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There are no simple answers to the immigration and housing question – CBC.ca

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On Thursday, Chrystia Freeland was asked whether Canada has an immigration problem. In her response, she suggested Canada has a housing problem.

Canada, she argued, is the most welcoming country in the world for newcomers and enjoys an economic and competitive advantage as a result. But “if we want to be a country that welcomes new Canadians — and I strongly believe that’s the right thing for all of us,” she said, “we have to build more homes faster.”

The question for the finance minister was prompted by reporting by the Canadian Press that found senior public servants at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada were briefed in 2022 about a “misalignment between population growth and housing supply.” Such a divergence between demand and supply tends to drive up prices for housing.

A woman in a red dress gestures as she speaks with reporters (not seen). Canadians flags are hung in the background.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says Canada’s history of welcoming immigrants is an economic advantage. The housing crisis risks eroding that advantage. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

But how the problem is framed — as a matter of too much immigration or too little housing, or some combination of the two — matters a lot. While it might seem like a straightforward issue of supply and demand, the question of immigration and housing defies the desire for simple answers.

As much as population growth is a factor in the cost of housing in Canada, it may be oversimplifying matters to consider it a problem of “immigration” writ large, rather than a problem with specific elements of the immigration system. It’s possible, for instance, that the federal government needs to review the exponential growth in the arrival of non-permanent residents — specifically international students and temporary foreign workers.

“When we look at the past 30 years, we can see that the inflow of new [permanent residents] has long been a significant driver of population growth. In the last year or so, inflows of [non-permanent residents] have become more pronounced and now account for a larger share of population growth,” Toni Gravelle, deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, noted in a speech last month.

Big questions about international students and workers

Immigration Minister Marc Miller has taken some steps to impose restraint on student visas. But it’s not clear that he’s done enough.

“When it comes to international students, there is some work to be done there, whether it’s on reforming the post-graduate work permits that these people get or really controlling the volume,” Miller said an interview that will air Sunday on Rosemary Barton Live.

At the same time, universities and colleges might blanch if the federal government tried to significantly restrict such a lucrative stream of enrolment — and likely would argue that they are otherwise underfunded.

In his December speech, Gravelle also raised an interesting question about the distribution of temporary work permits — specifically, whether enough are going to the sorts of workers who might help this country build more houses.

“While Canada is welcoming more newcomers than ever, only about three per cent of [non-permanent workers] work in construction,” he said. “By comparison, roughly eight per cent of the overall employed population works in construction.”

If immigration could be better harnessed to accelerate home building, supply might actually help us meet demand.

The housing shortage and the Canadian consensus

When Freeland said this week that Canada has the “social capital” to welcome immigrants, she wasn’t wrong. For more than two decades, the number of Canadians who believe there is “too much” immigration to this country have been in the minority, according to polling by Environics.

But that consensus has wobbled markedly over the past year — and that is the larger concern hanging over this debate.

When Environics asked in 2022, 69 per cent of respondents disagreed with the idea that there was too much immigration to Canada, while 27 per cent agreed. By last September, disagreement was down to 51 per cent and agreement was up to 44 per cent.

A rental availability sign showing no vacancy is pictured outside of an apartment building in B.C. on a fall day.
A rental availability sign showing no vacancy stands outside an apartment building in Vancouver, British Columbia on Monday, November 21, 2022. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

If there is any good news in that finding, it’s that the drop in enthusiasm does not seem to be based in social or cultural concerns about newcomers; among those who agreed there was too much immigration, the share who said immigration represented a threat to Canadian or Quebec culture actually dropped from 24 per cent to eight per cent. Seventy-four per cent of all respondents also still agreed that the “economic impact of immigration is positive.”

Instead, the new doubts seem almost entirely attributable to concerns about housing; those saying immigrants drive up housing prices or lead to a shortage of housing for other Canadians jumped from 15 per cent to 38 per cent.

Solving the housing problem is therefore doubly important. Canadians need to be able to live comfortably — and social cohesion could be threatened if they can’t.

The danger of scapegoating immigration

While attention turned this week to immigration and its potentially negative impact on the cost and availability of housing, a report by Desjardins released on Wednesday warned that a “sharp drop‑off” in non-permanent residents “could deepen the recession expected in early 2024.”

That underlines the difficult balancing act and trade-offs at play. The Liberals can be sure they won’t be applauded if their efforts to make housing more affordable end up being blamed for causing an economic downturn.

If one accepts the premise that higher immigration is a net-positive — economically and socially — and even a public policy imperative for Canada, then significantly curtailing immigration for the sake of the housing market risks swapping one problem for another.

But there also remains the risk that immigration will be unfairly scapegoated for a problem that would be better pinned on federal, provincial and municipal governments that have failed to ensure enough houses get built in Canada.

As unfortunate as it might be that housing concerns are creating doubts about immigration, it would be worse still if blaming immigration became a handy excuse for governments to avoid necessary investments in social housing or changes to local zoning. There would still be a case for taking such action even if this country suddenly reduced immigration to zero.

In an ideal scenario, Canada would have both markedly higher immigration and more plentiful housing. And it would be a mistake to assume the current problem can simply be blamed on one or the other.

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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