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Maybe a silly question, but given that Canada is a massive country concentrated in a few urban areas, why aren’t there more initiatives to build new cities and associated infrastructure, with migration plans explicitly focused on bringing migrants to the new cities rather than existing overcrowded urban areas?
Because people don't want to live there. We already have lots of affordable towns and small cities. But they're affordable because there is little demand for people to live there, and there is little demand for people to live there because there are no good jobs. Many of these places are actually populated mainly by old people and have shrinking populations.
The high demand areas aren't even overcrowded. There is nothing like Manhattan in Canada, let alone a denser city like Paris or Tokyo. Canadian cities usually have a small dense downtown core surrounded by miles and miles of low density neighbourhoods of single detached houses.
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My wife's family is from a more rural part of Canada. We went back to visit not too long ago. They're building apartments everywhere out there, all for the immigrants. All sorts of pockets that used to be empty now have a bunch of big apartment buildings and a small number of shops that are popping up nearby to serve them. Most of the people I talked to were natives, friends of the family. Everyone is definitely too polite blue to say anything outright negative, but in nearly every single conversation I had, it came up at some point. I wasn't bringing it up. But there would almost always be a moment where they'd kinda hesitate, think about what they're saying, give a little breath almost as if, "I'm not sure I'm quite allowed to say this, but I'm going to word it this way, and maybe it'll be okay," followed by some form of, "There are a lot of immigrants now. Especially since COVID. The local culture is changing. It's not the way it used to be anymore." They're not saying the follow-up, "...and I think that's bad," but I repeatedly got the impression that they sure were thinking something like that.
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This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
Which Canadian officials say that the purpose of immigration is keeping up housing prices?
It's usually framed using words like "resilience and strength" or "vibrant". The leading newspapers regularly feature columns from or interviewing people with incentives to encourage immigration with little critical analysis applied. Here's an example. Great emphasis is placed on the importance of housing prices continuing to rise in perpetuity.
I think you got over your skis here. The first link is just a factual report about prices rising and doesn't seem to mention immigration. The second is essentially a realtor's opinion (no surprise that realtors are in favor of continued scarcity). The third and fourth get closer but I still don't see any officials out and out saying that the purpose of immigration is to keep housing prices high.
I do agree that the third and fourth articles curiously assume that high housing costs are a good thing in a way that I haven't seen in American media though.
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I would guess it's because that's not where they need workers. If you keep the country just the same as it is but a new city appears somewhere in it then that doesn't do much for the existing country except by raising overall GDP.
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