injustices they did suffer, it's just a very different relationship.

[1] https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-sami-side-of-trom...

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#590

Post by crote » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:19 AM UTC

SolonIslandus wrote: post #35

Canada should join the European Free Trade Association instead of the EU! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Free_Trade_Associatio...

I don't think this is an attractive option for Canada. The main downside of EFTA is that you are required to follow a lot of single-market legislation, without getting any say in it.

Considering how tightly Canada is currently coupled to the US, this would be an absolute nightmare for many businesses. Yeah you'd gain a hypothetical overseas market, but in turn you're losing alignment with an absolutely massive market right next door! That's something like 60% of your import/export, gone.