Curb immigration rates to protect the environment
Population issues have at last begun to get public attention.
From 2016 to 2021, Canada's population grew by
1.8 million. Last year, we admitted another one million people. The social pressures of such increases — shortages of housing, health services, schools and jobs — are raising concern. Yet, I have not heard one complaint of the effect they are having on the natural environment.
Canada may seem big, geographically, but even its remote Arctic and boreal regions are not immune from human impact: agriculture, forestry, fossil-fuel extraction, manufacturing, residential development, damming of rivers, fishing, recreation, pollution and climate change.
In roughly the span of my lifetime, the world human population has more than tripled, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to over eight billion now. Simultaneously, the populations of non-human life have declined, some to the point of extinction.
About 700 species are at risk in Canada, according to the Canadian Wildlife Federation. The causes are habitat loss and degradation due to human economic activity. Canada has already lost 80 per cent of its native grasslands.
Canada has an international responsibility to protect its biological diversity. It cannot discharge this responsibility when its population growth rate is twice that of other G7 countries.
Despite this, some are pushing the Century Initiative, a plan to increase Canada's population from its present 39 million to 100 million by the end of the century. This is nation-building hubris of the worst kind.
It is unethical, both globally and nationally, to bring people from countries with a lower ecological footprint into one with a higher one.
Instead, Canada should be assisting foreign governments to achieve better governance and economies so that they can retain their citizens.
Human population and economic growth have come at the expense of other forms of life, hence their decline. Ultimately, growth on a finite planet is unsustainable for humans too.
Climate change is now top of mind as an environmental crisis but, amazingly, the connection between climate and human population size has not been made — it's people after all who use fossil fuels.
We need a brave new world with fewer people in it. We need reduced birthrates in the more populous countries, which will have immediate benefits in greater family prosperity (the family economic pie shared among fewer members), and better welfare and self-fulfilment for women.
Canada must abandon immigration as a tool of the growth economy, and learn to function with the people it has, training the skilled citizens it needs, using technology to reduce labour needs, providing incentives for Canadians to do unpleasant but necessary jobs instead of unloading them on the foreign disadvantaged. Retirees, still part of the economy as consumers, can contribute to productivity by volunteering.
If we look after this planet there could be a long future for humans and non-humans.