over 50% of a population can still be easily wrong
Immigration worked as expected: it kept Canada out of recession, keeping our GDP number up without requiring the rich to neither invest in people or equipment, nor pay taxes.
We bring in people because Canada’s productivity tanked, and it’s tanked because we’ve created a tax system that makes it more lucrative to sell ponzi schemes and/or houses and/or shitty coffee to each other than to invest. And since the people who are making money off of overvalues real estate and shitty coffee quite like the status quo–and also own our governments lock, stock and barrel–the only solution is to bring in millions of south Asians and strip them for every cent we can, then do it again in hopes we can stay ahead of the curve.
I’m sure Brian Lilley of the Toronto Sun is totally supporting higher income, corporate and capital gains tax rates that would both force reinvestment and increase government revenues so that we could both a) not by a productivity laggard, and b) afford to build infrastructure for the people we already have.
But who am I kidding. Lilley’s a shitbird hack who’ll blow the dogwhistle while crying about taxes and deficits, only to shut his piehole when a Conservative’s in power and look the other way…
…and you can bet that Poillevre has no plans to change immigration policy, because he’s even more beholden to the real estate and small-business sleazebags who clamoured for increases in immigration in the first place.
What Canadians think about issues like this is meaningless, because we’re uninformed.
And a Sun article - particularly a Lilly article - is going to be complete xenophobic garbage that shouldn’t be disseminated.
Lots of words to say nothing. The facts remain.
“The facts” are that lay-citizens who have no meaningful way to assess the consequences of immigration levels have ‘feelings’ about it.
That’s it.
Ignoring the fact that polls like this are usually pre-biased towards the desired result, only 9% of the survey responsers said they didn’t know whether immigrstuon levels are too high. In reality, I’d be surprised if as many as 9% had enough knowledge to provide an informed answer.
It’s worth asking why people feel this way though, and the answer is likely to be listening to the anti-immigration narrative from the Conservatives and Postmedia.
Consider the opening paragraph:
The Trudeau Liberals have broken Canada immigration system and with it, public support for that system.
This is NOT a reasoned discussion about immigration levels, it’s just another open attack on Trudeau and the Liberal party.
Canada is going to end up just as over-populated as the rest of the world. Which is only fair, really. We’re all in it together, the “it” being the global ecological disaster that is slowly unfolding.
Any framing of the story by the fucking Toronto Sun is going to be trash.
But it is true that the Canadian system has been overwhelmed. A lot of services and amenities have not expanded as massively as would be needed to accomodate the massive expansion of the population. We have 10 million more people than 20 years ago but the way we operate is the same.
Small example: we are not training as many more doctors and we are not recognizing as much faster foreign doctor credentials. So we have fewer doctors per person.
We are building mostly sprawling suburbia, and we’re expanding mostly highways. We’re still debating high speed rail. Our economy is still basically oligopolistic and extractive and our capital is mostly locked in real estate.
You can see all this and decide that foreigners are to blame, which is what the conservatives want you to think.
Or you can say, hey, we need to change and update the institutions, economy and structure of this country.
Because, this plot of land is actually prime real estate for the next century of climate change, and people are going to keep coming here.
Canada should have a better system to recognize foreign trained professionals. At the moment, they are not attracting highly skilled immigrants, and that is a major factor. Currently, low skilled workers are the majority and the economy can only support so many.
For example, a Canadian student has little chance to compete for a part time job against a TFW or international student who would be willing to work longer hours for less money.
And yes, Canada seems to be relying on real estate, however cannibalistic it is. I like the idea of exporting natural gas to more countries outside of the US, as one option to help improve the GDP.
It’s not true that Canada is not attracting high skilled immigrants. The international student boom is that or at least it can be, I’d Canadian universities are doing their job. Source: I was one.
The problem is that we are shit at putting foreign trained highly skilled people to work. We have an archaic system for recognizing credentials in all sorts of vocations. Indian doctors and Syrian engineers driving Ubers and all that.
Natural gas cannot be a sound long term investment for Canada, given the climate crisis. We have vast renewable resources, we should be becoming the renewable technologies capital of the world.
I knew a guy from a French-speaking African country who had studied international law. He was located in Manitoba doing manual labor. This is possibly the least effective way to use his abilities I can imagine. He should have been placed in a program to get his certifications for Canada and connected to a French speaking community that could help integrate him (provided that’s what he wanted, of course). But there he was, just scraping by.
What’s their plan for when climate change displaces billions of people? Build a wall? Canada really has to prepare for immigration to become more intense, and keeping everyone out won’t really be an option. It comes with challenges but a high rate of immigration is not really avoidable in the end.
It also sounds extra silly since everyone other than the First Nations are themselves immigrants or descended from immigrants.
Those are immigrants from Asia
… who displaced the previous Asian migrants.
Mayyyybe violently.
Immigration is fine but we need to invest in rail and put them in the unpopulated parts. Build out new cities rather than cramming everyone in an ever expanding 1 family per home circle around a city
So i work with a lot of immigrants and there is already a system like that in place. The problem is you can just pay a fee/fine and move wherever you want instead. Close that loophole and see how it works as designed
We aren’t building up new hubs though so it’s not going to work well
In Ontario for instance; Ford took a bunch of infrastructure money from Northern Ontario and moved it to Toronto
I hear you decrying suburban sprawl, but then you want to sprawl into new areas; areas we need for our rapidly dwindling agricultural and green space. Canada seems to be the only forest nation not criticized for razing its forest for bungalow space.
How about we densify what we have and reel back some of this obscene sprawl with its hoarded greenspace that can be better used growing things or for simple oxygen exchange?
Cities are different than suburbs
And aside from needing farmland, you need it nearby
By creating more hubs you have more space for farmland, forests, and wetlands
You aren’t going to be able to sprawl back, that’s why you create the densified hubs then move people there. Once the suburbs are empty you will see receding
As a European the suburbs in Canada shock me. My wife and some family are from/in Gatineau and it’s just an endless wasteland of single family homes with a Costco in the middle, crazy stuff.
With enough immigration we can fix that
This, but seriously. We have a shortages in the construction industry, etc. that could be quickly solved with foreign-trained workers.
Only we are really slow at recognizing foreign credentials.
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To make it worse, even if they went through the gauntlet to get citizenship and can vote, who are gonna be on the ballot so people can get better life?
