The Death of Grass

When was the last time you were sereved a meal with bread and butter on the side, and were tempted to say, "Never mind the rest of it. Just bring me more of this butter." It may have been a while, but I'd be surprised if it hadn't happened to you. Not all butter is created equal, and were I a higher-end diner, no doubt I would be enjoying dairy delectables on a level with the kind I was served at Rumours on Thursday night on a daily basis. It went nicely with the Doukhbor wedding borscht that you can get everywhere in Grand Forks, and it should, because butter (and cream) are the not-so secret ingredients of Doukhbor borscht. (The beet, in contrast, you throw out before serving. My kind of people.) People, we need to talk about Grand Forks. It's not just the place that my Dad ended up in because a particle board plant was hiring after the Port Alice pulp mill invited him to compete for his own job in the black year of 1982. It's also a horror story. One that could easily have a happy ending.

Braking into the Curve, 2: Immigration to Canada is Not a Solution

i)

 In the year 2000, twenty percent of Canadians were under 14, 10% were over 65. In 2035, 20% of Canadians will be over 65, 15% will be under 14. That's not a formula for a robust economy, or much of anything else.(1)

ii) Last time, I showed you some projections for future Canadian population totals. I took the low estimate as most likely. Why? Because it is the most likely. For example, this projection, which was made in 2012, showed the Canadian population at 35,729,000 in 2015. The January 1 2015 total now out is 35,702,000.   This sort of thing happens often enough that, were I a cynical man, I would be tempted to suggest that fears of overpopulation are inflating the numbers. 

So let us take it that population growth will have virtually stalled out by this time at somewhere below 40 millions.(2) All of that growth will be coming from immigration.

So how many immigrants can we expect? On its face, this is a policy decision. We set the numbers, they come. Living in Canada is awesome. In reality, check out the sharp year-to-year fluctuations, which reflect recession years. Immigrants are rational.

As far as projections go, there seems to be a trend towards optimism, again. The 2014 immigration action plan for 2014 called for a low intake of 250,000, high intake of 265,000, with a target of 261,000. The actual total was 258,953. 

The federal government's immigration plan for 2015 is set at a low of 260,000, and a high of 285,000. Will we underperform again? Check back next year --but notice that I just moved the goal posts here, from the net immigration rate to the immigration rate. People leave Canada, too. Your buddy, Mike from Canada? He's in L.A. now. Statscan thinks that the net Canadian emigration rate in 2012 was 47,100. So knock the Canadian population growth curve negative --soon. Of course, now I'm being the pessimistic one, since if you cut that many people from "above the red line" up in graph ii), the Canadian population growth rate would already be negative. 

Why do we have to worry about the future of immigation?  Immigration to Canada is sensitive to economic opportunity. Note the dips in the chart below.  People are not going to come if there are no jobs. In fact, it is conceivable that they will start leaving. Note the way the chart flirts with the floor in the 1890s? People might have like Canada back in ragtime days

But they liked America better.

What happens if, in the future, the Canadian population growth rate goes negative harder and more quickly than we currently estimate? Well, it's not going to be good news for pensions and eldercare, especially given how much we depend on immigrants to look after our parents for us. (Guilty, and do I mean "guilty.") As I suggested last time, there's a chance that it'll cost you your job, too.

Does all of this sound pessimistic? It shouldn't, because we've been here before, and we've gotten out of this before.

 Somehow, we managed to shift our foot from the brake to the gas pedal between 1945 and 1961. And, no, it wasn't the war, at least, not directly. The birth rate continued to accelerate through the 1950s. Presumably, then, it was the indirect effects of the war. Which is great, because to avert either a long-drawn out, low-level, endemic fiscal and health crisis, or a short and sharp one, we need to find the gas pedal again, and it would be nice to do it without having to fight a world war. Wars are bad. 

1) Unfortunately, these numbers come to us from the  Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision and World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision. and the Population Division tends to overestimate future population growth trends.

2) Per StatsCan: "the low-growth scenario is defined by the following assumptions: a Canadian total fertility rate that reaches 1.53 births per woman in 2021/2022 and remains constant thereafter; a Canadian life expectancy that reaches 85.9 years for males and 87.1 years for females in 2062/2063; interprovincial migration based on the trends observed between 1991/1992 and 2010/2011; a national immigration rate that reaches 0.5% in 2022/2023 and remains constant thereafter; an annual number of non-permanent residents (Canada) that reaches 733,600 in 2014 and remains constant thereafter; a national net emigration rate of 0.16%.

Hair on Fire: The Decline and Wait For It of the Educational Complex State

Tonight, because a storm was in the forecast, I took the bus to the University of British Columbia's "Irving K. Barber Learning Centre."* forcing me to walk the maze of cordoned off routes through ongoing construction projects between bus loop and, uhm, "Learning Centre."

Or not, as the case may be. As an old man, I am inclined to curse these latter days, and suspect them to be as loose and ready to fail as my joints or my bowels. My enthusiasms have become strange, my judgement suspect.

I do not like what they have done to my university. But I think I have something more here than the rambling free association of my own aging (I have, for example, no hair to set on fire). I returned, not through the quiet off-streets of the designated cycle route, but down the West 19th-Dunbar-West Broadway bus route that I have been taking, on and off, since I first enrolled at the university in September of 1982. This gave me the opportunity to see some commercial space that is not where I work, dressed up for Christmas.

Or not, as the case may be. I wasn't racing a supervillain in a fun, if cheesy, television show shot in Vancouver, but the lack of Christmas decorations is not restricted to the store at which I work. They are spotty, limited to a few neighbourhoods, probably the ones with mroe energetic business associations. It is certainly no lack of inclination for the season that is holding my company back.  It's our current paid hours target, about which subject I would be more discrete if my corporate board were to show up to help me pull dairy skids off the delivery truck with an unpowered handjack. (Though such is the way of things that they would be shocked, just shocked, to know that such things were happening, and the blame would fall upon my boss, or my boss's boss, because what else is middle management for?) 

As for confirmation of my suspicion that it is lack of time and energy, and not a War on Christmas,, I will note that it is pretty much the chain stores that are falling down on the job here. (To be fair, the Subway down the street as a strand of Christmas lights up in the window.)

So that's the symptom, the gesture of the hand at the idea that there is something larger going on here. Now let's take a walk through campus.   

Birth Crisis in Grocery Retail?

Last two times I did this, I was taking hard aim at the way that Hostess Frito-Lay was leaving money on the table with an excess of sheer stupid.

This, I'm more sympathetic about. This is a shot in an ice cream novelties section window of a stand-up freezer display case on a hot Saturday afternoon. There's a case to be made for it being empty. Running out of things happens, this is the time of the day and season when you expect to run out of ice cream, and at some point, it is physically impossible to do more.

But, the translucent plastic flaps at the front of the empty displays are the spring loaded plates at the back of a self-facing display installation. Facing builds sales, but the display takes up space that could be used to stock more product in the first place. Has the tradeoff really been costed out?

Of course not.

Smells Great Around Here: On Demand

This post is brought to you by this spring's general and local trend of a year-over-year decline in retail sales, which is making it hard for me to enjoy the perhaps-excessive benefits that I've finally qualified for, given the risk of a seniority bump due to "cost cutting measures in a challenging retail market." 

I know: hard to tell a business plan from a suicide note these days.

So, anyway, the title is a reference to Nirvana's 1991 "Smells Like Teen Spirit," implying that there's not that many teenagers around here. You may have heard of the song. In fact, I'm guessing to the point where I ought not play it straight.

But it's a void in my mind. I'm not sure why, because knowing stuff is hard. That's even true of what should be the most obvious thing that you can know, such as what your customers want.