I saw the effects of a real estate bubble in Spain 25 years ago, whose effects still ripple today. It started with young people feeling squeezed out of the housing market, staying with their parents for longer and either having child’s late or not at all. Then came the lines at the food banks.

This appears to be where we are today in Canada.

Next, foreclosures and a major recession. It is hard to overstate how painful this was to watch even as a bystander, you will see why in a moment. In most cases it goes smoothly and simply contributes to raising rent prices. In other cases, the police would get involved to evacuate people from their (former) homes. Tightly-knit communities would rally around the home that was being foreclosed to stop the police and delay the inevitable.

Sometimes the people whose home was being foreclosed, especially older people, would jump out of their windows to their death as the police were entering. This happened dozens of times, to the point where you become numb to the horror.

Sooner or later extremist political parties emerge and gain popularity, both extreme left, extreme right and regionalist. They offer “obvious” populist solutions to the crisis, from wealth redistribution to clamping down on immigration and a return to “traditional values”. The status quo parties may form temporary coalitions with the extremists in order to form a government.

Once they reach power and and are still unable to solve the underlying economic crisis with their “obvious” solutions, citizens become disillusioned and revert to the former status quo parties.

Nothing lasts forever, and over time the economy starts to limp forward again. It can take a decade or more – see what happened in Spain and Japan at different points of the last forty years. The lasting result is a long period where few babies are born while the remaining population continues to age as usual, placing public pensions in a tight spot unless immigration is increased. The country’s infrastructure, education and healthcare will have seen better times.

Will things unfold somewhat differently in Canada? Without a doubt. But history tends to rhyme, and what I’ve described above is hardly unique to one country.