Any Canadian who has visited Cuba and took the time to go beyond one of those insulated packaged beach resorts — subsidized by cheap Cuban labour — and is honest with themselves must conclude the country is an island prison inhabited with tortured souls begging to get out.
Cities like Havana are ghost towns with people.
And tightly controlled ghost towns at that. Cuba has more secret police per capita than the Stasi had in East Germany.
That’s why it seemed a miracle that thousands protested across the country recently crying out for food and freedom and suffering the highest per-capita outbreaks of COVID-19 in Central America.
And yet, many Canadians continue to romanticize the country for the simple pleasure of seeing Cuba stick it to the Americans. They don’t know the madness of the man who was willing to sacrifice every Cuban life and the outbreak of a nuclear war.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, after the Soviet Union placed ICBMs, bomber planes and transferred thousands of Soviet troops to the island, the world waited in fear for 13 anxious days. U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev finally agreed to disarm and pull their nuclear weapons from Cuba and Turkey.
When the agreement leaked out to the Cuban government, a furious Fidel sent a letter to Khrushchev demanding the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the U.S., saying the Cuban people are “…willing to sacrifice themselves for the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution.” Not that Castro asked the Cuban people whether they were willing to go along with this madness.
At that point, Khrushchev knew Castro was mentally unstable. This is the man our prime minister, who mourned his death in 2016, said, “While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante’.”
Cuba, 1958
Castro sympathizers live under the illusion that Fidel saved Cuba from an oppressive regime under President Fulgencio Batista, American capitalism and the mafia — right out of scenes from Godfather 2. As I have written before, and apologies to philosopher George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past aren’t condemned to repeat it but are condemned to having Hollywood teach it to them.
Cuba was not the basket case many Canadians believe before the Castro brothers and their pal Che Guevara took over. For a country supposedly suffering under Batista, Cuba’s economy continued to grow throughout the 1950s, with rising industrial and agricultural wages comparable to those in Europe. Workers were entitled to a one-month paid holiday and an eight-hour work day, while mothers were given six-week leave before and after childbirth. Before the revolution, the island nation had a rich literary and cultural life with 58 different daily newspapers and a capital city with more movie theatres than New York City. In the end, Batista did one thing the Castro’s never did: he won an election before taking power.
The Cuban government and Cuba defenders, such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, have always banged on about Cuba’s high literacy rates under Castro. An exaggerated claim. Literacy rates were rising from 1900 and were at 80 percent before 1959. Castro never allowed an independent confirmation of his literacy progress.
One has to ask what it means to have an educated population when most of what people read is filtered through Marxist ideology. Today Cuba has 30 universities and institutes but limited access to modern textbooks, the internet, email, international media and academic journals.
Pre-revolution Cuba enjoyed Latin America’s highest per-capita consumption of meats, fruits and vegetables, along with higher ownerships of cars, telephones and radios. Today, waiters with graduate degrees take home leftover food scraps from the tourists they serve. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the poorest of the poor were reduced to eating stray cats and dogs. Today’s standard of living ranks with Albania and Sri Lanka.
When it comes to health care, it’s a country where you don’t want to be sick. It’s common for tourists to drop off bottles of Tylenol, bandages and other over-the-country medical supplies to local clinics and hospitals. And if you have the misfortune to end up in one, be prepared to bring your own bedding, towels and soap.
Keep in mind that Cuba had a reputation for a high level of health care and education before Castro. The medical school at the University of Havana has always attracted the best students for Central and South America. As I have noted in a previous article for the National Post, by the late ’50s, the country had more doctors per capita than the U.K. and the lowest infant-mortality rate in Latin America. Today, hard currency is earned by sending doctors abroad while their families are held back to discourage defections. But the best doctors find ways to leave Cuba, where even surgeons earn only $40 a month. Those who can’t end up driving taxis to make ends meet.
What about the embargo? For starters, it’s not an embargo. The last time U.S. embargoed Cuba was during the missile crisis. The U.S. forbids American firms from doing business with Cuba, but any country can do business with Cuba and many do such as China, Italy, Spain and Canada. The Cuban government could have avoided the wrath of the U.S. government if it had negotiated a deal to compensate U.S. firms after the revolution. Castro refused and the country suffered the consequences.
Beginning of the end?
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau eventually came out making a tepid statement about Cubans deserving freedom, respect and democracy while calling for both sides to come together “in peaceful and inclusive dialogue.” That PC word “dialogue” adds a nice sense of absurdity. Even Joe Biden flatly said that Cuba is a failed state and the communism was the cause and that socialism isn’t much better.
Is this the beginning of the end for communism in Cuba, or the end of the beginning, as Winston Churchill once said during the Second World War?
For the sake of the Cuban people, let’s hope it’s the former.
The important questions of politics rarely change, we just change the way we talk about them.
Consider housing prices: in the 1970s, politicians understood that the problem was, at its most basic level, one of supply and demand. Today, it seems we only ever hear about inadequate supply. Politicians talk about the need for more houses, but they’ve stopped talking about why we need them. What happened to demand?
With starter homes in Vancouver and Toronto selling for 14 times the average income, the concern is especially acute right now, but it’s not new. In 1976, economist Gordon Soules interviewed two young Vancouver politicians for a book on rising house prices. See if you can guess who they are:
Concerned Politician 1: “First, it is essential that we relate both the local and the national housing problems to our immigration laws. Are we in fact merely trying to create new housing, as well as new employment opportunities, just to keep pace with the yearly average of 200,000 immigrants that Canada is admitting every year?”
Concerned Politician 2: “Foreign investors, many speculatively, are driving up home prices beyond the reach of British Columbians,” and in an “ideal” world “most land would be owned by the government and leased to the people.”
Surprisingly, the first quote was from Mike Harcourt, the future mayor of Vancouver and NDP premier; the second, promoting socialized real estate, was from future Social Credit premier Bill Vander Zalm. Even more surprising, there was consensus across political lines that immigration policy was a factor in rising housing prices. Vancouver’s progressive mayor Art Phillips chimed in, telling Soules: “I maintain that the primary approach to solving the housing problem in the Greater Vancouver area lies in the immediate reduction and future control of immigration.”
Sometime between then and now, we forgot about the demand side of that most basic of economic equations. In the meantime, Vancouver has added 1.5 million new residents, and house prices keep climbing. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other factors involved.
The air of unreality extends to federal politics. At the same time economists are warning us about an over-inflated housing market, and the Governor of the Bank of Canada is worrying openly that “recent rapid increases in home prices are not normal,” the federal government is planning an historically large surge in immigration.
For most of the last decade, the federal government under both Conservatives and Liberals admitted an average of 275,000 new permanent residents to Canada each year, and about twice that number of temporary residents. Now, against consistent public opinion, the Liberals are promising to raise the number to more than 420,000. That is the equivalent of adding a new Halifax every year, or a new Alberta over the next decade.
Except, of course, that with most newcomers gravitating to the largest cities, it really means more demand in the places that already have the most expensive housing markets.
At some point, we forgot about the demand side of that most basic of economic equations.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Immigration levels are not a force of nature beyond our control. Each year, the federal minister of immigration tables a “levels plan” in parliament announcing the total number of permanent residents his ministry will process that year. There is hardly any policy discussion about the optimal level inside government, and even less outside.
Considerations like housing or infrastructure or health care don’t enter into it. In its 41-page immigration levels plan for 2020, the Trudeau government didn’t mention either of these issues. Nor did it note, let alone discuss, the environmental and ecological impact of moving so many people to the one of the most carbon intensive countries in the world — a concern that once led David Suzuki to declare that “Canada is full.”
A new Public Policy Forum report by the economist and former head of the B.C. public service, Don Wright, corrects these blind spots. The report offers several ways the federal government can raise the Canadian middle-class standard of living, including by shifting “from immigration policy that is focused merely on increasing GDP to one focused on increasing GDP per capita” and by reversing the downward pressure on Canadian wages and the rising pressure on housing caused, in part, by current levels.
The report’s discussion begins, as all such discussions invariably do in Canada, with the assurance, in so many words, that the author is not Donald Trump. In a country that took public policy seriously this disclaimer wouldn’t be necessary, but this is Canada where, as Wright accurately observes, “the promoters of large immigration numbers are quick to label as racist, parochial or small-minded any questioning of larger immigration numbers.”
The accusations are nonsensical, of course. Justin Trudeau’s immigration policy in 2016 wasn’t racist because the annual level was lower than it is today, nor is the current level xenophobic because next year it will be even higher. And when Pierre Trudeau cut annual immigration in half between 1967 and 1972 and then by 60 percent between 1974 and 1978, he wasn’t being “parochial or small-minded,” it was just part of the normal fluctuations in immigration levels that used to track economic and political conditions.
Wright believes that “the optimal level of immigration” is not only “a legitimate question of public policy debate,” but it should offer “a much more nuanced set of policy ideas than ‘more people mean a bigger GDP.’”
It should, for example, include discussion of things like “GDP per capita and how income is distributed” — things that matter because they directly affect our quality of life. Things like the cost of housing, which is the single largest expense for Canadian families and determines how long they have to climb the property ladder before they can afford to settle somewhere and help build the neighbourhood relationships that are so important for personal happiness and the communities that are necessary for social solidarity.
It won’t come as a surprise to residents in Vancouver and Toronto, but it is still shocking to read that their cities are, according to a study by Demographia cited by Wright, “more unaffordable than any American city.” Of Canadian cities, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa fall into the study’s worst category of “severely unaffordable,” while Calgary is “seriously unaffordable” and the homes of lucky Edmontonians are “only moderately unaffordable.”
According to Wright, “[t]here are multiple reasons why Canada’s housing has become so unaffordable, but it defies credulity to argue that high levels of immigration will not exacerbate the growing unaffordability of housing in Canada.” This is because “[i]mmigration levels of between 400,000 and 425,000 per year (the current target of the federal government) means an additional demand for approximately 170,000 new homes each year.” And, of course, “[c]lose to 75 percent of immigrants settle in these six major cities.” Supply, meet demand.
Nowhere is it written that Canada’s population must increase, year on year, forever.
In response to sluggish real wages and rising housing prices, Wright commits Laurentian blasphemy and wonders “[c]ould it not be better in the near term to lower the level of immigration, while significantly improving support to new immigrants, giving them a better chance to more easily integrate into the economic mainstream?” He doesn’t get into specific numbers, but it is remarkable enough that he even asks the question.
Wright’s proposal is modest, the kind of plan that would have received broad bipartisan support in Canada until quite recently, and still would in most of our peer countries. It wasn’t long ago that respected figures on the left like Bernie Sanders denounced high levels of immigration as serving the interests of big business rather than domestic workers, and in 2017 progressive darling Jacinda Ardern ran on a platform of cutting immigration to New Zealand by up to 40 percent, in part to address housing pressures. (She didn’t keep her promise, but her government is once again talking about reforming post-Covid migration policy to relieve the pressure on housing, infrastructure, and the environment.)
An even more ambitious plan, one that would tackle the housing crisis head on, would aim explicitly for population stability.
Nowhere is it written that Canada’s population must increase, year on year, forever. It isn’t ordained in the constitution that Toronto and Vancouver must absorb hundreds of thousands of newcomers every year, or that their downtowns must bristle with cranes and condo towers and their suburbs sprawl a little further each year up the mountainsides, along the lakeshore, and into surrounding farmland and greenbelts. Relentless urban growth is the result of political decisions made each year in Ottawa. It is a choice, but it isn’t the only choice.
In two articles, from 2012 and 2017, Anatole Romaniuk, the former director of the Demographic Division at Statistics Canada, offered his vision of what a stable population would look like and how it would work.
Romaniuk begins by challenging the assumptions of “the populationist agenda which postulates that growing and large populations are the forces that move economies forward and project a nation’s international might.” Chasing “relevance” — one of the undefined goals of the Trudeau government’s Century Initiative — is a mug’s game. We will never come close to matching the populations of China and India and our international reputation has never have been based on our population. Besides, the government’s job is to boost domestic quality of life, not diplomats’ egos or the interests of the bankers and global management consultants advising it.
Like Wright, Romaniuk takes pains to establish that his proposal is not anti-immigration per se and certainly not anti-immigrant. Romaniuk, an immigrant himself, believes that “[a] liberal society by its very nature cannot be a closed society” and “[w]hile immigration is not a solution to all our social and economic problems, it can be a part of it.” He simply wants us to consider, probably for the first time in a generation, what is it we want immigration to do, and then design a policy to achieve it. In other words, he wants us to think of immigration policy as policy, the same way we think about taxes or research funding, rather than as a feel-good commitment without real-world effects.
Romaniuk runs through the data, well-known to most demographers and immigration experts but rarely acknowledged by our politicians and pundits, deflating the commonly assumed benefits of our current high — and the even higher proposed — annual immigration levels.
For example, multiple studies have showed that there is little, if any, link between increasing immigration and per capita GDP growth; that the earning gap between new immigrants and the Canadian-born has persisted or widened since 1980; that the poverty level of new immigrants is more than twice that of the Canadian-born (and has almost certainly gotten worse during the pandemic); and, contrary to the most popular justification — keeping our pension Ponzi scheme afloat — it has only a modest impact on population aging (according to StatCan, even the high assumption on immigration levels would only lower our average age by one year by 2036).
This is the sort of stubborn data that our politicians either ignore or dismiss in favour of inspirational stories of individual success, but which no amount of wishful optimism can refute.
Reviewing Romaniuk’s 2017 article, Dr. Roderic Beaujot of Western University suggests that it would be possible to stabilize our population through a mix of slightly higher birthrates and slightly lower, but still not insubstantial, annual immigration: specifically, “a cohort fertility of about 1.7 and a net annual immigration of about 0.6 per cent [would] produce about zero population growth in the long run.”
Such a policy would only require us to reduce permanent immigration to 225,000 a year — about the number of the late Chrétien years and still much higher than the G7 average — and would draw on recent pro-family policy proposals to modestly increase the Canadian birthrate to about where it was in 2010, or where it is now in the United States. It may even be that, by cooling the demand for housing, and thereby removing one of the reasons young Canadians often cite for putting off starting or having families, lowering immigration might itself play a small part in increasing birthrates.
Population stability alone wouldn’t solve the housing crisis. There would still be a need for some of the supply-side solutions that have been proposed, such as zoning for fewer detached houses, more infills, shared living spaces, and clearing away regulatory barriers to allow us to just build more, more, more, anywhere and everywhere.
But a future of denser, taller, more crowded, and smaller living units isn’t everyone’s idea of an affordable housing solution. So, as we work on the perennial problem of supply, perhaps we can remember a time, not long ago, when politicians talked seriously about the demand side of the equation as well.
Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, DC.
Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, DC.
