Why do Canada and Australia have so few people?

Factual Questions
101

Huh? I know my geography, thank you very much. I hear there’s also a city called “Victoria” somewhere in BC, maybe you’ve heard of it. :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s impossible to prove that Crown land is worthless unless it’s actually put on the market. I’m from Ontario and can’t give mile-by-mile specifics on Vancouver Island, but I can’t find a map of Ontario that clearly delineates the Crown land. I guess we could spend all day quibbling over the borders of Crown land, but I’ve never seen a cogent argument about WHY the government needs that much land (about twice the percentage of government land holdings in the United States). It also beggars belief that 90% of Canada is an uninhabitable wasteland with zero value and that people are basically forced by nature to huddle in a tiny portion of the country (where extremely expensive land somehow borders up against land with zero value)

I suppose the idea is that the government is graciously being a caretaker of all the worst land (I wonder if any Native person would agree on that point), but in Europe there are ancient settlements all over the Alps and all the way up to the Arctic Circle. And I won’t even get started on the deep ties between Canadian elites and the oil/mining industries.

The end result (whatever we think of the cause) is that Canadian land is grotesquely overvalued for a country of that size (google “Canada land overvalued” or something and one can spend all day reading about it.) People often cannot live where they grow up and have to compete hard with already-wealthy foreigners (who seem to have no obstacle to acquiring land in Canada) just to attempt to live a normal life. It has a very destructive effect on families and communities, and IMHO the middle class in general.

102
  1. Cape York is tropical, not temperate.
  2. >90% Cape York can’t support rice cultivation. The soils are totally unsuitable.
  3. Very little of Cape York is rain forest. See the blue smudges on this map? That’s the extent of the Cape York rainforest. It’s about 5% of the area of Cape York. Most of Cape York is dry open savanna on nutrient deficient, leached and seasonally waterlogged soils. Totally unsuitable for growing anything much besides stunted trees and cattle

The *total *area of East Gippsland is about 1/4 of 1% of the area of Australia. Even if it were all virgin land and all able to be put into production it wouldn’t make result in a measurable increase in agricultural output. Of course the areas that haven’t been cleared are utterly unsuitbale for any sort of farming, which is why they are uncleared. 80% of the uncleared area is hillslope and girge country on rocky, shallow soils, unsuitable even for paddy rice.

And as with your other examples, it is undeveloped because it is totally unsuitable for development. The fact that even Aborigines didn’t live in most of the area should tell you something about its productive potential.

103

And if you think all of Vancouver Island is buildable or desirable, you don’t know your geography very well.

Where, exactly, does extremely expensive land border up against land with zero value? Point out specific locations, specific geographic points where this is true.

Um, better look at a map of Norway or Sweden up to the Arctic Circle. In Sweden, for example, the overwhelming majority of the population lives in the southern third, mostly near Stockholm, Malmo, or Gothenburg. Huge areas of the northern interior have population densities under one per square kilometer, and that’s for a region relatively close to the open ocean and without an extreme continental climate.

And the various cites for that Google search (see, e.g., here or here or here) note the discrepancy between purchase and rental prices as one measure of “overvaluation.” However, if landlords can profitably build and rent out properties for much much less than homebuilders are selling them, then the underlying problem is not land values. More economists are positing low mortgage rates and easy money as fueling a housing bubble.

104

Are you talking about “land” or are you talking about housing? Because over here you were talking about “lots”, as in housing lots, which you claimed are overpriced. It’s not the same thing. And your reference to “already-wealthy foreigners” also suggests that you’re talking about housing, as wealthy foreigners don’t typically come to Canada to start a pig farm or grow wheat, but they do buy high-end housing, often multiple units both for their own use and as rental investments.

Your comments about “crown land” in the context of housing are ridiculous and uninformed. As RickJay said in an earlier post, “Nobody living in or around Toronto thinks there’s a lack of develop-able land. One of the major issues here is urban sprawl - something that, by definition, can only happen if there’s land to build on. And unless you go south, where it’s a bit too wet to build a house, they’re building in every damn direction you can build in.” This is absolutely true. Toronto is fueling housing construction 50, 60, 70 miles outside the city proper, with new developments springing up everywhere with no difficulty at all finding land for it. I see it all around me. Commuter train routes are heading farther out than ever. And the reason it’s happening is demand, and many other areas are already built up solid – the whole area from Toronto to Hamilton is essentially a single community, sometimes called the GTHA – the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
I am no expert on the reasons behind the rather phenomenal rise in Canadian house prices, especially in areas like Vancouver and Toronto, but at least two underlying factors are very clear. One is that responsible bank regulation and fiscal and monetary policy has kept the housing market stable, without the precipitous free-fall the US housing market has experienced due to criminal malfeasance by the financial industry. The other is just simple demand. People want to live here, and the ripple effects from the major housing markets has lifted prices in the whole country. The housing market is a huge reason that such a very large number of older Canadians have comfortable retirements or indeed are able to afford to retire at all.

105

Ontario Crown Land Use Policy Atlas. Click the green button and wait for a zoomable map that delineates land use in Ontario, including private land.

Note that there is almost no Crown land in southwestern Ontario, the Golden Horseshoe, north as far as cottage country, across the top of Lake Ontario up to the Ottawa region, and around almost all urban areas in the southern end of the province.

There is a mix of private and Crown land in cottage country and around municipalities in northern Ontario.

There is very little private land in the far north.

In short, almost all of Crown land in Ontario is where people do not want to live, although in some instances (e.g. parks) it is where people want to protect the land from private usurpation.

Where specifically in Ontario is this taking place? As you can see from the map of privately owned land in Ontario, the urban growth in southern Ontario is far from Crown land, and as you can see from the links provided by the atlas’ home page, if a community is adjacent to Crown land, it can arrange for the transfer of the Crown land to it for development, cottage lots, or whatever seems like a good thing to do with the land.

106

So let me get this straight. You seem to be of the opinion that when private property is bought on the open market by wealthier private citizens who out-bid less well off private citizens, the fault lies with there being Crown land where neither of these citizens want to reside.

107

OK, so everyone in Ontario crams into an area the size of a typical U.S. State. Makes sense to me that property values would therefore be artificially high.

People are taking it as a matter of faith that nobody wants to live in those areas. Has that ever been tested on the market? Even Alaska manages to have 10x more people living there than the Yukon and the NWT combined.

108

A lot of it is,yes. However steep slopes can certainly be cultivated using terracing as is extensively done in SE Asia. Also we use a lot of our land very unproductively, cattle grazing on marginal lands, where the hooves also contribute to loss of top soil and further degradation. Replacing cattle with Kangaroo cultivation could produce much more food with the same amount of land. Similarly research into other native crops which are better suited for Australia’s soils could support more efficient usage. Of course also Australia could be a net food importer, we’re a rich country with plenty of mineral wealth to buy imported food. Fresh water would be an issue but using grey water recycling and desalination that could also be solved.

Melbourne to Cairns is 2800 km and theres only three large cities along that coastal stretch. I suspect that a large reason for the low population of Australia is the white australia policy. European immigrants mostly wanted to settle in the temperate south. If we’d been open to SE Asian immigrants throughout the twentieth century there would have been a lot more development of Northern Australia by now.

I am not saying that Australia should have 60-80 million people, only that its possible.

109

Well, I agree that it’s dysfunctional to have a teeming, sprawling, densely packed GTA surrounded by endless miles of nothingness. I think Canadian society would be so much better served by a cluster of smaller and distinct metropolitan areas.

110

All this tells me is that you have never seen northern Ontario. I mean, it’s not like I’d necessarily expect you to, but if you had, you’d have seen that there is millions of sq km of nothing but boreal forest. If people wanted to live there, they could, but there is no reason for them to.

More than half of which live in the metro Anchorage area. Yukon, as you might see from a map, is almost entirely landlocked, and the one short course of shoreline is on the Arctic Ocean. Now, at one time, in the early 1900s, the Yukon had a population of almost 30000, equal to what it had today, but it almost immediately dropped down to a few thousand. Why? The gold rush ended and people decided they didn’t want to live in a freezing cold wasteland with little to no economic activity. And the North West Territories? I don’t think you have a conception of just how much nothing there is there.

111

That’s my plan!

112

Sure. Northern Ontario small towns try to market themselves to attract people, and few have much success. In one of these towns earlier this week I handled a transaction for a nice little house that sold for $5,000 because people do not want to live in that town. Earlier today I spoke with a clerk about our scheduling the transactions for a couple of dozen homes in that town that are being purchased for a song and then torn down rather than have them sitting abandoned.

In another of these northern Ontario towns, there has been some success at marketing to people who cannot afford to live in southern Ontario cities, but most of them move back to southern Ontario after a year or two, so we get regular work transferring the same dirt cheap homes repeatedly.

There are a lot of properties in these northern Ontario small towns that can be purchased for the cost of the mortgage payout, tax and water arrears, and transfer costs. In most of these small towns the banks have a blanket policy: even if you make a pot of money you still must obtain mortgage loan insurance, for mortgagees are not interested in homes that do not hold their value when the primary employer in the town cuts back or shuts down.

A mill or a mine opens and a town grows. When the mill or mine closes, people leave town, resulting in a surplus of housing and a decreased tax base to maintain the infrastructure and services. That is a fundamental fact of life for small towns in northern Ontario, where you have a choice: a struggling mill town or a struggling mine town, both with a surplus of housing and a dearth of jobs.

Not many people want to move somewhere where there are no jobs, other than retirees from southern Ontario who are house rich and income poor, who sell their southern Ontario home and move up here where they can buy a dirt cheap home and use the rest of the proceeds of the sale of their southern Ontario home to pay their ongoing bills. But most of them don’t like living here, so they move back south and suck up the loss.

I’ll put it as simply as I can: people need to live where they can hold jobs rather than live where they cannot hold jobs, and once this need is met, they prefer to live in communities that have good services (e.g. hospitals, schools) and good amenities (e.g. stores, restaurants, theatres, sports venues). They do not want to live where they can not hold jobs, they do not want to live where services are lacking, and they do not want to live where the amenities are lacking. Crown land is irrelevant to this.

Being surrounded by Crown land does not put pressure on a northern Ontario community’s housing prices; it is simply a reflection of people not wanting to live there, for if there was a demand for further housing, Crown land would be transferred to the municipality. The small towns in northern Ontario want to grow. The province wants to help communities to grow and is more than happy to free up land. The only bug in the ointment (or more correctly, the unbearable swarms of black flies in the spring, followed by the summer’s deer flies and mosquitos) is that people do not want to live in these towns.

113

Land prices are determined by demand. By what basis do you conclude that the prices are artificially high? The prices for the most desirable land will be the highest, based on market demand. That doesn’t mean the prices are artificially high.

114

:dubious: Note Houston’s location in the dark green section of this map http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap17/rain_usa.html

The real challenge of living in Houston isn’t trying to grow things, it’s preventing things from growing.

115

Some slopes can be used for terrace farming, some can not. It depends on the degree of the slope, rainfall patterns, soil type and underlying geology amongst many other things. East Gippsland is not suitable.

No, sorry, that’s just nonsense. Kangaroos are not suitable for farming. They can’t be herded, they die easily from stress when handled, they can’t be confined without dying of disease, they can’t be treated with most insecticides and vermicides, they reproducce very slowly, they require tens of thousand of dollars per kilometre to fence and so forth.

This has all been studied to death. It’s a pipe dream. If you could show us one ecologist, agronomist or ethologist who believes that kangaroo farming is even a viable option, much less capable of *increasing *meat production, then you might have some credibility. Until then the suggestion ranks alongside claims that Cape York is temperate,.

They could. And we could develop cold fusion tomorrow. But right now we don’t have cold fusion and crops that are better suited for Australia’s soils do not exist.

It could. But you said that Australia can produce more significantly more food in areas such as eat Gippsland, Tasmania and Cape York, which is simply not true. You also said that Cape York is temperate, has large areas of rainforest that are suitable for conversion to arable land, and that kangaroos could be farmed. None of those things are true.

Australia has had a huge immigrant intake from South and East Asia for the past 45 years. 80% of those Asian immigrants live in cities > 100, 000 people. Less than 10% live in areas deemed rural. 80% of them live in NSW, Vic and WA and 90% of *those *live in the capital or its satellite shires. Statistically, far fewer immigrants from SE Asia live outside those three large cities you mentioned than immigrants from western Europe.

So, do you have any evidence whatsoever for your claim? It seems to be contradicted by the actual settlement patterns of immigrants from SE Asia, and given the other erroneous material you’ve posted in this thread, you will understand why I’m slightly reticent to take your word for it.

Of course it’s possible. It just not possible for the reasons that you have stated. those reason are simply wrong. Cape York does not have huge areas of temperate land and rainforest amenable to agriculture, nor does East Gippsland. Farming kangaroos is not even practically feasible, let alone capable of producing *more *food. South east Asian immigrants are less likely to live outside the major cities, not moreso etc.

It is certainly possible for Australia to support a population of 80 million people at certain standards of living, just as it is possible for New York City to support that population.

116

Presently, New York City has an above-ground population of about 8.4 million people, but based on the 10 factor, there are about 84 million mole people scurrying about underneath New York City.

117

I have no idea what that means.

118
119

Well, I think it’s kind of defeatist to throw up one’s hands and say that the land outside the GTA is worthless because there’s no infrastructure, and that there’s no infrastructure because the land is worthless. I’m sure the people who personally benefit from the mineral rights don’t find Crown land worthless at all and are very content to keep most of the country inaccessible.

Has the government really been part of the solution to try and create viable communities? As far as I can tell Canada apparently never went through a U.S.-style phase where people were given the equivalent of 40 acres and a mule and encouraged to settle the nation end to end (surely the country would still function alright with the government keeping 50% of the land rather than 90%?) I’ll also add that the extreme north of Ontario is at about the same latitude as Copenhagen.

The cost of real estate is scandalous and destructive to young middle class Canadians. If you don’t think land ownership has anything to do with it, that’s fine… but I suspect it’s a big reason why Canada is lagging way behind its potential as a country.

120

Why would someone want 40 acres on the Canadian Shield? The point of having 40 acres is to farm those 40 acres, which is not possible there. The latitude is irrelevant when the ground under your feet is a solid rock.