2025

Life almost operates like the popular Sim City video game franchise. You start out with a small community and build up the population. Past a certain point, you move out to neighboring areas, and start building up services there, such as roads, electricity, water and sewage. Unfortunately, several forces are preventing this from happening in Canada, despite the fact that our populations have grown over the last few decades.

The first force is the pushback from the climate community who does not want Canada to open up any of the Crown land to development. They are of the belief that people use up a far smaller carbon footprint when densely packed into a single, urban area. This leads directly to our second problem, namely socialism.

Socialists believe in the management of society, and a densely packed population becomes reliant on government for their food supply, energy and waste services. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the bureaucracy has grown so large in Canada that all development is being channeled into the urban centers. In BC, as one example, the province has taken over the municipal land planning, and is aggressively densifying all regions, without any thought put into opening up Crown land for the people.

A third force is what used to be called fascism, but which would most accurately be characterize today as a public/private partnership whereby government prefers to work with large developers, which operate much like government, than with small developers who are more independently minded. When we first immigrated to Canada in 1989, as an example, my father, despite speaking little to no English, obtained a loan, acquired a permit from city hall, and built three modest homes on 15th and Lawson. Twenty years later, the regulations had become so punitive, that he stopped developing homes in Canada entirely, and focused on working in the US. To me, the outcome of regulations is the wiping out of small businesses and the centralizing of power in the hands of a few, and this centralization of power, and the sense of powerlessness over one's life which it brings about, is precisely why so many young Canadians are leaving to other countries in search a more meaningful life.

What is needed is for the province to take its, roughly 95% ownership of land and, not merely sell it or lease it off to a developer, but to auction it off to Canadian citizens who can then decide how best to capitalize that land. The municipalities, then, need to begin planning for new communities and providing utilities to those citizens, and small builders to entice them to build residential houses. Enriching only a few large developers will simply make serfs out of the residents a city is supposed to serve, and this densification push is an idealistic, pie in the sky fantasy.