this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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No we don't. You're buying the capitalist dogma that says infinite growth at any cost. Canada could shrink to 8 million people, like Austria. There would be no problem with that whatsoever.
The issue is that shrinking the population over a short period of time (and I mean more than 10% a generation) means that you have a lack of young people to take care of older people. And that's ignoring all the capitalism issues that come with all this.
Not every young person is willing to spend the majority of their free time taking care of their parents. Hell, most people aren't willing to do that more than once or twice a week, yet once you get past 70, a lot people need constant care. That's the original point of elderly homes. Of course, those homes are just plain shit and closer to cruel and unusual torture than actually a form of care (especially here in Ontario). And that's not to mention that occupancy is so tight that there's a wait list on them.
Then there's the fact that if our population drops too quickly, we'll have massive holes in essential services as well. There's already a massive hole in all blue-collar work as it stands as people would rather go into the service industry than skilled labour. And while pay is an issue, this is a problem in the States as well, where pay is far better. It's to the point that they've legalized child labour in several places just to make up for the shortfall.
Population decline is an easy way to destroy society, even ignoring capitalist needs.
But it's paradoxical. You need population increase to support increasing costs, yet increasing population creates a strain on the finite resources of the planet.
I acknowledge you said this ignoring the capitalism issues, but if you didn't ignore it then it wouldn't really be an issue. We have the wealth to handle this if we had the political courage to force an equitable society.
Believe it or not, Canada was once a population much lower than 40 million people and we managed just fine. The idea that populations cannot contract is a harmful concept because it forces acceptance of the paradox that we can infinitely grow in a finite world. And this always relies on the use of technology to overcome this. So, instead of reducing the population to the point where automobiles wouldn't need to be electric, we increase the population and try and find green solutions.