Title:  What's the big idea?: Visiting Canada's largest cities, have you ever said 'boy, there just aren't enough people here?'

Author:  Randall Denley

Source:  The Ottawa Citizen

Date:  November 6, 2005

Questioning the god called growth is about as popular as flatulence in church, but it's Sunday, always a good day for heresy.

Conventional wisdom tells us growth is both good and inevitable. We want a larger population, bigger cities and a continuously enlarging economy. These outcomes are so obviously desirable that all three levels of government have made fuelling growth their top priority.

The federal government is doing its bit by raising next year's immigration target by 10,000 people. If we are able to admit up to 255,000 new immigrants, we will help "secure the economic and social prosperity of our country for this and future generations," Immigration Minister Joe Volpe assures us.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is another growth enthusiast. His government is planning for Ontario to grow by 4.4 million people during the next 25 years, an increase of more than one-third. Most of them are expected to live in the Greater Toronto area.

In Ottawa, growth means more of every kind of service the city provides, every year. We must continuously hire more police and paramedics, for example, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on light rail, to move all those new people downtown.

The problem with all of this is that the underlying premise -- growth is good -- doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Continuous growth consumes finite natural resources at a reckless rate, damages the environment, destroys the quality of life in our cities and will be ultimately unachievable.

In planning to continuously expand its population, Canada is trying to outrun depopulation, a demographic trend that is affecting almost every major western country. Only the United States has a fertility rate adequate to replace existing population. That's 2.1 children per woman. Canadian women have 1.5. There is no realistic hope of increasing fertility rates. Couples have fewer children because of the high cost of raising them, the need for two incomes and the ease with which abortion and birth control allow people to limit family size. It's a trend unlikely to change.

We've been trying to overcome our low birth rate with the most aggressive immigration program of any G8 country. If the goal is to get more workers, our immigration system is a poor tool for doing it. In Canada, we are told the immigration program is a vital source of workers, yet of 235,000 people admitted last year, only 55,000 are skilled workers or entrepreneurs. The rest are spouses, family members or refugees.

Some say we need even more immigrants, and raise the fear that failing to do so will mean China and India will pass us on the economic racetrack. Let's not kid ourselves, we aren't even in the race, so losing it isn't a concern. Those two countries are using their vast populations to lever dramatic economic growth. We don't have a vast population, and immigration won't give us one.

But wouldn't an end to economic growth mean poverty all around?

In a word, no. When you think about it, GDP growth is only essential if the population is growing, too. The economic pie has to keep increasing if it is shared among more and more people every year. If the number of people is decreasing, the pie can too. Even in a no-growth economy, things will not be static. Some areas will always be growing, others shrinking.

Growth skeptics got some rare support this week, when Ontario's environment commissioner made the modest suggestion that the province's population expansion plans would be bad for the environment. The points made by commissioner Gord Miller are only common sense, although he has been accused of being anti-immigrant and anti-development. If you've toured the vast sprawl of southern Ontario recently, you'll know that growth can't be achieved without destroying natural areas. And the provincial government wants to add 2.4 million more people in the GTA alone.

Why would a province that can barely generate enough power for current needs want to add so much more demand? The solution is more nuclear plants, although they are astoundingly expensive and we still haven't solved the problem of disposing of nuclear waste.

We see the negative effects of growth around us every day. More people means more cars, more roads, higher taxes and more crowding everywhere we go. When visiting Canada's largest cities, have you ever said "boy, there just aren't enough people here?" The federal government pretends that more immigrants can be directed to rural areas and small cities. Not likely. Recent immigration destination patterns make it pretty clear immigrants want to go to big cities where there is the perception jobs will be easier to find, and they have the support of others from their homeland. A federal policy position isn't going to change that.

Some argue the effects of growth can be minimized with higher density development and use of more transit. It's true, up to a point, but like so much of the unrealistic national growth plan, it counts on people acting quite differently than they always have in the past.

No Canadian politician will even begin an intelligent discussion about growth because it would immediately open him to accusations of being anti-immigrant, anti-progress and anti-business. There is another factor, too. Growth has kept so much money flowing into federal coffers that annual surpluses in the billions have become routine. At all three levels of government, planning for all the growth has been a growth industry in itself. Why would they want to give up a concept that has served them so well?

Instead of putting more effort into yesterday's solutions, Canada ought to be taking a more realistic view of the world that lies ahead of us. That would mean re-evaluating such traditional markers of success as growth in population and gross domestic product. It would also mean reassessing the value of immigration. Canada still has 6.7 per cent unemployment and an economy in which Canadian-born university graduates have a tough time getting a foothold, and yet we wring our hands because a foreign professional can't step off the plane and find work here.

Growth is an insatiable demon, and a guarantor of constant instability as our governments and individual Canadians chase a continuously moving target. When you really think about it, and we ought to, you have to ask, what is the point of our blind allegiance to growth?

Contact Randall Denley at 596-3756 or by e-mail, rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com

Title:  Blinded by promises (letter to the editor)

Author:  H. F. de Witt
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
Date:  November 13, 2005

This was an eloquent article by Randall Denley on our master folly. I have for some years tried to argue in a similar vein, though of course with little hope of making an impression. The public is blinded by the promises tied to increased growth, and woe to us all if said growth should ever approach zero, let alone go into negative territory. That a halt to growth could mean a balanced lifestyle enabling us to live in harmony with our total environment seems to escape us.

Part of this uncritical acceptance of so-called "essential growth" is the fact that most of us can, of course, not recall the 1950s or 1960s, when our quality of life exceeded that of today, even as we had a lot fewer gadgets to store in sundry corners of our homes. How many of us recall that the computer was to give us more leisure time than we would know what to do with, while doing away with most of the paper of our bureaucracies? What about one other yardstick, namely drivers' road behaviour or frequency and duration of traffic jams? Not exactly signs of progress, are they?

More of us are aware what habitat destroyed or taken away from wild species does to their continued existence. With capital resources eventually disappearing, renewable ones would by definition have to be proportional to our total consumption. A puzzle to me is how the necessary ingredient of growth in population numbers and/or our per-capita consumption can continue in view of essential resources being finite.

Oh well, I'm sure our politicians and industrial minds will have an answer.

Title:  Canadians will pay a price for growth (letter to the editor)

Author: Jon Legg
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
Date:  November 13, 2005

Congratulations to columnist Randall Denley (What's the Big Idea; Nov. 6^th) for criticizing the conventional wisdom that growth is good and inevitable. He could have added a national argument and a global one.

Nationally, our present immigration policy is formulated for the short-term benefit of the ruling political party, not for the long-term benefit of Canada. A federal party that is perceived as pro-immigration ensures that all so-called ethnic ridings will vote in its favour. Daniel Stoffman's book Who Gets In? (2002) and Martin Collacott of the Fraser Institute and others have shown this. However, as Mr. Denley points out, the quality of life of all (including new Canadians) suffers as our larger cities continue to grow.

Globally, many of the world's resources have been depleted beyond recovery, and human waste products continue to be released into the atmosphere, the oceans and the land with possibly irreparable damage. This is due to overpopulation and an overly high average rate of consumption. If Canada continues deliberately to increase its own population, Canadians will pay the price in more damage to our environment and lower quality of life.

Elements of both the political left and right favour high immigration numbers for different reasons: it's generous to share our bounty and it keeps the labour wage rates down, respectively. However, polls show that an increasing number of middle-of-the-road Canadians question the wisdom of high volumes of immigration. But all federal parties preach growth, for electoral reasons. As usual, the people are ahead of their "leaders."