Canada’s shrinking population

By William Corden

This article  is appropriate

Go West young man! ” doesn’t apply any more. Decade after decade of incompetent politicians has scotched the idea of  Canada being a land of opportunity. You can feel it in the culture and it’s accelerated in the past 10 years or so

The downtown areas of the big cities , like Vancouver or Toronto or Montreal have an almost ghost town atmosphere about them. It’s like the air has been let out of the balloon, especially in the evening.

Evenings show the number of unoccupied apartments sitting there waiting for non-existent investors, who’ve been frightened away by non-resident taxes or by extortionate municipal fees and worse still , by uncertain  title  questions raised by indigenous legal actions (actions which are usually paid for by the taxpayer.)

It used to be that in its heyday Canada was one of the favourite places to start a new life. You could get a job easily in any of the heavy industries, logging, manufacturing, mining, fishing, shipbuilding etc.  and of course the ancillary administrative jobs that came along with those jobs, paid well and were pretty stable.

Not any more, heavy industry has almost disappeared and where you once saw logging trucks on the roads you now see SUVs made in some other country but shipped to our ports, ports which don’t provide anywhere near enough jobs to compensate for our loss.

We used to have a thriving Secondary Education economy, stoked by eager foreign students from all corners of the world,  with wealthy parents keen to give their kids a leg up, but that’s come to halt because…

1. It’s now prohibitively expensive and  2.  There’s no payoff at graduation ….. the kids can’t find jobs here and the lifestyle back home is much less stressful

Daily we read reports of once thriving colleges closing down.

On top of all of this is the new culture of childless marriages. Young and successful girls don’t want their freedom cramped by being tied to raising kids and anyways you have to have two salaries coming in to meet a reasonably comfortable standard of living. The prevailing philosophy is that kids are too much of a burden.

Canada is still a wonderful country to live in , we have no war planes flying overhead, we have a wonderful international reputation as a peacekeeping and caring nation. I’m lucky enough to have come at the right time.

But now we have a broken political system, from the Federal right down to the Municipal level, where the highly paid politicians/ bureaucrats are locked into the belief that they can go on charging us whatever taxes and fees they like and that people will still flock to this country.

The only ones who are now thinking of making this country their home are the ones in desperate situations and we all know where the main sources are.

The problems of title and the problems of freeing up our vast energy resources could maybe get us back on wish lists around the world, but it’s going to take someone with an iron will to get the changes made.