The State of Canada: Immigration, Election, & RE Update

Why Canada keeps ending up in international headlines in the current year

This piece was published September 30, 2024 on the BowTied Bull Substack.

First, thank you Bull for the opportunity.

I’m not an expert, but I have been following Canada closely for a while (will not elaborate).

Below, I’ll share what I’ve observed. None of this is investment advice.

In October 2023, I had a similar opportunity, and went deep on Canadian real estate (RE), its notorious 30 year bull run, and ongoing RE market forces. To best understand today’s post, I’d recommend reading it first.

Today’s post will include a RE market update; but will also dive into the upcoming election, and the immigration dynamics which, even beyond interest rates, continue to have the most significant impact, on not only Canadian real estate, but also Canadian healthcare, education, crime, labor markets, and shockingly even nice, polite Canadian politics.

In short, this post will help answer your questions on the current state and trajectory of Canada.

Reminder: To avoid repeating myself, I will assume you have read the October 2023 Canadian RE market update.

Pre-2015 Immigration Policy

First, some brief context.

Canada is a population of now 40m – up from the 38m last update in October 2023 – and is roughly ~10% the size of the United States (40m vs 345m).

Over 80% of people live in or around big cities (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal), and 77% of trade is with the United States.

Like the United States, population growth through immigration has increased since liberalization of immigration laws in the 1970s.

In 1989, Canada let in 225k immigrants; in 2015, 270k. Gradual annual increases for previous decades, were followed by a steepening rate starting in 2015 and further dramatic increase in 2021. Immigration in 2023 was over 470k, and the government still holds a goal of over 500k per year by 2025.

Note the flat, steady immigration levels until 2015. Source: Statistics Canada

In a population of 40m, 470k is a substantial 1.1% annual population growth from just legal immigration, with numerous second order effects across social and economic systems.

Despite this, until 2024 these immigration rates were not controversial with the masses or generating the type of public political division that has characterized similar situations in the United States, United Kingdom, and across Europe.

In fact, raising questions about the actions or presence of any foreigner or newcomer in any respect was immediate grounds for accusations of racism until just this year. And in many circles, it still is.

But, big changes are clearly afoot in Canada when not just right wing media but even one of the most left-wing pro-immigration newspapers is running headlines like “Liberals go hog wild on immigration, hoping to secure victory in 2029 and beyond”.

Could this be the Canadian “Great Replacement Theory”?

It seems likely, and now in 2024, Canadians are noticing. But what happened in 2015 to start these drastic changes?

What happened in 2015?

While there are other small parties, and thus many Canadians can smugly boast that they have more “choice” than their southern neighbours at the ballot box, Canada retains the familiar boolean dynamic of power, always revolving at the federal level between a left variant (the Liberal Party of Canada) and right variant (the Conservative Party of Canada) of political party.

Further still, Canada shares a familiar uniparty dynamic that historically has seen great bloviating in election debates, but then generally much more minor and slow policy shifts when power finally switches hands.

The liberalization of immigration policy in Canada has seen broad support from both major parties for decades, and had generally similar policies administration to administration.

For example, while the Liberals often feature immigration more prominently in public messaging, Conservative policy changes rarely reduced the rate, but instead would tweak qualifications criteria to emphasize skilled labor for pertinent national economic need vs. Liberal policy preferences of broader quotas for family reunification, asylum seekers, and refugees.

After decades of sticking to an ongoing steady, gradual increasing trend, immigration policy and rates did start a distinctly different trajectory following the 2015 federal election.

The Liberal Party candidate, Justin Trudeau, campaigned and won as the “sunny ways” candidate, a proposed – though mocked – contrast to the perceived stoic, serious, though stable administration of Conservative Stephen Harper, in power since 2008.

Trudeau pandered hard to minority communities and voter empathy. For example, one of Trudeau’s more talked about campaign promises was a pledge to take in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2015, far above other party platforms of 10,000. Even usually favorable state media thought the goal was “problematic” and mostly for optics. In practice, in the following years many settled refugees continue to profoundly struggle, not quite the happy ending promised in his campaign.

Far beyond the optics though, have been the significant economic and societal impacts of drastic changes to immigration policy following the 2015 election across the biggest programs:

• Legal Immigration

• Illegal Immigration & Asylum Claims

• Foreign Student Visas

• Temporary Foreign Workers

Legal Immigration

Historically, Canada sought skilled immigrants, and specifically those who could fill labor gaps in the economy. Candidates applying for permanent residency (PR) an initial status before citizenship, were scored on points including language proficiency, education, professional designations, with a preference for young families who could integrate well, quickly, and productively into the Canadian mosaic.

This reasonable criteria was loosened after the 2015 election, with family reunification – in practice granting permanent residency to elderly relatives of recent immigrants – and unskilled immigration increasing significantly. A new policy for “caregivers” made this even more explicit – over 20% of program applicants “are 65+ [themselves] and may also need care”.

An easily foreseeable consequence of importing an elderly population is heightened load on the healthcare system, which predictably came to pass in following years.

For example, a 2023 study reported that in the past year 31,397 patients were estimated to have “died after waiting anywhere from less than a week to nearly 11 years […] on surgery or a diagnostic scan”.

Canadian healthcare systems have struggled to keep up with the pace of population growth, and Canadians continue to die as a result.

Illegal Immigration & Asylum Claims

Throughout the Trudeau administration, illegal crossings have increased, with migrants coming across a largely unprotected land border with the United States, or even walking up to official crossings and then seeking asylum once met by Canadian border patrol.

The Roxham Road crossing in Quebec became so notorious for illegal crossings and asylum seekers that Conservative Party leaders in subsequent elections campaigned there and even suggested the need to “build a wall” to stop the continuous asylum-seeking foot traffic.

Meanwhile, the Trudeau administration has done little to secure the most common crossings and border stretches, official reports even warning against doing so, given it could lead to asylum seekers “facing increased danger” – forced to instead cross at a more remote locations. There have also now been numerous cases of former ISIS members among other unsavory individuals successfully making asylum claims and obtaining citizenship, before then being charged with planning terrorist attacks.

While official numbers only reported 113k illegal crossings since 2017, the Minister of Immigration admitted in 2023 that they had recently found well over 600k undocumented aliens within the country. He plans to grant most of them legal status to resolve the documentation issue, replying to subsequent outcry, “People do get worked up about numbers, but the reality is that they are already here.”

Asylum claims have recently spiked by 500% – 1200% under the suspicion that many foreigners are being advised to file for asylum instead of take the added risk of using alternative immigration programs which are now seeing quota reductions.

Foreign Students

Canada has long had a proportionally larger international student visa program than the United States.

Up from 275k in 2012, Canada took in 914k foreign students in 2023. The United States in those same years grew from 380k to 650k foreign students respectively.

Adjusted for population, Canada admits 19x more foreign students than the US.

Is Canada the home of the world’s best universities? Why are students clambering to attend there specifically?

While Canada has some well-rated institutions, most foreign students are not attending them.

They instead attend “diploma mills” where education is a distant second priority to quickly obtaining a diploma and then leveraging it for the subsequent fast track approval for work permits, permanent residency (PR), and citizenship.

Regular non-student permanent residency (PR) applications would take many years, so many foreign students instead saw the arbitrage opportunity and took it to become a student for a year and get their PR faster, skipping the long and growing PR line.

College towns and major cities have had rents soar as there simply is insufficient inventory to support the spike in new students. In many cases, single family homes have turned into student ghettos where foreign students live 4-10 people to a room, pooling funds to afford the high rent.

Diploma mill community colleges and consultancy firms like Applyboard lobbied aggressively and profited handsomely as student visa quotas rose. Canada’s biggest banks have targeted students for new accounts and now advertise aggressively to newcomers in Canada’s biggest airports as you walk from arrivals to customs and baggage. While international students used to be 10% of total fees collected by colleges, they are now over 50%, exceeding even domestic student tuition.

As a case study, Conestoga Community College, 1h outside Toronto, was at break-even financial performance prior to the student visa gold rush, with barely a $6m surplus in 2018. They were among the most ambitious to profit on the visa program, expanding by 4x their foreign students from 7.8k to over 32k, doubling their student population to 45k, and finishing 2023 with a $252m annual surplus, financial over-performance completely unfathomable for any similar B-tier community college under the pre-2015 status quo.

Advertising abroad on TikTok by immigration consulting firms like ApplyBoard and local immigration agents, who charge significant markup on college applications to ensure smooth admission, foreign students were lured in thinking it only takes $10k to survive in Canada during their year as a student. Students arrived only to be shocked by the true costs, and subsequently desperate for jobs or to live in student ghetto houses. The government had conveniently not inflation adjusted the $10k capital student visa requirement for over 20 years until the reports on rampant foreign student poverty forced an update to $20,635 in 2023. Notably, the low capital requirement had qualified many applicants who no longer would under the new minimum.

Low-skill jobs (retail, landscaping, fast food…) across Canadian towns and cities have been filled by foreign students. You’ll no longer be served by high school students and failed crypto traders at your local McDonald’s. Minimum wage laws are seemingly unenforced, with the trades and other labor markets that have been decimated by such a fast outward shift of the supply curve.

As one example, a local landscaping firm run by legal immigrants who came in the early 2010s – who properly incorporated, filed taxes, purchased insurance, and grew the business for 5 years – is now being undercut by 90% in their already low bids by teams of foreign students. The foreign students are willing to work for meagre cash, far below minimum wage, content to have enough pooled together across their house of 10-20 people to cover rent and food, but no need to individually make more than that, let alone each earn minimum wage.

Similar stories are rampant across the trades including construction, auto mechanic shops, and gig-economy jobs including Uber and DoorDash.

Regulated professions such as lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, and others seem unaffected for now, but the impact to low skill jobs may be the canary in the coal mine once students have their certifications and fast tracked PR work permits. The average minimum wage retail or fast food job now gets hundreds or thousands of applications per position within days, even in small towns. Youth unemployment is soaring. Job openings elicit line ups of thousands of applicants.

Policy reforms have begun, as the public has become vocal upon witnessing the visible changes across the country, but the foreign students themselves have taken to protest reductions to the visa program or fast track residency, and often have gotten concessions from politicians who the foreign students can’t even legally vote for. Yet.

Sensing a change in the winds, many foreign students are now filing baseless asylum claims, up 500% – 1200% in 2024 Q2, to avoid the coming quota reductions.

Across labor markets, real estate, and the credibility of Canadian educational institutions, the foreign student visa program is notorious and has had a profound impact.

Temporary Foreign Workers

The Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program expansions though are possibly the most egregious amongst the immigration portfolio changes.

The TFW program originated in 1973 as a way for farms to legally bring in unskilled labor during harvest seasons for a few months. Workers were restricted to work on the same farm that sponsored their visa, and living conditions there were as rough as you’d expect, but impact to domestic labor markets was minimal.

In a recurring cat and mouse game, non-farm corporations have consistently lobbied to get new exemptions, industry inclusions, and import their own TFWs to reduce labor costs, only curtailed after inevitable subsequent public outcry force regulatory reforms. For example, past abuses in 2013 by Canadian banks and Microsoft were restricted in subsequent reforms in 2014. On and on, the gradual pendulum had swung back and forth.

But post-2015, the program was broadly expanded to let any corporation qualify if they could show that they had a job position which they couldn’t fill with a domestic candidate. Posting jobs for a single day, then removing when no candidate applied was often sufficient to fill the necessary Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) forms.

Ripe for exploitation, by both foreign candidates and corporations, it was. Fast food, grocery conglomerates, meat packing, IT, and retail – including Lululemon – ignored domestic candidates to bring in hundreds of thousands of TFWs to fill roles at lower wages than domestic candidates would accept.

From 111k TFWs in 2000, the number has soared to over 777k in 2021, a 700% increase. Canada’s population only grew by 25% over that same time period.

Across all programs, Canada’s temporary resident population in 2024 is now up to 3m, or 7.5% of the population, a 115% increase since just 2021.

Program abuse has been rampant both with corporations dishonestly filling out LMIAs and with many cases of foreign candidates paying $30k or more to employers to be hired, effectively subsidizing their own salary just to get into the country on a temporary work permit.

In 2022, the government both expanded TFW quotas and added a new fast track to residency for all existing temporary residents, further increasing incentives for potential immigrants to use this program to skip the usual slower PR application process, not unlike how the foreign student visa program was arbitraged and abused.

Iconic Canadian brands (though now owned by international conglomerates) like Tim Horton’s across the country now are staffed not with high school students, but with predominantly TFWs; a visible reminder of the new state of the nation to any Canadians who continued to go there for poor quality coffee and donuts.

Even as unemployment began to rise to 7%, and 14% for youth, companies have continued to claim that domestic labor can’t be found and had their TFW applications approved.

Only within recent months, have policy changes been announced that will crack down on some of the most flagrant abuses of this program and shrink next year quotas by an inconsequential 10%.

Social Systems & Economic Impact

The steep increase in annual rate of immigration, from the above mentioned immigration policy changes, has caused Canada’s already fragile social systems and economy to approach a breaking point.

Education

In public education, administrative bloat, generous benefit pensions (Ontario Teachers Pension Plan is one of the biggest funds in the country), and growing numbers of curriculum consultants have ensured that budgets have soared, while students lag further and further behind international peers, from many factors like reduced standardized tests, ineffective new curriculum, rising student teacher ratios, and a myriad of broader societal issues like phones, poor parenting, and crime.

In higher education, domestic university graduates face a difficult road to permanent employment, even for those at the top of their class, amidst competitive, newly crowded labor markets and flat wage growth.

Public sector job growth, while being admitted, only after jobs report revisions, to be the only net new job creating sector, has even started to slow amidst anticipations of a new Conservative administration in 2025, which could bring tightened budgets and headcount.

Healthcare

Similarly, Canadian healthcare outcomes continues to decline, while budgets rise.

A 2023 study reported that in the past year 31,397 patients were estimated to have “died after waiting anywhere from less than a week to nearly 11 years […] on surgery or a diagnostic scan”. The report noted that this was not for lack of funding, the rise in per capita healthcare costs since 1992 had exceeded inflation growth rates by 80%.

Attempts to add private healthcare options to relieve the burden on the public system, like in the UK or many other countries, have been met in previous years with fierce pushback to the accused “Americanization” of the much boasted Canadian “free healthcare” system.

Backlash has been quieter recently as most now know someone personally who has been affected by delays and shortages.

New heavily pushed medically assisted suicide programs – including to military veterans – instead of honest attempts at reform, don’t resolve the sinking feeling that Canadians’ only hope if they get sick is to have sufficient savings and frequent flyer points to cover travel for healthcare abroad.

Crime

Despite lacking a prominent George Floyd incident of their own, Canada has remained as usual in-tune with the American cultural trends, including defunding the police in many cities for their accused racial prejudice.

In combination with material increases in the city populations and new bail reform leading to a new “catch-and-release” policy for violent criminals and rapists, crime has skyrocketed to 30-year highs, especially around Toronto where break-ins, car theft – with subsequent shipping overseas from nearby ports, public transportation violence, car insurance fraud, and violent crimes have all seen prolific increases.

Following a “national reckoning” on the poor treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools, the Pope apologized, a new statutory holiday was instituted, and well over 100 churches have been burned through apparent acts of arson. New reports of ongoing archaeological digs not finding the anticipated evidence of the initially reported mass child graves have been ignored by the Canadian media, and new churches continue to burn, with little interest from police or government on each new chapel turning to ash.

A new federal government bill even seeks to make the above paragraph illegal, another reminder of the shrinking rights of Canadian citizens, including free speech.

A common topic of conversation, across Toronto suburbs especially, is where people might move to flee the rising crime. Some are considering even leaving the country, to the shock of friends and family who, for now, are staying behind.

Economy Headed for a Recession

Similar to the American jobs reports of recent months, Canada’s job numbers continue to be revised – notably always in the same direction, down – and show an increasingly bleak economic picture.

Fast rising unemployment nears 7% by latest official reports, and almost 14% among youth (ages 15-24). This has motivated 3 urgent rate cuts by the Bank of Canada so far, with more expected over the next 6 months; one of vanishingly few areas where Canada has led the G7 in recent years.

Business productivity continues to slide, consumer credit to income ratios are up to over 180%, and bankruptcies still trend up and to the right.

Canadian GDP growth is vanishingly small, while per capita GDP continues to lag the United States since 2015, which combined with rampant inflation has marked “the worst standard of living decline in 40 years”.

GDP per capita (current US$) - Canada, United States, Source: World Bank

While the current administration is understandably loathe to admit it, the Canadian economy appears to have reached a point of deep stagnation, failing to keep pace with the United States for nearly a decade.

Real Estate

After an almost 30 year bull market, punctuated by near exponential vertical jumps in 2020 and 2021, price movement is now horizontal.

Some areas have cooled or had more price chop than others, but generally prices are flat to down ~10-20% since the May 2022 peak.

If prices continue to stagnate, a soft landing “regression to the mean” seems ever more likely instead of the much anticipated US 2008 style crash, with Canadian RE prices returning to the long term trend after a COVID burst above for a few years.

The first market update from October 2023 appears to have stood up to both scrutiny from readers and over time. The bullish and bearish market factors from that update continue to play out, now a year later.

For brevity, only the ones that have significantly changed will have further commentary below, note that all have a tag for whether the factor impacts the demand or supply side of the market.

Bull Factors

• Demand: Extended ZIRP

• Demand: Houses as Investment Asset

• Demand: Foreign Investors

• Demand: Immigration

  • Immigration numbers continued to soar, with recent talk of policy changes to slow growth yet to have much demand reduction impact.

• Demand: Foreign Students

  • 2024 was the biggest year yet for the program. Announced quota decreases for 2025 are already causing some rent declines in towns where foreign students were the marginal buyer.

• Supply: Green Belt, Mountains

• Supply: Zoning, Regulation, Taxes, Rent Control

  • No capitulation by the bureaucrats to report.

  • Many threats to “cut the red tap” from the 2025 Conservative campaign, though still unclear how federally they could legally implement those changes even when they likely take power by fall 2025.

• Demand: Government Incentives

  • In addition to the many buyer subsidies present in 2023, all levels of government have been announcing new builder subsidies to try and increase the rate of house building starts.

  • Predictably, this is having the inverse affect as builders are continuing to pause and now are in a deflationary spiral assuming the longer they wait to start new projects, the bigger the subsidy and lower interest rates they will get.

• Supply: Running out of Labor to Build

  • This is much less of a factor than in 2023 since house building starts have slowed.

• Demand: Canadians Never Mail in the Keys

  • While still not common for houses they are living in, Canadians are walking away from pre-build deals on new houses and condos in record numbers. Instead of having to suffer an in some cases a $500k+ loss on completing the purchase which now is under water, many are accepting losing their $25k-$300k deposits or attempting to re-negotiate with builders.

  • New stimulative policy as of September 2024 to expand mortgage insurance and amortization caps seems directed specifically at trying to get more pre-builds to close. It’s too soon to tell whether it will incentivize buyers to continue to lever up as politicians hope.

• Demand: Government Backstops for Mortgages

  • The Bank of Canada (central bank) and CMHC (government run mortgage insurance agency), have been working together to increasingly bail out Canada’s “big five banks” (a government charter monopoly), who have quietly become insolvent under the rate hikes and struggling Canadian borrowers, and now have significant short interest on their stocks from traders.

  • Emergency overnight repo line increases and the government itself now purchasing mortgage bonds, are the most recent attempts to prop up the banks & RE market, though at increasing cost to the central bank’s monetary policy and government deficits.

  • The government recently added even more demand-side incentives including an expanded mortgage insurance purchase price cap to $1.5m and 30-year amortizations.

• Demand & Supply: COVID Measures

• Demand: Interest Rates Follow the US

  • While in October 2023 it wasn’t clear who would cut first, Canada ended up with three rate cuts before the US Fed cut once.

  • Now that the US Fed has started to cut – 50bps in September 2024 with further easing language – the Bank of Canada can and will likely continue to cut rates with less risk of the currency exchange rate sliding on interest rate drift, which would negatively impact trade.

• Demand: Currency Devaluation and Printing

  • Government deficits continue strong with no signs of slowing into the upcoming election.

  • The money supply remains at 2.5x the levels of the 2019 pre-COVID baseline and has started to tick back up.

• Demand: Infinity Mortgages

• Demand: Mortgage Fraud

  • Three of the biggest banks were placed under remediation orders by regulators for risky lending practices and forced to unwind parts of their lending portfolios to get back within required ratios. Borrowers faced interest rate spikes on their HELOCs to induce them to repay or switch to help fix the bank ratios.

  • Mortgage fraud remains rampant as mortgage broker requested proof of income systems from the CRA (Canada’s tax collectors) have still not been provided.

Bear Factors

• Demand: 5-Year Fixed Mortgages & High Rates

  • 5-Year fixed mortgages continue to roll over until 2026 to interest rates 2-3x what borrowers are used to paying, and that’s assuming rates come down to a now expected 3-4% by 2025 Q1. Unless rates come down to 2%, new tranches of Canadian borrowers will still be in for a squeeze on renewal.

• Demand: Stagnant economy and wages

  • Increased taxes on capital gains further disincentivize growing professional careers or starting businesses in Canada. Brain drain likely will continue to increase.

• Demand: Immigration Slowing

  • While there have been some small tweaks to immigration policy, few have taken effect; and some that have been announced, have been quietly walked back following protests from the affected.

• Demand: Consumers Capitulate

  • Consumer & business sentiment down, consumer credit lines up, and savings rates continue to collapse.

  • Housing inventory isn’t moving, completed sales way down, as sellers seem to now prefer to hold prices above what they’ll sell at for weeks before re-listing at a lower price. Many listings when you browse HouseSigma show 3-7 prior listings that were terminated at subsequently higher prices in the prior 6-9 months.

All of this to say, Canadian RE has so far avoided the 50% - 70% price decline the many online commentators have forewarned for almost a decade. The above mix of factors continue to keep prices stubbornly high, still within 10-20% of May 2022 peak.

Public statements from Trudeau himself confirm that at a policy level they plan to keep prices high and avoid any major correction, “Housing needs to retain its value… It’s a huge part of people’s potential for retirement and future nest egg.”

I haven’t yet seen any political party explicitly, or even implicitly, propose policy which would force significant price declines and bring house prices back to affordable levels.

Political Dynamics & Upcoming Election

Immigration Platforms by Political Party

To the shock of all, after aggressively defending their immigration increases for years and immediately throwing accusations of racism or economic illiteracy against critics, the Liberals under Trudeau have in August made concessions that many programs must be urgently restructured.

Smaller, further left parties like the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Green party have not made any such concessions yet.

The small Quebec nationalist, Bloq Quebecois party, has aligned with Quebec provincial policy of generally reduced immigration with stricter entrance criteria, though they have little sway on federal policy.

The official opposition, the Conservatives – now led by Pierre Poillevre, while having spent years attempting to court support from the same new immigrants who entered the country through the above Liberal expanded immigration programs, have only in recent months quietly started to say that some policy changes are needed, though with great nuance to try and not lose the support of recent immigrants. Instead, they have remained focused on failures in fiscal and monetary policy causing the current inflation and housing crisis, ignoring any likely impact of the major changes in immigration policy, a topic which remains a much feared 3rd rail of Canadian politics.

A small further right party, the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) led by Maxime Bernier, founded in response to the dairy lobby manipulating the 2017 Conservative primary, gained notoriety as the only party to push back against COVID lockdown & vaccine mandate overreaches. The PPC rose to 11% national support in past years despite Canadian media blocking them from national debates and denying press coverage, even when they often polled above the included Green Party. It is the only major party with a platform that explicitly calls for immigration reductions from 500k down to 150k per year, or effectively 1980s levels; levels which would have a profound impact at reducing housing demand and the labor supply – pushing RE prices down and wages up.

Despite many polls showing Canadian sentiment has flipped on immigration, the PPC is only polling at 2-4%, indicating a lack of voter will to punish the uniparty and institute drastic policy reversals. The current >99% likelihood projections of a Conservative majority victory remain believable.

When Is the Next Election?

One nuance of Canadian politics to remember is that it is a British style Westminster parliamentary democracy, and the current Trudeau administration is a “minority government”.

This means the Trudeau government doesn’t have a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, so if it fails to negotiate a coalition of other parties to support votes on their proposed bills, not only will the bill fail but the “minority government” will be considered to have lost the “confidence” of the house and an election will be called.

Since the last federal election in 2021, the Liberals have had a handshake deal agreement with the further left party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), to reduce risk of losing any confidence vote, with other small leftist and separatist parties often joining to prop up the government.

While federal elections must happen every 4 years by law – the next scheduled for late October 2025 – with a minority government, a non-confidence vote could trigger one at any time.

Given many elected Members of Parliament (MP), including the current NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, don’t get the highest level pension unless they stay in office until February 2025, I wouldn’t bet on any election being triggered before then. Follow the incentives.

If polls continue to show leftist parties getting wiped out, they may continue to wait it out until October 2025 and hope in that period that some new factor emerges to unseat the Conservatives from their currently near-certain victory.

Left & Lefter: Understanding Canadian Politics

To understand the Canadian political spectrum, the following poll is highly illustrative.

When asked who they would have voted for in the 2020 American Presidential election, a full 81% of Canadians said Joe Biden, and even 56% of the supposedly right wing Conservative party, in spite of all the attempts by left wing media and politicans to typecast the Conservatives as “Canada’s Republicans”. The People’s Party was the only subgroup polled which would have voted for Trump (86%).

The Canadian Liberals might map correctly to the US Democrats, but it’s important to remember that most Canadian Conservatives do too.

The vast majority of Canadians soak up American culture and news media unfiltered, and not until the 2022 Canadian trucker convoy protest – suppressed by riot police on horseback, political arrests, and freezing bank accounts of many involved – have more Canadians stopped adopting leftist American media opinions uncritically. Still, most Canadians when polled disapprove of the Truckers protest, supported the subsequent government crackdown, and would vote Democrat if given the chance in an American election.

And there has yet to be a similarly passionate uprising for any of the economic or immigration questions discussed above, as have begun in the UK or other countries in recent months.

All this to say, even if Canada could vote itself out of this – and maybe it can, there is little evidence that Canadians yet want to. The 2025 election will see the end of Trudeau, but many of his policy changes will live on. The ratchet will notch further.

A change in tone and a tweaking of quotas to be sure when Trudeau is replaced by the Conservatives, but it seems there will be no radical snap back to 2015 norms & policy, especially with respect to immigration.

The Trajectory for Canada

Openly admitted by current leadership that Canada is the world’s “first postnational state”, and continuing to adopt globalist WEF policies on immigration, medically assisted suicide, censorship, high taxation, carbon taxes, gender theory & sex change operations for children, among other issues, what is next for Canada?

In the base case, continued leftist policies will have their expected negative outcomes. The current state of Canada is no surprise, given the predictable outcomes that would come from drastic induced shifts to demand and supply curves across the Canadian economy.

Given recent polls, it appears voters have had enough, and will flip power to the blue uniparty in the next election. Yet, the Conservatives are solely focused on housing affordability as a building supply problem – though lacking much in policy that would actually double housing starts, and no proposals to reduce demand or address immigration policy failures. It’s still unclear what would materially change other than rhetoric, and whether it would reverse current trends, especially for RE prices.

In the long term, it may take more years of stagnation before Canadians are willing to risk being called racists, protectionists, capitalists, or other epithets and vote in a platform which will make drastic reforms to the root cause immigration, regulatory, and taxation policies which are having devastating effects across labor markets, healthcare, housing, education, crime, GDP, and productivity.

That Javier Milei in Argentina, as reported by Bow Tied Mara, was able to pull out a surprise win, after decades of failed leftist policy, and quickly implement significant economic and political changes, is as sufficient reason as any to not black-pill on almost any country – Canada included.

Canada is flush with natural resources, has top educational institutions – especially in computer science & AI, benefits from the US market beta as primary trade partner, and under better governance many of the current problems could be solved.

Whether Canadians have the will, is the question; and a question similarly being asked to voters this year in elections around the world.

Regardless, the Jungle remains proof positive that wherever you live, you can will yourself to make it – no matter what color of uniparty is in power, or new policy they roll out.

As for me, I’ll keep chipping away at the walls of my W2 prison with a sharpened spork, inching closer to my escape, and sharing tactics so you can do the same.

Back to the cell.

Fullstack out.

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