What do you think are some overlooked demographic issues?

I would like to assure everyone that I am working on a post in response to yesterday's news that China is shifting to a two-child policy. (Brief reaction: I do not think it will change much, given the consistently low level of fertility in East Asia and Chinese-majority societies. Demographic changes in China will come in other ways.)

In the meantime, I am curious to know what readers might think are demographic issues of note that are not being covered, here, in the larger blogosphere, and in the mass media and academic journals. What's being overlooked?

Some thoughts on the 2015 Canadian election (#elxn42)

Last Monday, the long-awaited Canadian federal election finally occurred and produced a rather remarkable shift.



For comparison, below is another Elections Canada map, this one from the 2011 election.



One obvious result of this shift is that the long-form census will almost certainly be restored in time for 2016. A minor election issue, there seems to be time enough to fix things for 2016. Certainly, as explained by the Ottawa Citizen's Jason Fekete, fixing the census is a cost-effective way for the new Liberal government to prove itself to its supporters.

Statistics Canada is quietly waiting for its official marching orders from a new Liberal government to quickly reinstate the mandatory long-form census and have it ready for 2016.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have promised to restore the mandatory long-form census that the Conservative government eliminated in 2010 and replaced with a voluntary National Household Survey that critics say has significant holes in its data.

The incoming government has also promised to make Statistics Canada “fully independent,” believing Stephen Harper’s Conservatives meddled with the data collection agency for its own political purposes.

Trudeau’s new Liberal government will be sworn in Nov. 4 and is expected to move almost immediately to restore the census to allow Statistics Canada enough time to have it ready for its rollout in May 2016.

“We will immediately restore the mandatory long-form census, to give communities the information they need to best serve Canadians,” says the Liberal platform.

(I would note, parenthetically, that this year as in 2011, I voted for the NDP candidate in my riding. In 2011, the NDP candidate won; in 2015, the same parliamentarian, incumbent, lost.)

I noted in my post here on the 2011 election that this year's election revealed and crossed some interesting fault lines. The split between Conservative and non-Conservative MPs in the Greater Toronto Area, for instance, mirrored fairly deep splits of class and ethnicity, the better-off downtown voting for non-Conservative candidates and the suburban peripheries voting for Conservative candidates. This year, the Liberals swept the entire Toronto area, and then some.

I also noted that the NDP came from nowhere to become the dominant political party in Québec, even all of French Canada. I speculated that, between its existing English Canadian base and its new dominance in French Canada, the NDP could well be on track to replace the Liberals as one of Canada's two natural parties of government. This did not happen. While the NDP does retain a strong presence in Québec, and likely has potential for recovery now, years after the taboo of a NDP presence in Québec was spectacularly breached, the party is going to take a long time to recover across Canada.

This Tuesday, I put together a collection of links about the election, noting (for instance) the disenchantment of many Canadians--including right-leaning Canadians--with a Conservative government they saw as betraying their interests for its own benefit, the renewal of the connections of newer immigrant groups with Liberals, and so on. All of these things produced what, by any account, is a Liberal landslide, one that took the Liberals from third party to governing majority and even saw the Liberals make inroads into areas of western Canada like Alberta lost since the 1960s.

What will come next? Will the splits of old recur, and how? Follow this blog.

Some links on the Syrian refugee crisis

• This CBC report, noting the extent to which ISIS tries to police the intimate lives and everyday business of people living in the territories it controls, demonstrates that there will be very many incentives for large numbers of refugees to continue to flee Syria.
• The Boston Globe's photo blog The Big Picture had photos from the refugee crisis, including the famous heart-rending photo of young Alan Kurdi's limp body.
• Although the numbers of Syrians who have found refuge if not formal refugee status in the Gulf States are not trivial, Bloomberg was correct in noting that many Syrian refugees saw more hope in Europe than in the Gulf. Thomas Piketty has argued that the European Union's acceptance of refugees, particularly that of Germany, bodes well for its future. A post today made at Lawyers, Guns and Money by Adam Luedtke makes useful points, first that the numbers of Syrian refugees reaching Europe is smaller than the number of Yugoslav refugees two decade ago.
• As noted by The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer and as also observed by Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, South America could become a major destination for Syrian refugees. A lack of official support means this is unlikely to happen, even in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile with large Syrian-origin populations.
• In Canada, meanwhile, the official response has become an election issue. The story of the aforementioned Kurdi family, with family connections in Vancouver, added complications for Canadian immigration minister Chris Alexander, as have contested allegations that the Prime Minister's Office has sought to restrict the flow of Syrian refugees. Scott Gilmore of MacLean's argued that Canada could increase is intake twentyfold, while author Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer in The Walrus looked at Canada's intake of Indochinese boat people in the 1970s.
• On my native Prince Edward Island, meanwhile, there was some interest in taking in forty Syrian refugee families. One family has come in, with perhaps more to follow.