Herschel Hardin, January 6, 2025
Even supporters of Canadians for a Sustainable Society and others preoccupied with population matters need comic relief once in a while, and what better comic relief than a satirical fable about a city whose residents refuse to allow its population to grow?
And as in all good fables, there’s a serious underlying point to the story….or, in this case, several serious underlying points.
The book’s title is Jack in Pemberland, after the hidden city, Pemberland, in the Cayoosh Range in British Columbia. Pemberland not only has a population limit (of 100,000), but its folks are determined to keep it that way.
The City of Pemberland has other advantages. The cost of housing is so inexpensive that nobody has to even think about it. The residents also have all the doctors and nurses they need without having to take them away from other places.
The genre, for those who are interested, is “magical realism.” Strange is it may sound, it’s the “realism” that, in the end, grabs the reader most. You can’t read Jack in Pemberland without feeling in your bones, and in the limbic system of your brain, how counterproductive endlessly bulking up our population is.
How I came to write the book is a story in itself.
A bit more than 20 years ago, because of global warming, I began to question Canada’s ramping up of immigration that had begun in the 1990s. Canada was a northern country whose homes needed to be heated over cold winters. We were also a high-energy-use country generally. Did it make sense, in the circumstances, to bring in an increasingly large number of people, thereby adding to that high per capita CO2 burden?
The cost of housing around me (I’m in Greater Vancouver) had also begun to take off, right into the stratosphere, largely because of the inflated number of people coming into the area. This eventually became a full-blown crisis. The value of land in itself, improvements aside, reflected this pressure most of all. Vancouver‘s housing was suddenly the second least affordable in the world, after Hong Kong (and is currently third, after Sydney). The effect, especially for low-income people and especially when it came to buying a house or even a condo was punishing.
There were other repercussions. It meant that an already serious inequality in society was becoming further entrenched, with those who didn’t own a home and couldn’t afford to buy falling yet further behind unless they had family to back them financially. They were facing a double whammy: The price of buying was heading upwards higher and higher, and so, however, were rents, making it impossible to put together a down-payment and get into the market to begin with.
At the same time, the pressure to build more and more housing as quickly as possible, with high rise after high rise – build, baby, build! – was destroying community planning, pushing the city of Vancouver in particular to the tipping point. Vancouver’s unique character and quality of life, that had made it one of the most livable cities in the world, was incrementally, but no less relentlessly, being sacrificed.
The more I looked into it, the more I discovered. The most revealing of those discoveries had to do with the supposed rationale for inflating the immigration numbers – that it was needed for economic reasons. This proved to be a fiction. The opposite was in fact happening: The true measure of prosperity is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, and among OECD countries Canada was inexorably losing ground. Particularly damning was the OECD prediction for GDP per capita growth in the future where Canada, in both the intermediate term and the long term, was ranked 38th of 38 OECD members, or dead last.
There appeared to be no understanding in the federal government of how labour markets worked to meet needs without resorting to artificially induced population growth. Instead, as even some bankers finally came to realize, Canada was caught in a “population trap” that was counterproductive.
The most egregious strands of the government’s policy, the loosening of restrictions for temporary foreign workers and the trade in foreign students, were administrative fiascos in themselves.
Mulling all this over, I decided to make the argument for dramatically cutting back on the immigration numbers, at least until the country had caught up with the backlog in housing, estimated by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation at 3.5 million units.
Something over and above the housing crisis troubled me as well. The purported economic rationale for the inflated immigration levels was a neo-liberal one which disregarded our prior obligations to our fellow citizens, particularly our younger generation and particularly on the matter of affordable housing. In effect, our primary obligations to each other, as Canadian citizens, could go hang. This was consistent with Justin Trudeau’s own musing about Canada as a post-national state, the perfect neo-liberal cover.
Forget, for the moment, that even in neo-liberal terms, the strategy was a misconceived disaster.
Being a left-winger, I also paid attention, in my argument, to the failure of the political left in Canada. It was the left which should have been taking Trudeau on over his neo-liberal thinking and the resulting immigration numbers. For the political left in Canada, however, questioning anything about immigration, even the excessive numbers and their impact on the affordability of housing and on reinforcing inequality, was simply taboo.
Contrary to advice of colleagues, I included as well a final section on the global threat of just too many people on the planet, an issue in which I was taking more and more interest and which brought me back to my original, ecological concern – global warming and planetary survival. With the benefit of hindsight, I was glad I left that section in..
Global population growth was also where the dystopian push of illegal immigration was coming from.
I ended up with a 16,000-word essay, more than 15,000 words longer than any newspaper would take. There was, after all, a lot to cover. I posted it on my personal website, where
you can access it, at https://www.herschelhardin.ca/commentaries/politics/timetostart.htm.
The trouble with a 16,000 word essay is that few people these days will read something that long, even if my website had a large following, which it doesn’t. I did manage to get an excerpt, largely about housing and Vancouver, posted by Inroads, an online Canadian journal of opinion. However, word-length and difficulty of access to major media were not the critical problems in effecting change. Several people, largely economists, had written shorter, also critical, pieces on the issue, some appearing in think-tank journals but some, also, in the Globe and Mail. The Globe itself, editorially, was raising questions.
At the same time, Douglas Todd, a leading Vancouver Sun columnist, had for several years been writing well-researched and probing articles critical of the inflated immigration numbers, articles which also publicized other critical work and opinions on the issue.
Government policy, however, wasn’t changing, even in the face of changing public opinion. That was the problem.
Faced with this dilemma, I said to myself, “Time for some lateral thinking.” Were there other ways to approach the subject? The idea of a fable somehow came into my head. Jack in Pemberland is the result, complete with cutting satire of the powers that be, what one reader called “funny and irreverent,” which it is, but also “a wee bit scurrilous in places.” All the better.
And stories do indeed work differently than argument and analysis. As author Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) put it, “Stories are far more potent…than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. … Ideas come and go, stories stay.”
I can at least guarantee that once you’ve read Jack in Pemberland, it will stay with you in just that fashion, plus the fun as a bonus. You’ll remember how Pemberlandians came together to keep their population below the 100,000 ceiling. You’ll learn, too, how the Pemberland labour market works so that there are plenty of doctors and nurses to go around, and learn as well why housing is so inexpensive…all through the zany, colourful characters Jack meets in his adventures.
The task now is to make people aware of the book and its rollicking tale. For a summary and links to ordering the book, please go to https://www.herschelhardin.ca/jack.htm. If you enjoy it, as other readers have, please talk it up with your friends and your social-media networks. You can also write a review for whatever online bookseller you acquired your copy from (and, of course, you can also order the book at a bookstore).
Jack in Pemberland, a fable for our times!
You can reach Herschel at herschel@herschelhardin.ca.