Canada bet big on immigration. Now it's hitting the brakes
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I guess the US isn't melting down at the speed of Canada because they can still build houses in many places where immigrants first land (the south like Texas). It's way worse here in Canada. Imagine SF but even in the suburbs and small towns basic houses go for millions.
The entire country is basically waiting for the current gov to go away so the next one can actually attempt to fix it. It's very depressing and this is 100% contributing to the flight of our best domestic talent to the US more than ever (it was bad enough the last 2 decades).
It is wild that the deal between the Liberals and the NDP is constitutional. All it did is disenfranchise Canadians for 3 years. Trudeau should be forced to have his government subject to non-confidence votes - sink or swim on his decisions, and if there isn’t confidence (which seems totally obvious!) then go to an election.
Edit: I would love to hear from those who downvoted this. What’s your take? It seems indefensible to me.
Edit in response to your edit [i did not downvote you] - for starters this is a really common feature of most parlimentary democracy. It helps mitigate some of the downsides of first past the post & vote splitting (NDP+liberals have > 50% of the popular vote. They are fairly simlar politically, agreeing on many things. Why shouldn't they get to do the things they agree on, since a majority of the country voted for them when combined, presumably a majority like the parts of their platform that are the same)
The second thing, is that politics involves compromises, generally it is expected some wheeling and dealing might occur. e.g. MPs from alberta might vote for something that benefits fishermen in Nova Scotia in exchange for NS MPs voting for something that benefits alberta. I dont see anything wrong with that, this is just a more formal version.
Last of all, the agreement is non-binding. NDP is allowed to pull out any time it wants with no penalty other than the liberals being mad at them. So it is not like it prevents a non-confidence motion if the NDP is unhappy (for that matter, individual MPs do not have to vote with their party on anything, the only penalty is they might get kicked out of their party. If the MPs don't like treadau they can kick him out anytime they want regardless of what party leadership thinks.
> 1 in 5 properties across much of Canada are owned by investors. That makes it harder for 1st-time buyers
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/housing-inve...
I suppose you are referring to rent? On average, the price of buying a Canadian home in nominal dollars hasn't really changed since 2021, which, thanks to inflation, means that buying a home is around 12% less expensive now. That's a decrease, and not an insignificant one at that.
Not exhaustively, but it is as true nationally, as it is in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and even many rural areas. Sure, there is probably some outlier – there always is – and CREA (Canada's unfortunate source of housing price information) doesn't collect/publish data for every last nook and cranny of the country anyway, but the general trend is abundantly clear.
To their credit there has been a movement across the country to scrap single-family zoning restrictions and allow more housing development. Which should improve the housing situation but it's still unlikely the housing market can keep up
The deficit spending is clearly to try to buy votes but I think he reading the tea leaves wrong - the average person is way more concerned about inflation, their job, and the economy, and I think this spending is unpopular, even from those who tangentially benefit from the spending!
I have been hearing this for years. Capitalism is supposed to increase salaries until that stabilizes.
So, why hasn't it?
Erm, this is my point, no?
This large a differential between Canada and the US has persisted for decades.
Why?
You would think that the US would have drained Canada of the personnel sufficiently to cause salaries to match by this point.
Why not?
"Highly skilled" people are highly sought after because, by and large, they are the people most likely to create new capital. Success in creating new capital begets a desire to create even newer capital and so long as the people continue to be successful in capital creation efforts, there is really no end.
Not a whole lot different as to why Silicon Valley hasn't stabilized with Detroit. Of course, Detroit is also interesting here because it provides a cautionary tale as to what happens when capital creation seizes up. That is what Canada is desperately trying to avoid by trying to bring in the "highest skilled" people from other countries.
if you're in STEM there is easy a 40% difference in pay, and considerably more on the high end (FAANGM, or similar large Enterprise tier).
by limiting it to high-end, educated work, it also skews the market a lot -- high earners leave, low-to-mid market stagnates. Canada then has to import both high-end talent via immigration, but also low-end Temporary Foreign Workers to do crappy jobs like slinging coffee at Tim Hortons.
I guess it is a “bet” the way buying a lottery ticket and hoping for the best is a bet.
You win some, you lose some. 'Tis the nature of betting.
Boy does it feel great to be constantly shamed for being a white male as the source of our country's problems while not being rich enough to influence the political system like billionaire donors. Boy does it feel great that our industries and political system are completely captured, so they can shame us out of one side of their mouths while making sure their donors who are bought into the housing market (and they themselves, who are too) will never have to worry about their house of cards collapsing.
Canada sets two-year cap on foreign students
> There were more than 1 million international students here in 2023, up 245 percent from a decade earlier and 60 percent since 2019. Canada, a country of 40 million, had roughly the same number of international students last year as the United States, a country more than eight times its size.
> Immigration Minister Marc Miller said last month that Canada would for the first time set targets for the number of temporary immigrants. He had already announced a temporary cap on undergraduate study permits and increased the amount of money that international students must have to study here. The ministry also barred students in programs run by public-private college partnerships from applying for postgraduate work permits. Some, Miller said, run “the diploma equivalent of puppy mills,” offering poor curriculums in exchange for the prospect of permanent status.
This isn't just a housing or infrastructure problem, productivity is also tanking. These strip mall college degrees are effectively worthless, and these programs function as a backdoor mechanism to suppress the cost of low-skill labor. Why invest in automation or equipment when you can just hire more cheap foreign workers?
a quick look at their tuition calculator shows that international students pay roughly x3 for most programs compared to locals.
if US boomers want to pay x3 to get access to sub-par quality care, let em. subsidize the costs for Canadian students, and the expensive surgeries for grandpa will have a wait list so long they'll have to go to the US anyways.
Once they graduate, they need to follow the same process as everybody to obtain permanent residence, and age is a big component of obtaining enough points to be selected.
American retirees aren't doing that because it just doesn't make sense for them.
[0] https://www.conestogac.on.ca/international/student-support/h...
https://www.newsweek.com/us-canada-border-migrants-crossing-...
"Officials for the Swanton Sector in Vermont said there were 1,109 apprehensions in March 2024. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures, this is up from 756 in March 2023, and just 61 in March 2022. The March 2024 figure of 1,109 is higher than the total amount of crossings in all of 2022, which was 1,065."
"In a post on X, Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia of the Border Patrol Swanton Sector said the 1,109 apprehensions last month included people from 40 different countries."
"The top three nationalities apprehended were 408 Indian, 323 Bangladeshi, and 170 Mexican nationals," Garcia said.
The above influx has further stressed an already rickety healthcare system. An amazingly high portion of Canadians don't have a family doctor <https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/despite-more-doctors-many-cana...>. In Atlantic Canada (the four easternmost provinces) it is impossible, repeat impossible, to get a family doctor if you don't have one <https://web.archive.org/web/20190226051406/https://www.thete...>. It's one thing to have shortages in rural areas—that happens in the US too—but Halifax?!? I've heard the same occurs in Vancouver too.