Maximum Canada by Doug Saunders

This book's full title is Maximum Canada, Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough. Doug Saunders has his own site for this book here. He is also on Facebook

I had not realized how anti-immigrant Canada has been in the past until I read this book. However I had heard before in reading Canadian history and Canada had a hard time retaining immigrants. He says that between 1851 and 1941 Canada attracted 6.7M immigrants but lost 6.3M people to the US.

Early in our history, the British Government and the Canadian Government wanted only farmers. A lot of immigrants did not want to be farmers. Lots had skills or want to live in urban areas. One of the main reasons people moved on to the states.

Also we currently have the problem of low density. My city of Toronto has a big land area, but within the city there is much lower density of people than in other cities, say London or New York. We, with low density, good public transportation systems are difficult.

There are some interesting reviews on Amazon Canada. A couple of reviewers certainly do not like Saunders take on population need for Canada. However, I am inclined to agree with Saunders that we need more people, but we do need to manage this. Irvin Studin in the Globe and Mail gives a very thoughtful review of this book. There is another review by Charlie Smith on Straight.

Doug Saunders talks on CBC radio called The Homestretch. He will soon speak soon in Ottawa at Writers Festival . Doug Saunders speaks at Science for Peace. He was on the The Agenda with Steve Paikin talking about The Myth of the Muslim Tide. There is a short video of Doug Saunders talking at The Walrus.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.