Louis Shalako: On Immigration and Related Matters. Louis Shalako.

The Blind Leading the Blind, Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Louis Shalako

Everything is politics, and all politics is local politics.

Immigration is one of those issues which fall under the aegis of the federal government.

Yet its effects, are seen and felt at the local level—I can only live in one town, one little neighbourhood at a time. What’s happening at the other end of the country doesn’t affect me, mostly because I don’t see it. Canada is a very large country, but it’s a very small town, in the sense that we all know each other. We have wonderful communications in this country, telephone, internet, television. Radio, newspapers and magazines, websites, and all that goes on in our new, electronic, public square. With the Weather Network, I can sit here and watch thunderstorms on radar, rolling on in from wherever.

We have vast resources of information, compared to a few short years ago.

This is one storm no one saw coming, except that they did—they did. We all did. We knew all about the inverted pyramid of demographics back in the early eighties. This is the graph that looks like a pyramid, upside-down, based on statistical analysis of age groups and one would suppose mortality tables of the time. It is the opposite of Malthusian economics, as limited as that is, and as open to question, even at the time it was written.

And people will talk.

***

The housing crisis has come to Sarnia, just has it has come to all Canadian cities and towns.

Past and present federal governments have seen increased levels of immigration as a desirable thing. An aging population and a falling birthrate would seem to make this an inevitable process: when half the population is over 65 years of age, the burden of taxation, including all those state or taxpayer funded pensions falls on fewer and fewer shoulders. People hate taxes of any kind. Older folks hate being rendered homeless and starving to death on the street, a fairly natural inclination. What is interesting, certainly in the case of the Province of Ontario, is that no one seems to have seen this coming. If they did, they sure as hell didn’t think to do anything about it.

In Sarnia, in a recent news story, it was revealed that there are at least 2,000 foreign students at Lambton College. Foreign students pay the going rate, tuition and rent, with no help from federal and provincial student assistance programs.

Foreign students aren’t taking high-end homes and condos. They’re not taking high-end apartments. They are taking the cheapest apartments they can find, what with being here only temporarily.

We can’t blame foreign students for housing inflation in detached homes or high-end condos and apartments. We can’t even really blame immigrants for such inflation, as few immigrants arrive on these shores with big stacks of cash. We all know immigrants can be hard workers, we know their children tend to get good educations, we know that for various reasons related to language and culture, it is often easier for an immigrant to work in low-skilled occupations, right up until the day they quit and start their own business. At which point the rest of us nod thoughtfully and talk about them taking all of our welfare, and all of our jobs…

We sort of know that folks whose French or English language skills are not good will often seek out their fellow countrymen. They will labour in the kitchen rather than at the front counter. One of our local realtors has radio commercials in an Indian language. He’s from India, presumably, there are enough Indians in the local marketplace that this confers some kind of competitive advantage.

Not all foreign students get their education and leave town. Far from it, also, the children of immigrants, Canadian citizens, can go to a college or university as easily as anyone else’s kids.

You see them all over town. Young people, working the gas bar, the beer store, working the vape shop, (as sole proprietor), working the phone sales. Answering the phones at federal and provincial agencies. There are five of those mobile phone shops in our local mall, virtually all of them appear to be ‘foreigners’ or people of colour to be exactly clear.

Some people in the comments section of any major news source just seem to hate immigration, as if it were the cause of all our woes. I won’t lie to you—it probably isn’t the solution to all of our woes either. There may be some valid arguments regarding the level of immigration, but for the most part it is bigotry suffused with ignorance of any economic and social realities. Hatred is blind, and unreasoning, and it poisons every mind that it touches. It also gets to vote—through the ballots of those who hate.

These are the folks that profess to love Canada—only real problem, of course, is that they seem to hate every little thing and every other person in it.

The housing crisis was caused by a perfect storm of events. Immigration, foreign students, these are only factors, but not the whole story.

Even if there was no immigration at all, zero, nil, nada, ladies and gentlemen, we still haven’t been building what is called the ‘missing middle’ in terms of housing, and we sure as hell haven’t been building the lower and bottom tiers of housing. No responsible developer is going to propose a brand-new, state of the art flophouse, ladies and gentlemen. Not when you can go high-end on the same site, rather than listing one-roomers for $700.00 per month when you can put a few of them together as one unit and get $2500.00 per month for the same square footage. It is, after all, new construction, not some clapped-out old church or factory or a sweatshop in an alley somewhere. Simply put, a one-roomer still needs one toilet, one sink. One fridge, one stove. One bathtub, one patio door. An apartment with five rooms still only gets one toilet—capiche?

It is more efficient in terms of cost to the builder.

(Where in the hell would you put it? Sure as hell not Bright’s Grove. – ed.)

The people that are against immigration tend to forget that half the doctors in this town are from Africa, India, Asia. They tend to ignore the fact that here in the Province of Ontario, we simply do not graduate enough doctors to serve the needs of our population of 14 million.

That is just one more failure of Ontario social policy, which I have mentioned before.

When the federal government decided on an increased level of immigration, it was a gamble. The gamble will pay off in the long run, in the shorter term, it has brought increased pressure on available housing stock. What they did not gamble on was Covid-19, supply chain disruptions, and inflation increased by pent-up demand. They did not gamble on a major European war, which has in fact cost this country billions that might have been better spent elsewhere, and driven up the costs of basic food-stuffs like flour and cooking oil. In Japan, with an aging population and virtually zero immigration, they have rural and small-town housing, vacant and falling into disrepair. In China, with a population of over a billion, they can’t fill the housing they have. There are huge developments, full of half-empty and even half-built high-rise apartments. These are mistakes of demography. When the provincial government decided that free market capitalism would be the solution to all problems, it seems to have overlooked the most vulnerable members of the population in terms of available housing. They had to overlook them. Otherwise, they would have had to have given them a raise…was it wrong to put a moratorium on evictions during the pandemic? Ah, but when they took that off again, there was all that pent-up demand, mostly from the landlords, and yes, some folks did abuse the privilege. Most of us did not—

Just sitting here, watching the storms roll in.

All of those evictions. All of those rent-controlled units, suddenly becoming vacant…that wasn’t very smart now, was it. Don’t forget, half the workforce was sent home for six months to a year or more. How in the hell was the average person supposed to pay the rent?

There are villages in Italy, where they will sell you a house for a dollar. It sure sounds like a real bargain. All you have to do is fix it up and live there, and pray for a bit of luck as it’s Mafia territory—and you look like an easy mark in what is someone else’s country. They like to call it free market capitalism, don’t you know—otherwise, it’s just simple extortion.

Right?

Free market capitalism simply can’t do anything for us—what with being responsible to the shareholders and all. The one thing they ain’t, is responsible to the taxpayers, and I guess that just leaves the poor old government holding the bag.

When the provincial government fails to adequately fund colleges and universities, that was a conscious decision. When the provincial government fails to adequately fund disability pensions, or social assistance payments, to the extent that people can’t pay the rent on the units they already occupy, well, this was more than a conscious decision. It was a moral failure, based on ideology and mistaken notions of how things actually work. At some point, you are asking people living on the street, to save first and last month’s rent, on an apartment they couldn’t afford in the first place and that goes about triple several years later; and by this time, you don’t stand a chance in hell of passing the credit check anyways.

The exact same unit that once cost $700.00 per month now costs $2,100.00. It’s like the blind leading the blind sometimes around here…or maybe they’re just stupid, but I think not, and they would hotly deny it themselves. In that sense, we are in agreement…so, you’re not so stupid after all.

Blind, maybe, but not stupid.

When the provincial government fails to provide rent controls on vacant units, this only makes a bad situation worse. It also fuels inflation in the housing market, what with all that turnover.

The only thing that is going to bring down the cost of housing is to build more housing, as quickly as possible and that is going to require skilled labour—and our construction industry is facing a demographic crunch that cannot be denied.

Where exactly do you plan to get all those people? The Province of Ontario is already receiving the benefit of 50 % of all immigration. They have literally fought over immigrants, ladies and gentlemen, although Quebec insists on French language skills in all new arrivals. They still wanted their fair share.

They are here to be exploited, in other words, at least for the first few years, or until they become real Canadians, or something.

It is also true that immigrants do not move to the wide-open prairies and bust some sod these days. They don’t take a freehold title in northern Ontario and begin, with axe and plow, clearing 140 acres of timber to wrest a subsistence from the land in what turns out to be a very short growing season. The land is all taken. They move to the cities, where the opportunities abound and they can be absorbed in a more cosmopolitan environment.

It takes time, decades, before they filter down to the smaller cities and towns. It will happen. It happened here, after all. At some point the immigrants arrive in Tuktoyaktuk, and one wonders what the Innu will think of that one, ladies and gentlemen…more bloody foreigners, eh.

Malthus was a mathematician studying social effects. His thinking was limited in that his model was of an agrarian society, where nothing ever changed except the level of population. He did not take into account changing technologies, and he seems to have completely missed the industrial revolution, with its explosion of productivity, which was happening all around him.

Malthus recognized goods, but failed to recognize services. Immigration, classic or internal, (province to province, for example), played no role in his calculations.

Canada is the second largest country in the world, geographically, with a relatively tiny population. How in the hell are you going to develop all that potential, without people to build the things, to consume the services, to invent new technologies, to find greater efficiencies and to become a nation greater than the sum of its parts.

That, my dears, is a series of very good questions flying in some kind of a fur-ball of aerial combat.

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