ive lost all faith in my own country. there is no leadership, no rules, no regulation. UN called Canada a "modern serfdom with slavery"
A lot of Americans complain how shitty they got it, For Canadians it is like heaven here. You can actually buy a house in a major city and afford nice things and earn a decent salary.
This is not possible in the majority of Canadian cities. Canada is a great place to visit but it is a shitty place to work and live, unless your parents own a house and have a couple of rentals (in Vancouver or Toronto) that you're going to inherit.
Even 100k salary in Toronto is poverty these days, I don't know how people do it anymore. Private industry pays like shit and unless your a Gov Employee it's just tough.
-ExPat...never coming back.....
Can confirm 100k salary in Vancouver is nothing. Even 200k I wasn't saving money.
What makes me angry is learning 1/4 jobs in Canada is a government job. Taxes, housing, society (I don't even feel like I live in Canada sometimes).
I don't know what other options there are. It's quite bleak and living in Canada takes a toll on your mental health.
I envy you...
Not that surprising when you include teachers, doctors, nurses, etc. I imagine the usa would probably be similar to us if they had socialized healthcare.
> Can confirm 100k salary in Vancouver is nothing. Even 200k I wasn't saving money.
That is rediculous. Vancouver is expensive. Its not so expensive that you cannot afford to live there on 200k.
> Taxes
Highest marginal tax rate in california is 49% vs 53% in BC. That is a bit higher, but its not like the difference is that big. Although maybe how it falls out might be worse if you are middle class.
> I apply to American jobs but they minute they find out I am Canadian they will pass on my application even jobs I overqualified for.
I have worked remotely for american companies from canada. Not every company will go for it, but it definitely do-able.
Have you considered we are in a bit of a market downturn right now, and you might still get rejected even if american?
In any case, if you dont like living in canada, why not move? NAFTA makes moving to the usa a hell of a lot easier from canada than it is in most countries.
or the employer is your own startup.
trust me 200k wasnt enough in vancouver downtown (i rent)
However, QC has its own issues, infrastructure and hospital waiting time are pretty bad.
the weather tax too doesn't make sense. extremely cold and hot weather. at least in BC its functional and get little snow.
i donno where to go tbh, hoping to land a remote gig somehow but job market is super tough.
My dream right now is living in East Asia working remotely earning USD. Canada has remained stagnant while that region surpassed it in many areas.
But the best thing is probably a remote job paid in USD. It's possible but relies on a lot of luck and connection. Another thing to consider is working on two remote contractor jobs at the same time -- maximize expense and move to a place that doesn't f**ing rain. MTL has too much rain these two years and I'm afraid it's going to lose its summer charm.
The healthcare situation is also horrendous overall, but if you and your family are currently healthy and you have a good job with good insurance (as software engineers tend to), then the risk to you and yours specifically may be low. If you can afford it, you also have access to higher quality of care than almost anywhere else. If I had a severe disease or got into a bad accident, I would want to be a well-to-do American with good insurance living in a major city.
Have you tested that?
Good family friends had a baby in California. They’re both high level teachers, have been for 15 years at this point. Gets complicated, c section. Less that 10 hours later someone comes to the bedside and says this is costing the insurance company $60k a day and they have to move to a new hospital. Now. In their own car. With no wheelchair. With a 10 hour old baby and a wife that just had a c section.
They have great health insurance, have paid premiums their entire lives. What a scam.
Also, heaven forbid you want to take a year or two off to be with family or write a book or just live.
Also my partner currently has 18 month’s maternity leave, fully paid.
That is a very, very big no thanks.
Just a reminder, 92% of Americans have health insurance. California has universal healthcare, and there are more people in California than in Canada.
[1] https://www.citizen.org/article/medicare-for-all-prevents-me...
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadians-moving-to-the-us-...
126,340 Canadians moved to the US out of a population of 38.93 million
0.32% hardly seems like "most people"
There most certainly is regulation, and that's why housing prices are so high. If you got rid of the regulation, builders would build new housing. It's like this all across Western nations now: they can't build new housing in the needed quantity because of zoning regulations.
Note the important point here that these don’t “stop building” but rather simply make it more expensive or more time consuming. Increased time is essentially equivalent to increased cost since you must pay lawyers and employees and so forth as time increases.
- minimum parking requirements
- single family zoning restrictions
- height restrictions
- environmental reviews
- historical preservation review
- local input on many/most decisions
There is a whole universe of stuff written around this topic. You can Google around for it with the topic of “YIMBY” or “housing abundance” or similar.
A good entry point can be: https://new.yimbyaction.org/top-resources/
Also read Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein as they have been harping on about housing abundance for many years.
- Usage Restriction. Seattle is famous for having the highest percentage of land zone exclusively for single family housing. This puts a hard limit to how much can be built.
- Parking Minimum. These can drive construction costs a lot, so much that a lot of projects can't be build profitably.
- Endless "Environmental" review processes. While these do sound good in theory, they have (at least in Seattle) very rarely been used to actually protect the environment. They're typically used by NIMBYs to slow down and delay projects forever so that developers abandon.
There is a lot more, but those are some of the main things people talk about when they point to "zoning regulations".
We still get people being like, "No my neighborhood character is changing!" But thankfully most of them are drowned out by people asking for up zoning and more housing.
It’s caused several builders I know to close their businesses.
Congratulations! Sometimes, evidently, you get what you vote for?
I've even heard people lament saying they miss Chinese international students who would spend a lot of money, creating jobs but these new Indian "students" just show up at food banks taking everything, overcrowding homes, taking advantage of government benefits, jobs meant for new graduates, nepotism, just DDOSing the whole Canadian infrastructure as a whole is the popular opinion.
I don't know what to do about it and neither do the politicians. I'm not exactly thrilled to be importing this many people from India, a country which I frankly don't have any interest or passion for.
Everyday I just long to be away from it all but tough to do that when you rely on payment from one location.
I’m unhappy about it because we need them to immigrate here because we’ve utterly failed to create a thriving, functional, sustainable, balanced economy with people who have legitimate means and incentives to participate in it across the board.
This mass immigration strategy is a lifeline whether we like it or not. It’s not a good situation no matter how you slice it in my opinion, but I suspect things would be worse without immigration.
I recently started a business and I’ve been completely blown away by how much it sucks in this country. The start up costs were reasonable until I discovered my type of business requires light industrial space to get a permit. I can’t get the permit to operate from my residence due to zoning, not because I want a store front or anything, but because I’d need to drain water more often than residential zones are allowed. I mean, someone who has a lot of baths will drain far more water than I’d need to, but whatever. I need to rent the space to operate.
So I look around my city and discover this can cost around $100k per year for remarkably small spaces. Like, barely larger than my 2 car garage. The cheapest I found was $65k for what is essentially the same situation as my garage, but I’d be able to get the permit. It’s dirtier, far away from my home, only has 120V service, no internet, would need serious renovation to be suitable for basic lab work, etc.
I thought I must be missing something and started digging into historical pricing. Around 15 years ago the same place was leased for 3 years at $15k per year.
How are we supposed to build our economy in these conditions? Why would I take on that risk? I don’t want to build the next unicorn here; I just want to tissue culture some plants. I like it. It’s insane to bother doing it legitimately though. What a mess.
Canada is failing to make entrepreneurship appealing or even sensible. Regular employment is becoming less rewarding for most people each year. As a result I think we’ve got a shrinking and relatively unmotivated workforce. Unless that were to change, we absolutely need to import labour to fill the gaps. It’s going to feel strange to live here in 20 years, I think. It won’t be the same. I hope it works out well for the people who are coming here, at least.
I really worry for my kids inheriting the economy and country as I see it, and being wrong could be a good thing.
Canada lowered its student immigration target and then MISSED it [1]. Students in India are acutely aware Canadians don't want them (or more accurately, don't have the infrastructure to handle them). So now a whole generation of potential immigrants have spread the word that Canada is not worth it (and that fire will spread fast).
This plus the standard developed country birth rate (i.e. low) but a lack of adequate infrastructure is now going to push Canada into anemic to negative economic and population growth. Think Japan without the infrastructure.
Unless something is done to turn around this degrowth, and without immigrants to blame this time, Canada has nowhere to go but simply become America's little shrunken brother.
What is actually unpopular to say is that a certain sector of Canadians got annoyed at too many different looking people in their towns and instead of demanding the government build infrastructure and housing, they demanded the government choke growth. And well, they're gonna get what they demanded..
[1]: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202406251...
because its clear that whatever you guys have its working
US has immigration caps per country of origin, unlike Canada.
US has strict entry requirements, unlike Canada.
US has less "free" social programs than Canada.
2. "US has immigration caps per country of origin, unlike Canada":
OTOH, US has almost unlimited illegal immigration unlike Canda.
3. "US has strict entry requirements, unlike Canada."
Have you seen the southern border of the US now? US's unauthorized immigrant population is roughly one-third/fourth of Canadian population.
A census was performed in 2021, but I wouldn't trust its findings to be relevant. It was done in the middle of harsh government-imposed lockdowns and other severe disruptions throughout the whole country. A lot of foreigners who could temporarily leave Canada did so, and many foreign "students" and "temporary workers" delayed their arrivals. There has been a huge influx of foreigners since then, too. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until 2026 for the next census and more recent data.
This also isn't a subject that sees objective study in academic settings, either. I don't think that it would even be possible to study objectively in such a setting, given then the lucrative financial ties between foreign "students" and Canada's universities themselves.
Any researcher daring to even consider the subject in an objective manner would likely face significant persecution from a variety of sources.
For their own personal safety, it's a topic that most Canadians are not willing to openly and honestly discuss with people they don't know and trust, including academics, pollsters, and others engaging in data collection. Expressing the "wrong" opinion can easily result in various types of harassment and abuse, if not worse. The downvoting of deisteve's comment is an example of this in practice.
In private, and when among trusted individuals, Canadians are far more willing to honestly discuss this subject.
You might not want to believe it, but what deisteve expressed is highly relevant.
I mean how hard is it to find some data supporting racist generalizations like this?
If you and deisteve can draw and propagate generalizations like this without data, an unbiased person can also state objectively you and deisteve are bigoted.
Some of the people I've heard from who are most opposed to what's happening are actually Indians who immigrated decades ago, and especially the Canada-born-and-raised descendants of Indians who immigrated in the past.
The first group find themselves once again starting to experience the sort of environment and problems that they intentionally wanted to leave behind.
The second group, especially those in their 20s and 30s, find that their reputations are being tarnished thanks to the negative impacts that unrelated foreigners who happen to have similar appearances and similar names are imposing on Canadian society as a whole.
Also, keep in mind that your false accusations of "racism" and "bigotry" are exactly why so many people in Canada are hesitant to discuss this matter openly and honestly, and why the "data" you claim to want probably don't (and effectively can't) exist.
While some of us are thicker-skinned and have come to expect false allegations like yours, many others just completely avoid the situation by remaining silent and hiding what they're actually thinking, or by giving a "safe" answer that they don't believe. Such people only share their experiences and true thoughts with individuals they've come to trust won't harass them merely for being honest.
struggling with immigration from india is very real in Canada and we can't keep censoring or avoiding it because its uncomfortable
For exactly the reasons you mention. They’ll fit right in.
color of skin isnt the issue, its who contributes to taxes and society in balance so as many surface areas can be served without anyone feeling left out
singapore's multiculturalism works but why doesnt Japan's?
canada is better than most
Modern Canada has not turned a "blind eye". I accept absolutely no blame, none, nada for a single thing any ancestor of mine has done. None. I am not responsible for anything my ancestors have done.
The federal goverments covering multiple parties over the last few decades have poured money into settlements, investigating claims, resolving issues. I agree with settling claims if there was a contract, otherwise not. All over the planet, in every single country that exists, people are on "other people's land". There is not a single place free of this, anywhere. You only need go back far enough to discover "someone else was here".
It should be noted that this also holds true for virtually all natives in Canada today. All took land from prior waves of settlers, and all warred against one another for land and resources. To somehow claim or believe that no war, to strife, to taking of others land occurred before that "horrible horrible white man" showed up is a fist full of lies.
In terms of "atrocities", there has never been "mass graves" found in Canada, ever. Please differentiate between "suspected" and "we've validated that suspicion". It should be noted that for mass graves, there are federal funds given to native communities to investigate any such claims, millions being spent this very moment, yet again -- never, ever been found.
The issues with the church abusing natives in the past is a sad, and indeed horrible event. Yet one must view this in the optics of ALL societies at this time. It was done with an intent to help, not hurt. Again, it was wrong, but the motive was not intended as such.
And to put this in perspective, look at what happened to white Canadian children placed in the care of the church. Ever hear of priests raping young boys? Of orphanages beating young children? This happened to white people as well, and while none of it was right, to native or to white, my point is that it happened to us too.
And if you think that's it, Google the "home children". An example being that my great-great grandfather died during WWI, resulting in his wife and children being without a provider. Mores being as they were back then, this meant the wife had two choices, put the children up for adoption, as they would all starve otherwise, and then remarry -- for no man would take another's children back then.
This is how war heroes were treated in the early 20th. Thanks for your life, your wife and children are now screwed.
Thus my grandfather was eventually shipped out indentured, which is on the edge of slavery, to Canada from the UK. My greatuncle was shipped to Australia. My great-aunts, unknown. To this day we have no idea where our family is in the world, or even if they survived. Some home children were treated atrociously, starving conditions, raped, beat, and more. To run meant the law would catch you and bring you back.
My grandfather was "lucky", in that he was only worked 18 hours a day as a youth, and being a farm he had food. But that farmer bought my grandfather's contract, and had him until 18.
You may say "So what", but my point here is this was the world of the time.
And you may say that Canada is a horrible country, but from my perspective screw you. Look at the world today, where more than 1/2 of it are committing acts that are far, far more barbarous than anything done 100+ years ago in Canada.
And for the last decades we've been working towards resolution.
Canada is not perfect, but it a light of glowing enlightenment compared to the rest of the world.
I'm sure you're going to come back with "But, this happened!" and yes some of it likely did. But is it happening today? Are you seriously trying to claim people aren't aware today? Are you seriously trying to say the billions upon billions spent in the last few decades aren't an attempt to try to fix things?
Canadian government committed atrocities against its people. It will continue doing so, while apologizing and throwing money away.
Modern Canada is no better. Look at what is happening.
Definitely not what the rest of us are discussing.
My point wasn’t to litigate whether everyone’s history includes atrocities. My point is that a government that allowed these things to happen very recently is not the type of government that has the average person (who has as little voice as indigenous people on a reserve) in mind when making policy. Our government is beholden to corporate interests and elites. Not sure why you are defending that.
Yes, but were the acts of that church run school system, the same as the acts exhibited in the 1600s? The 1800s? NO. In fact, there was a realization that the schools had issues, that there was wrongness in the schools, as far back in the 1950s, when legislation was passed to allow natives to attend in the standard school system. The federal government stepped in, and in the 60s took direct control of the school system, seeking to rectify things. Schools were closed in the 70s, lots of them, and many were given to control of native groups.
The point is, context is important. Were the schools you cite in the 90s treating natives as they were treated 100, 200 years before. NO.
No one is saying that the school system was a good idea by modern ideals. This is, in fact, why it was shut down. However, trying to equate how the school system performed in the 90s, to how it performed 100 years prior, is absurd.
There have been issues with water all over Canada in rural communities, not just native communities. My own town had issues with local well water for decades, until we finally built a water treatment plant. Successive federal governments have dealt with these issues on reservation, and I 100% agree that this is an issue. Yet at the same time, we have some chiefs redirecting, or just personally stealing funds marked for local communities. Natives are human beings after all, and so corruption exists here too, and the systems of checks and balances to force some accountability in governmental operations in Canada, don't apply to Native communities. And of course, if the federal government attempts to step in, simply to force accountability, people howl at the "power grab".
I have little care of 'unceded' land, unless there is a historical treaty stating otherwise. You may wonder why I say that? Well as I stated in my initial reply, this is how the world is. Every single piece of land on the planet has people on unceded land. The very use of the term is absurd. Natives, before a single white man arrived, were on unceded land, for they took their land from people here before them. Natives were not the first North Americans.
I can look at any piece of land on Europe, and it is unceded. Taken.
Back to the main point, and back to Canada, it is absolutely not beholden to corporate interests and elites. Claiming so, ignores what each government has done in detail, perhaps focusing only on the mistakes made, and not on the good each government has done.
So I am not defending your incorrect view of Canada and of history, and of modern Canada, but instead I am defending my view of Canada. An imperfect nation, as all are, but as I said in a prior comment, better than most, if not all.
One of the largest issues I see is, everyone has a weird view of the world, in which the culture and beliefs, and traditions of natives would remain unchanged for half a millennium. Yet, let's enact a little thought experiment.
What would have happened if, for example, Europeans arrived in the new world, but instead did not settle here? But at the same time, enacted in open trade with native communities, and open contact.
Well an entirely European free North America would have had its culture evolve. Technological progress would have seeped in, that is unless there is an assertion that natives have no mind for science, technology, the capacity to build things?
And what of trade? Various native tribes and nations warred with one another, Europeans were not required to cause this. Obviously, some would seek to trade furs for guns, yes? And with the right tools, building settlements could aid in defense. We don't really need to look too hard here, for every culture across the entire planet, including many cultures in the Americas build settlements.
And speaking of culture, none of the traditions cited and spoken of today by natives would be unchanged, unvarnished the the steps of time, should natives have controlled North America. Wars would cause the elimination of some tribes and cultures. Cultural ideas would have spread between communities. As technological advances occurred, culture would have changed.
My point in all of this is, it is of great disservice to presume that natives would not change the world around them, ever. That they would not change over time. That no native group, or community would expand and its culture supplant others. This happened all through the Americas, just take a look at the Mayans.
Yet the modern dialog is ... what? That natives would be living today, precisely as they did in the 1500s? Absolutely untrue.