Canada is facing a number of destabilizing forces—like climate change, disinformation, and young adults never owning a home. That’s the take from an internal RCMP report called the Whole-Of-Government Five-Year Trends For Canada. The report is a “scanning exercise” on evolving risks for law enforcement to monitor. It puts the fact that many people under 35 will never own a home, on par with disinformation and climate change.
Police Worry Canada May Be Destabilized If Young People Realize They Won’t Own A Home
One of the concerns law enforcement is warning about is the impact of eroding economic conditions. Especially when it comes to young adults.
“The coming period of recession will also accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report.
Canada may have seen a pandemic economic boom, but it was largely related to rapidly appreciating real estate. Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply to young adults who saw housing get further out of reach.
“For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely to ever buy a place to live. The fallout from this decline in living standards will be exacerbated by the difference between the extremes of wealth, which is greater now in developed countries than it has been at any time in several generations,” warns the RCMP.
Wealth disparity is bad enough, but what happens when that wealth disparity is driven by shelter disparity? It’s a problem not typically seen in advanced economies at scale.
The RCMP report also includes a number of other hot button issues. Erosion in trust in the West, paranoid populism, big data harvesting, climate change, and artificial intelligence were amongst the issues they briefly mention.
Locking A Class Out of Land Ownership Has Historically Driven Instability, Ruined Economies
The report doesn’t get into the details, but the destabilizing impact of wealth polarization is a very real issue. The transfer of housing from end users (or even “mom & pop” landlords) to institutional investors results in communities being reduced into yield generating assets. As a consequence, prioritization of wealth extraction occurs without regard for long-term sustainability, leaving communities vulnerable to shock.
This was a destabilizing factor in some notable points in history. For example, there’s the Irish Potato Famine and the resulting Land Wars. In a more extreme example, there was the Chinese Land Reform Movement. In both cases, the extraction pushed people to a point where they had little to lose—and people with no vested interest in an economy tend to become liabilities.
Once again, those were extreme examples the Mounties are worried could brew over time. A more immediate issue is one capitalism originally sought to address land hoarding and productivity. Adam Smith, credited with creating capitalism’s foundational works, criticized the state’s focus on taxing labor over land, which creates a natural land monopoly. The result is a gilded class that extracts the wealth created from labor, draining a nation of its ability to grow productivity. Canada is already approaching a lost decade as a result of its over reliance on real estate.
