Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

> and don't just route money from young people to old

Doesn't matter. Money represents goods and services. And the young people to provide care to the elderly at the currently expected levels don't exist. Things, even services, that don't exist can't be bought at any price.

People often forget that money is but a proxy for other things. On the small scale of an individual or a family anything can be bought. For a country, the illusion is broken and you have to do economics with actual people, actual land, ... because otherwise prices will rapidly "adapt" and make policy impossible.

Which is exactly the mistake 99% of all governments currently make.

We aren't getting 10s of millions in the last 20 years the population of illegal immigrants has grown by about 2 million.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/what-we-k...

The majority speak English especially after living here for 5+ years.

There are more than enough jobs to go around which is why immigrants only have a problem supporting themselves when not allowed to work.

As someone deeply involved in immigration advocacy in USA I can assure you that the Canadian points based system is terrible. It is the classic case of grass is greener on other side effect.

It was fine, but more importantly borderline sustainable, until post covid explosion in Indian student visas, more than system can realistically integrate in short time line involved. The point of skill based immigration is you drain the brightest (and richest) who can generally pay their way and be net contributor right away (tuition etc). When I was in Canadian uni around the 00s, around explosion of PRC international students, they mostly come from wealthy backcgrounds, bought a condo, studied and transitioned into skilled work. They generally didn't work part time while in school. Brought money into economy with stupid consumption. Still drove up RE market / rent, but not the to levels now in the last few years. The richest Indians with $$$ goes to the states due to their remarkably successful Indian disaphora network, Canada gets what's left over, which is still bright/hardworking minds, but they're poorer, and many have to work driving down wages in all segments. Which might be fine i nmoderation but with sheer numbers involved, in the time frame involved, is driving up cost to visibly levels in the few cities where immigrants settle.

American in Canada.

One of the work permit paths is points-based -- "Express Entry". There are plenty of other ways, and there are programs like the Temporary Foreign Worker (contemptuously referred to as TFWs), who bring in lots of low skilled workers. Lots of Filipino coffee-slingers working at Tim Horton's (a fast food chain), for example.

Immigration also isn't the problem, the problem is the boomers buying up all of the housing, and large corporations (many of which are foreign) buying up the rest. This is combined with Canada's climate and geography -- aka most of the country is uninhabitable in any real sense -- which concentrates the population in a handful of markets where the prices are absurd.

Chain migration is great imo.

Immigrants arrive with a built-in support system that get them off the ground when they arrive, a safety net and most importantly, someone that they can trust. All in ideal circumstances anyway.

Corporate migration puts immigrants at huge risk of abuse and failure if things don’t go as expected.

A lot of immigration happens somewhere in the middle.

Canada’s points system isn’t that robust, but I guess less problematic than a straight up lottery.

Oh no, you got me.

I'm a Chinese Canadian citizen living in Canada who advocates for Canadian geopolitical interests before Chinese ones, which I advocate before US ones. That means useful immigration, including Indians who can pay and contribute to economy, not when it gets remitted back to India like MENA model, or eat away at locals QoL. I'm fine with going back to 600k immigration levels, which is still high and having Canadian schools 40% Indian, because frankly PRC talent staying in PRC is good for PRC. For reference, I also advocate Canada cooperating with India on sikh seperatist (and India cooperating with Canada on assassinating Canadian on Canadian soil) to get relations back on track.

Since AI can do three of those better now, I see a lot of pizza in our future.

The paradox of globalization is that it benefits the ultra wealthy of every nation but only hurts the working classes of wealthy nations.

That's probably up to Canadians to decide. But there's quite a lot of space. ;). Joking aside, this sort of thing was done in the UK years ago. places like Milton Keynes, Crawley, Stevenage. Its not without its issues. and not a simple endeavour. But really, its laughable to someone living in a crowded country, that one of the most , in parts, sparsely populated countries in the world, isn't apparently looking into this. It'd be a 10-15 yr plan perhaps to implement. But with government commitment, the right tax incentives etc. Look how much China has built out in the last 20 yrs. Edit- cold winters are an issue in parts of Canada but climate change is actually opening up new areas, right?

Great read. I'm glad that the author stressed how systemic tech addiction is, and not a moral failure of the individual. It's only slightly ironic that he asked for readers to plug his article on social media, but the word needs getting out.

It's simple: I want cheap houses, food, goods and child care built, picked, manufactured and done with expensive domestic labor, and I want home prices to be low but home values to increase without bound forever. I don't understand what's so hard about this. /s

That video gets cited regarding every discussion about the current Canadian immigration disaster. It pushes two basic ideas-

1) If Canada had housing, services and infrastructure that met any growth in population, there would be no problem!

2) Look at all these problems occurring, isn't it wonderful‽‽‽ It's going to force a revelation and everything will be super fixed and it'll be better than ever! The future is now! Things that don't kill you make you stronger or something.

That covers 100% of the video, and the delusional, pie in the sky notion pushed by the creator. If that video were presented as farce it would actually be funny. Instead it's depressing and sounds like the dope-fueled meanderings of someone absolutely decoupled from any semblance of reality.

Nothing is being fixed. Housing starts have dropped. Housing projects are moving slower than they did before this influx (but wait, isn't the video holding that there has been some amazing, wonderful transformation? Where?). The health system is in shambles. Demographics ghettos grow. A whole generation are going to be living in their parent's basements indefinitely, and anyone looking for a future is moving out of Canada.

Canada is poised for a very unfortunate hard turn to the right due to the policies of the very minister quoted and his peers who pushed the same "no problem here!" dismissals to growing concern. Busy making excuses as problem because disaster became catastrophe.

It is very unfortunate that some of the anger and outrage about government policy is reflected in racist or xenophobic outbursts as described in the root post, but it was basically inevitable: This government basically declared war on a demographic of Canadians and they're "fighting back". I'm lucky to work in a high skill position and live in an affluent area, but I can recognize the absolute disaster that is occurring: When coffee shop chains are buying up apartments and evicting the residents to bring in an army of TFWs, something has gone profoundly awry. When international students don't actually go to classes, get a worthless diploma, and are buying a work permit and a path to residency, something has gone wrong.

Canada needs immigration. Canada was built on immigration. Canada is a multicultural nation. What has been happening is a perversion of that and has put a country on edge.