More on the generation squeeze and immigration with good quotes from Wright and Skuterud:
... But that hasn't stopped politicians and business people from constantly raising the spectre of aging baby boomers, with Ottawa making it the primary rationale for "supercharged levels of immigration," Wright said.
"Sometimes I talk about the 'baby boom derangement syndrome.' So much of public policy has been driven by this apprehended catastrophe of the baby boom retiring and then putting great demands on the public purse," he said. The trouble is it's creating a population bubble of people under 40.
"We should not be at all surprised that all of a sudden housing markets are under great stress now. It's absurd that politicians pretend to be surprised by it," Wright said, pointing to a February report revealing then-Immigration Minister Sean Fraser had been warned that Canada was accepting newcomers at a far higher rate than houses could be built. Early last year Wright predicted this would affect public opinion about immigration, and that has been borne out.
"What Ottawa is doing is making it damn difficult for young people to get a proper start in life," Wright said. "That's primarily in the housing market, but in the labour market as well, because you're competing with a lot of people your age."
Ontario's University of Waterloo labour economist, Mikal Skuterud, has been among those tracking how the federal Liberals have drastically hiked the number of guest workers and study-visa-holders, most of whom work while in Canada and intend to apply for permanent resident status.
Last year more than one million foreign students were in Canada, three times the number when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected. (B.C. had 176,000 in post-secondary schools). While wages in some sectors are up, gross domestic product per capita has been flat for six years. Skuterud suggested low-skill workers, whose wages are actually declining, could be the most impacted by the surge of new residents.
In regard to life choices, Wright also wonders how much the country's housing crunch — including the prospect of "living in a 700-square-foot hamster cage" — might be a significant factor behind why some young Canadians aren't having larger families.
Cardus, a think-tank, commissioned the Angus Reid Institute to conduct a poll last year of 2,700 women in Canada ages 18 to 44. It found nearly half have fewer children than they desire. Canadian women intend to have, on average, 1.85 children per woman, but desire 2.2 children.
Given such personal strains, especially for millennials and Gen Z, the National Bank's economists have declared Canada is caught in a "population trap" in which the population is growing faster than can be absorbed by the economy, society and infrastructure.
With so many facing stagnant wages and housing distress, National Bank economists Stéfane Marion and Alexandra Ducharme said: "At this point we believe that our country's annual total population growth should not exceed 300,000 to 500,000."
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