In Carneys neuer Weltordnung besteht die Chance Kanadas darin, ein Brotkorb zu sein

The pockets where the majority of the people live are unlike the great majority of the land in the country. I grew up in the „near north“ Ontario and southerners have no idea of the scale. Most of them really don’t. It is an implicit assumption, I think, that all the „good land“ has been taken, and that the population density and distribution is reflective of arable land and habitability for modern industrial pattern of life.

This is just incorrect. Very roughly, about 30% of the country is habitable. Almost half of Ontario’s land area is. This is 1000 kilometres north of Toronto: https://onregionalecdev.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/canola.jpg The current population distribution arises in large part from the historical process of colonization and industrialization and that’s why the big cities are so concentrated around the waterways.

There’s a large fertile clay belt spanning from Thunder Bay across south of James Bay into Quebec with an area about that of the currently arable land used on the prairies and only 5% is currently under till. It’s marginal only under the current market dynamics; if push came to shove we could grow potatoes onions canola and such to feed a hundred million people in that region alone.

It’s the Winnipeg climate not the Toronto climate and some regions would require large scale land work to drain the muskeg (and there are ecological consequences to doing so that have to be well-examined before we might do so) but in general the carrying capacity is much, much greater than those in the south appreciate.

And I’m talking of only near-north Ontario; but potatoes grow all the way up in the NWT these days.