OPEN LETTER TO HALIFAX REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY
May 17, 2024
Halifax Regional Municipality,
It appears you will be involved in a Century Initiative event. I’d like to ask you to reconsider attending as I believe it is a mistake for a public servant to be involved with a group advocating such a destructive policy as mass immigration.
Tripling our population has no public support and is a continuation, a doubling down even, of the environmentally, fiscally and socially disastrous policy of simple growth of the past 40 years.
This policy has delivered no progress for Canadians but just higher cash flow and inflation which delivers enormous profits for the CI backers. This group is simply the national form of the lobbyists identified in Robert Macdermid’s sturdy “Funding City Politics”
– https://www.academia.edu/7457510/Funding_City_Politics
Increasing population, much less tripling it holds no benefit for Canada – neither for the people nor for the land. In fact, it is a rolling environmental and social juggernaut.
Inflating housing costs is extremely profitable for the growth lobbyists as is cheap labour but the effect of this near-perfect engine of inequality on Canadians is to reduce their incomes and inflate the cost of housing. Note that our equality level has plunged from second highest in the world in the early 1960s to the mid-30s now – a decline matched by no other nation. Debt has quintupled. Who profits? Banks, speculators and developers.
Inflated housing valuations constitute not an increase of real wealth but a transfer of real wealth from those who produce it to a small elite of wealthy people who accumulate it.
I’m sure you are aware of the social and quality of life declines which have been a theme across Canada over the past several decades. These are largely driven by cheap labour and asset inflation impacts of population growth.
With balanced immigration from 1980, Canada’s population would now be stabilizing at around 28 million people but the policy of mass immigration has added 13 million more. Our infrastructure has not been built out to handle this increase and given the tax negative nature of cheap labour, it never can be brought up to previous levels. Effectively we are going broke on growth while the growth lobby amasses immense wealth.
Environmentally, the impacts are entirely predictable as Canada paves over its best farmland, destroys habitat and increases its ghg emissions while access to nature declines for our people.
If the role of government is not to increase the well-being of its people, the food and energy resilience of future generations and pass on a healthier environment, what is it? To make the money economy grow? That is what the CI lobby is actually promoting.
GDP is a cashflow metric never meant to indicate social health or guide public policy. It describes the money economy, not the real economy or social welfare. Progressive public policy must be based on a national perspective, not one focused solely on the ability of a small elite to extract immense wealth from a disenfranchised citizenry.
What do Canadians want? Obviously affordable housing, high quality jobs, living wages, access to nature, reduced congestion. These are the diametrically opposite of what mass immigration delivers.
What don’t Canadians want?
– 5:1 against the Century Initiatives agenda of 100 million by 2100 and growing forever
– 4:1 against living in large cities – the ones you seem to be advocating
– 4:1 against using immigration to change the cultural makeup of Canada
– Regarding the best place to live: for 82% this was not a large city.
– For skilled labour: 36% said invest in Canadians vs 4% said rely on immigration; a ratio of 9:1.
– Corruption. On corruption and politician links to developers, 59% support the creation of an RCMP organized crime task force.
– Less than 15% support importing cheap labour.
– https://sustainablesociety.com/what-do-canadians-want-opinion-research-report/
Check the numbers – are they a surprise? Do they in anyway line up with current government policy or CI proposals?
Mass immigration has become policy through backroom maneuvering rather than due process. Where are the studies on environment, fiscal and wage impacts? Public will? Public benefit? Due diligence has been completely evaded.
Clearly, mass immigration would never survive on a level playing field. It is a usurious policy slid past any public mechanisms to avoid scrutiny by very powerful individuals acting in pure self-interest.
Simple growth advocates view the nation as a market and its people as consumers rather than a society composed of citizens and the land. They have been successful in eliminating any coherent strategy aimed at achieving clear national goals. They advocate a patchwork of band-aide solutions with the overall cure being even more of the policies which created our problems in the first place.
No public official should be associated with it or the process.
In 1990 we forecast that Canadians would spend a much larger percentage of their incomes on housing in 2036 if high levels of immigration were maintained. Were we right or did housing costs come down due to “economies of scale” as promoted by the immigration lobby? Ditto low productivity, low wages, higher inequality and the consequential fiscal and program decline. Did these get better or worse?
Public servants should be laser focused on offering Canadians a better life and making Canada a progressive sustainable society, resilient in the face of rapidly deteriorating climate and environment. They should not allow themselves to be caught up in the fantasy world of the ‘50s growth or on the simplistic mantra of bigger makes everything better when our experience proves the exact opposite.
I hope you will reconsider your participation as it lends credibility to a concept which should have been tossed onto the scrapheap of history decades ago.
Yours truly,
John Meyer
Yarmouth
