Canadian Banks Financing Mass Immigration Lobby

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the Canadians for a Sustainable Society website (sustainablesociety.com). It is republished here with permission of the author. 

Canadian banks – Bank of Montreal, ScotiaBank and TD Bank – are funding the mass-immigration advocacy group Century Initiative, whose goal is to increase Canada’s population by 60 million people by 2100. Why would banks support this lobby group? Because the resulting housing inflation – home price increases – produces scores of billions of dollars annually in profit for them.

The policy of mass immigration has added 12 million people to Canada’s population and driven the construction of an additional 3 or 4 million housing units over the past 40 years. Of course, this leads to urban sprawl and congestion and a host of other social negatives, but more critically for banks, this rolling environmental disaster comes with millions of new mortgages. Additionally, the inevitable housing cost increases means all mortgages are much larger than they would be if housing demand were not so strong.

So win – win; if you are a bank, developer or speculator. For the rest of us, not so much. The money this parasitic overhead takes out of the system comes directly from the pockets of Canadians because housing inflation adds no real value. It is, in fact, a tax on Canadians.

Banks should not be allowed to promote policies which generate huge profits for themselves at the expense of Canadians and the environment. They are imposing an unseen, unauthorized and unregulated tax that Canadians cannot avoid paying. It also boosts the cost of all productive businesses as real estate costs and rents are baked into every business. While housing costs increase, there is less household money to spend on other necessities and individual quality of life declines.

Are these banks also funding politicians to promote a larger population? This has to stop!

A responsible government would not allow the banking sector to write blank cheques to themselves from the accounts of Canadians but this is effectively what is happening.

How big is this scam?

Compare the scale of housing inflation profit potential to other sectors which routinely get the attention of the media. Do banks and their confederates make off with all of these profits? Certainly not, but they do rake off a juicy portion. As this graph shows, no other industry comes close to the scale of the real estate inflation industry:

Housing inflation is non-productive business, and may be very profitable business if you are on the right side of it – but not if you are paying for it as most Canadians are.

Below we can see what the impact is on one bank’s revenue over 15 years. Add in all the other banks and mortgage companies and developer and speculator profits, and it is clear housing inflation is the most profitable industry (or scam) in the country taking scores of $billions from the pockets of Canadians annually.

Housing prices would have increased just marginally over the past 40 years had Canada adopted balanced immigration, which means about the same number of people entering as leaving.

The mass immigration policy was put in place to drive the housing inflation juggernaut, not to make Canada a better place to live. Studies also show negative economic impacts for Canadians as well but then, the welfare of the growth lobby has trumped the well-being of Canadians and health of the land for many decades. Yes, they are that powerful.

It was also put in place to provide cheap compliant labour for highly subsidized cheap labour employers and inevitably to benefit the ruling Liberals and their “rivals” the Conservatives as they vie for the loyalty of various ethnic groups.

Is there a day in your life when you didn’t read or hear the corporate media advocating for more growth?

Greed partners with complacency to produce disaster

While the banks, developers, cheap labour employers and speculators deliberately steered this policy, the only reason it endured was the acquiescence of the boomer generation who were too comfortable with the windfall profits on their homes to shake the tree. That these profits came straight out of the pockets and futures of their children didn’t seem to penetrate their consumer-first consciousness.

Was the great housing inflation scam illegal? Probably not in Canada, but in a country with a responsible, non-corrupt government it certainly would have been.

Will Canada get such a government in the future? It’s up to all of us to try now that the edge of the lid has been pried off the mass-immigration, endless growth scam. Identification of a problem is the first step along the path to fixing it. The second step is getting the word out.

Please pass this along, especially to your politicians and the media who have enabled this travesty through so many years of denial.