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We live in a dangerous world. Canada needs to bulk up
That means we need to get building – more housing, more transit and a more robust defence policy. In other words, we need to get too big to push around. (File Photo: Jonathan Letniak/Unsplash)
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Canada often feels small. The landmass is gigantic, but we’re mostly clustered in a few metropolitan areas along the border. We’re a G7 country, so we have one of the largest economies on Earth. Our population, well, it’s not exactly large. But it’s not small either. Canada has crossed the 40 million threshold, and we continue to grow.
Still, in a world increasingly defined by conflict between great powers like China and the United States, if you’re not big, you might as well be small. When global political winds blow, we can do little more than take shelter.
Taking shelter has been an easy strategy for a long time. After all, our neighbour and primary trading partner is the leader of the post-war liberal international order. Or it was. The president’s increasingly unhinged trade war and annexation threats suggest that Canada can’t count on the benevolent hegemon for protection anymore.
With America seemingly uninterested in maintaining its position as leader of the free world, Canada needs to get serious about its place in the new world order. As do our allies. The free nations of the world should outgrow the autocracies.
That means we need to get building – more housing, more transit and a more robust defence policy. In other words, we need to get too big to push around.
100 million Canadians?
Canada has a vast geography and abundant resources. What we lack is people. It’s something that visionary leaders like Wilfrid Laurier thought about. More recently, University of Toronto professor Irvin Studin popularized the idea of setting a concrete target of 100 million Canadians while writer Doug Saunders argued for “Maximum Canada.”
A group of people from business, academic, and political circles formed the Century Initiative to promote having 100 million Canadians by 2100. It has become a magnet for credit and criticism for the idea. But, as Andrew Coyne recently argued, Canada is already well on track to reach that target.
There are major advantages to being a large economy. Studin cast the argument in geopolitical terms: a larger population would give us more weight in global affairs. He noted – ominously – that this isn’t entirely new thinking:
“Many have forgotten that much of the original populating motive of the federal government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had a clear sovereignty motive (yes, a strategic motive) vis-à-vis potential American encroachment into Canadian territory (particularly in the West),” he wrote.
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Large economies have more geopolitical sway, which may not seem important in a world where we peacefully live under America’s security umbrella, but matters a lot when that guarantee becomes unreliable. It also gives you the resources to defend yourself, which is particularly challenging for a large landmass like Canada.
This view has proved influential lately. Canada’s population grew by about six million people between 2014 and 2024, in part due to the government’s decision to boost permanent immigration to 500,000 annually, and from an influx in non-permanent residents. I think it’s fair to say the results have been mixed.
A troublesome trend
The impact of rapid growth on housing prices has been undeniable and has stoked frustrations across the country.
The trouble is, we took a shortcut. We increased the rate of population growth without putting in place the basic building blocks of a growing country, most notably, housing. Consider figure 1, which I like to refer to as the Chart of Doom.
The figure is from a paper I co-authored for the Macdonald Laurier Institute in 2023. The math hasn’t changed since. Canada builds around 200,000 housing units per year – just like we did in the early 1970s, when we had around half as many residents and far slower population growth.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. estimates that we’ll have a housing supply gap of 3.5 million units by 2030. We need to double home building at a bare minimum. Politicians across the spectrum agree in concept, but few have had the political will to implement all of the necessary reforms.
It’s not just housing, though. Transit construction in major cities has become slow and expensive, inter-city transportation between cities is often sparse, slow and unreliable. It shouldn’t be hard to get from Toronto to Ottawa or Montreal for a morning meeting. We can change that by embracing the new push to build high-speed rail from Toronto to Montreal, with new estimates suggesting it could move up to 21 million passengers annually by 2050.
Northern communities are often cut off seasonally by poor infrastructure and generally have poor year-round connectivity. We also have a distressed health-care system and cash-starved universities. In short, we’re not able to absorb the large numbers of people that would be required to really build out the country.
We also need more and better trade-promoting infrastructure so that we’re not so reliant on the United States. While the Trans Mountain pipeline was expensive and contentious, it is an example of how we can diversify our trading patterns with the right infrastructure.
We need to defend ourselves
Rebuilding our shrinking military would not only deter potential aggression from adversaries in the Arctic, but also would allow us to project strength. In an increasingly dangerous world, we should be willing to pay the cost of maintaining a free society.
None of this would be cheap, of course. We’d need a major national infrastructure push as well as an aggressive defence industrial policy. We can hide and hope things blow over, or we can bulk up and stop getting pushed around.
It’s been a while since we have done big things, but we’ve done it before – whether it’s building the railroad or the canal systems that connect the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. We had the world’s fourth largest navy by the end of the Second World War. We’ve punched above our weight in the past. We can do it again.
This doesn’t mean that we should turn inward. In fact, we’d be well advised to deepen ties with other allies. Geopolitical uncertainty has shown us that we can’t always count on free trade to exist in practice, but history and economic theory are clear on the benefits of trade – especially for a resource-rich country like Canada. If America wants to trade less with us, we should trade more with our other allies. Trading is in our DNA. We should continue to embrace that role, albeit with less dependence on one customer.
Still, we need to be able to stand on our own two feet. We need to have the manufacturing capacity to do the basics. We need at least some capacity to build bombs, produce vaccines and keep the lights on. Growing our country and economy will help on all these fronts.
Make immigration popular again
We should continue to press to attract the best and the brightest from around the world – much like post-war America did. If they’re no longer interested, that’s a major opportunity for Canada. Uncertainty over U.S. immigration policy combined with a general sense of American decline might push some Canadians who might have otherwise moved to Silicon Valley or New York to stay put. Anecdotally, a friend was recently offered a tenure-track job at a well-known American university. Had the offer came six weeks earlier, they might have accepted. It didn’t seem like a great time to move to America, and Canada, too, has excellent universities, so they accepted a Canadian offer instead.
Canadians are starting to think more seriously about geopolitics. We’re concerned about how our own lives will be impacted by tariffs, or civil unrest in the United States, or global conflicts. One of the best ways to adapt to a world where great powers might decide to push around middle powers is to get too big to push around. Not just in population, but in an economic and military sense.
Getting pushed around by mutually destructive tariffs could create some slack in our economy – or worse, a deep recession. We should use that slack to build the things that we need to survive, and the things that can help us thrive. Better that than huddling along the border and hoping that history continues to ignore us.
Building a larger, more muscular Canada can allow us to become a bulwark against tyranny. With America stepping back, it’s more important than ever that Canada bulks up. That means getting more shovels in the ground, much faster. It’s time to build everything, everywhere, all at once so that we can grow our economy and population and reach our full potential.
This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
