Filip Matous

Canada's fertility rate just hit another all time low of 1.26, and my province (BC) came in at an appalling 1.00, the lowest in Canada. For context, to avoid population decline, the FR needs to be 2.2+ While there are many reasons for this, and it's a complex issue, it's not exactly shocking that Canada's least affordable province is also its least reproductive. The bottom line is that when policymakers endlessly prop up a stratospheric housing bubble - largely to the benefit of older demographics - they are creating a world where only the most accomplished (or more accurately, most privileged) youth have the luxury of forming a household and building a family. But I think they're also playing with fire, wittingly or otherwise. When you game the economy in such a way that young Canadians can never actually win on merit - they can only grind out basic survival by themselves, or get help from their privileged parents (if they have any) - you create the conditions for societal decay. As a result, BC has become a de facto aristocracy. You're either born into the owner class, or the wage-earner class. There is no way to cross the chasm. It's the owner class that gets to form households, grow a family, have leisure activities, buy assets, and grow wealth. Wage-earners will have to share rented properties with other earners. Few will have children, because they won't be able to have housing security. And the smart ones will simply leave. This hollowing out has been occurring for some time now, and the pandemic only accelerated it into overdrive. This is why BC has one of the lowest fertility rates on planet Earth, let alone in Canada. While your average shortsighted realtor or delusional Boomer is incapable of understanding that this is cyclical, and can't last forever, they can be forgiven for holding that view based on how long BC's (and Canada's) respective governments have insisted in maintaining this status quo, at the expense of its young, and at the expense of real productivity. But if we look around the world, we see countries that have long since had their housing bubbles burst - with immense social ramifications for letting them run up in the first place. Two examples come to mind, that being Japan - whose nominal housing prices have only JUST recovered since the implosion of their bubble in 1990... and also Spain, whose bubble burst in 2008, and has not yet recovered. Japan's population has since aged to the point where there are 4 adult diapers sold for every 1 infant diaper. Once thriving communities around the country are now abandoned ghost towns where houses are literally sold for ~$10K USD, or even $0 in some cases. Spain similarly still reels from the impacts of its prior excesses, seeing unemployment rise to nearly 30%(!) in the years following its RE collapse. Even now, its UE is still ~12%, which is well into severe recession territory by Canadian standards. Some version of this is undoubtedly Canada's future, unless we are humble enough to recognize this, and bold enough to do what's necessary to avoid the worst case scenario. Even so, it may be too late by this point. If we don't give our young people a future - a game they can actually win - we will secure an outcome where nobody has a future. This isn't speculation, it's grade 3 math.