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Notes -
Canadas emigration numbers are about 40,000 a year which is very low. However, Canadian statistics have a huge gap in the measurement of emigration. They often make errors of 5 or 6 figures in a year and it’s only when the census is conducted that we know what has actually happened in the interim.
All we can really say is anecdotally, there is a huge outflow happening. I recently moved and the previous occupant of my house moved to the States. One of my friends became an ex-pat in Europe last summer and another just sold his place and is moving to Colombia. Yes anecdotal, but this hasn’t happened in my friend group before.
What we do have good stats on is people moving within country and the migration out of major cities is accelerating. It’s always been true that major cities are population sinks with low fertility and outmigration of natives to be replaced with immigrants. Recently , this has picked up and smaller Canadian cities like Halifax or Victoria have seen big inflows (ruining their housing markets too).
So people are responding with action which is great to see, but politically this is going to be the greatest ever repudiation of the left in Canada. The conservatives are polling at 47% among the young.
It will be interesting to see what the Conservatives actually do if (when) they form government. So far Poilievre has only offered the vaguest commitments to reducing inflow (saying things like he will "match immigration to rate of homebuilding").
The Conservative Party has historically been reliant on industries that take advantage of TFWs/international students. Almost half their MPs are landlords. They don't really want to slow this down anymore than the Liberals do. The swing of the youth vote towards them is in large part predicated on anti-immigration sentiment, so how do they reconcile this?
Luckily for them the Liberals have given them so much room to maneuver this is less of threading the needle and more finding your way out of an open door. Even cutting the inflow by half would leave them at roughly double the rate of the Harper years.
That seems oddly low- in the states I would assume that most people wealthy enough to be in congress own at least a renthouse or two.
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