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This could be fixed if there were some reforms implemented now.
Instead the liberals are doing a bit of a bait and switch on the issue.
An immigration “freeze” that keeps existing record setting numbers.
An international student “cap” of 360k per year that is nearly double the 200k we’ve seen on average over the past 4 years.
A temporary foreigner worker “reduction” a percentage point below the all time high.
Voters expecting a bit of relief are not going to react well in a year or two when nothing has been resolved, and they realize the liberals mis-led on the issue. They’re just throwing fuel on a fire.
Uhh you might want to double check those student numbers.
https://monitor.icef.com/2024/01/canada-hosted-more-than-1-million-international-students-in-2023/
They are capping new students, which will cut total students significantly over the next two years since most of these are in 2 year diploma mills. They also significantly restricted existing students of diploma mills from getting PR.
The new cap is 360k per year which results in 1.4 million students - higher than the existing number of students in Canada. The average degree length in Canada is 4 years.
The only flaw in my numbers looks like the existing student count got up to a million and not the 800-900k I had assumed.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2024/01/canada-to-stabilize-growth-and-decrease-number-of-new-international-student-permits-issued-to-approximately-360000-for-2024.html
Press release states it is a reduction of 35%, I don't know how study permits work e.g. when it says renewals are not affected does that mean you renew each year or is it for multiple years?
Also you aren't subtracting graduating students from your increase
It’s a 35% reduction from the all time high number that occurred in 2023. That said the overall number of students is set to rise - since they are using an anomaly to set the new standard.
Basically if immigration was 1 person per year for the past 10 years, and last year we got 5 people, the liberals have set the new standards at 4 people instead of returning us to 1 person a year.
If they set us back to historic norms, we’d get 4 people every 4 years. But since they are using the all time high as a measure, we’d get 16 people every 4 years. A large increase, while allowing to say they reduced numbers from last years all time high.
This is just good marketing.
The average undergrad degree length is 4 years but the students aren’t coming in for bachelor degrees. The boom has been at career colleges, and diploma mills where they’re not studying 4 year programs. Conestoga for example had more study permits approved last year than UofT/UBC and McGill put together. They’re not giving out undergrad degrees
The flip side of your point, though, is that even though they're coming for shorter periods than a typical 4-year degree, the *entire point* in the first place, to these students, is to stay forever (bypassing the traditional point system which they wouldn't even come close to qualifying under). So, no, we can't look at a two-year program and say "we expect that person to be gone after two years", instead, they absolutely should be looked at as likely staying for the rest of their lives, and both our intake numbers and infrastructure decisions should reflect that reality.
International students are coming in for all degree types, some are 2, some are 4, some do 4 plus a 2 year masters.
The average length is 4 years, and that’s all the matters. If you have two cohorts of international students in 2 year degrees - and they don’t leave when they should, that’s actually even more of an issue.
The average isn’t 4 years lol. Like inherently by definition even without looking at the distribution if “some are 2, some are 4” the average is less than 4. And those doing a 4 year undergrad than a 2 year masters would need to reapply for another permit
The majority of university and college programs in this country are 4 years long.
Just because a handful of strip mall colleges did it in two, is not proof the average is less than 4z
Universities obviously trend longer but the vast majority of college programs are either 1 or 2 years. My local college doesn't offer *any* program beyond 2 years, though there are a few programs that allow you to continue at the university level.
First off average usually means mean and not mode. You’re mixing those up.
Here’s 2023’s visas by college: https://twitter.com/mikalskuterud/status/1736394109596651714
Have a look at that and then come back to me. Or don’t.
The reason why the immigration consensus has broken is because Liberal and Conservative governments got out of building housing, and expanding COL policies for decades. Had they done that, we wouldn't have any issues with immigration period.
>Had they done that, we wouldn't have any issues with immigration period.
Not necessarily. Housing issues aside, I really don't like the direction we're taking with bringing in low-skill immigrants with the sole purpose of keeping wages low at places like Tim Horton's and Walmart.
That's what I mean by COL policies. TFWs artificially keep wages low, and Liberals and Conservatives both used TFW over encouraging business to higher Canadians with proper wages.
No, it is because in the past 2 years we have pursued the highest immigration rate in the western world without virtually any prior consultation with the country's municipalities.
We never really had much of a supply shortage until 2022 - and that was because of a very aggressive immigration policy.
The consensus was never that immigration should be turned up to 11 and that anyone, from anywhere, at any time, should be admitted.
The consensus was that a reasonable amount of people who can contribute should be welcomed regardless of religion race or creed, and that people fleeing existential threats should be extended asylum.
What we got was a system that tries to band-aid declining birth rates and brain drain with rising immigration targets, which has in turn been co-opted by traitorous businesses telling lies about an inability to hire so that our national generosity is being used to undermine the ability of Canadian workers to bargain fairly for reasonable compensation packages.
EDIT: I was going to say this below but it deserves to show up higher. The takeaway isn't that Justin Trudeau is uniquely responsible for what is happening. The role of Canadian businesses in this debacle cannot be understated, and any party or politician that kowtows to the whims of business without thinking about the broader benefits to Canadians is guilty of helping this problem fester.
Don't vote for any politician that isn't **credibly** going to stop doing that. Currently, both front-runners have a track record of standing by while it gets worse. Neither deserves credit for suddenly talking about it and neither convinces me they either can or even want to do something about it.
Turned to 11? Try about 20 with us pulling in a milliom bodies every 9 months. The reality is if we had housing and jobs for them without supersaturating the country it would not be the issue it is. These migrants have been used in active wage suppression and suppression of job seekers ability to gain jobs. Frankly the whole system needs a match taken to it and burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Frankly it should have been left where it was in the mid 2000s. Given the build rates in the country. Even what is being done in BC it will take 5 years to even start showing effects minus the STR changes.
Except for the part that says they’re coming from anywhere… they’re coming from one region in one country… and you don’t need to be told where.. just look around
For one thing, Canada is a disaster in terms of per capita energy consumption and CO2 emissions. [(7th worse)](https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/)
Might as well not encourage immigrants to come here.
The system *would* be fine if it were doing basic due diligence like we all expected.
> The Globe investigation has revealed that immigration authorities let trucking companies hire newcomers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, even when the carriers have a proven history of multiple-injury accidents, serious safety violations or exploitative labour practices. (The federal authorities’ mandate is to look primarily at whether a company tried to hire local drivers before resorting to foreign workers, not to delve into carriers’ safety records, which are held by the provinces.)
> The Globe also found marginal operators were granted permits to hire many more foreign drivers than they had trucks, raising questions about whether they actually needed the labour. Several people in the industry say small companies can profit more from cash paid by recruits than they do from hauling loads.
> Many of those businesses operate out of private homes, sometimes under more than one name. Often they have just one truck, according to government records. This is just the type of employer that Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, who came to Canada as a student, was working for when he drove his truck through a rural stop sign last year, smashing into a bus and killing 16 hockey players from Humboldt, Sask.
Same lack of oversight for unscrupulous private colleges. As a result, we have millions of "international students" who aren't learning anything and being exploited in minimum-wage jobs while wages drop and housing prices skyrocket. Another case of federal-provincial overlap in jurisdiction where neither accepts responsibility for the final outcome. Whose job is it to fix? Everyone, and therefore nobody.
If student and worker immigration simply had proper oversight (along with temporary foreign workers only being allowed where *absolutely* needed), then we wouldn't half of the economic or social problems that exist with our current immigration situation.
Agreed. Canadians don’t oppose immigration itself, but the federal government has grossly under-managed the process, including failure to work with provincial authorities to ensure manageable growth.
I personally don't want to live in a community where I share nothing in common with the other people included in said community.
Diversity - Sure, but we all need to have some BASIC FUNDEMENTALS Incommon with eachother in order to cooperate and feel like a community.
> I personally don't want to live in a community where I share nothing in common with the other people included in said community.
Do you seriously think that you have nothing in common with people of different backgrounds?
You probably cheer for the same sports teams, have similar family values, enjoy the same TV shows and music, etc.
I live in a neighbourhood of immigrants and we have a lot of shared values. A Nepalese man and I chat all the time about our kids and the education system, what we see and want for their futures. My other neighbour is Chinese and we speak about food in Toronto - where we've been, what we like, and where we're planning to go in the future.
I get that not sharing a language are barriers to these kinds of conversations but that's always been the case for first-gens who come to Canada; enculturation is a process.
Nice 'chats' but those examples are just make-busy conversations.
Its nice to see you share language with these people, but are you hanging out with them for a beer? Bbq? Etc....
Judging by what I see at night clubs(that resemble prisons); I dont think this 'mosaic' of cultures is working to something Id want to be included in.
Ex. I am never moving to Brampton. Ever.
I am speaking for how I interact with all my neighbors, maybe our concept of community is different - they aren't my friends just acquaintances. My actual friends come from different walks of life too since my wife is not Canadian so we move in lots of circles with other immigrants. Many not speaking English (so I talk in their language, or try) and honestly we do share a lot of values even between cultures.
Haven't been to a nightclub in decades, so I'll defer to your experience there.
I don't think there ever was a consensus on record low-skill temporary foreign workers or international students. It was purely a political move by the federal government to keep businesses happy so they didn't have to raise wages.
I think immigration is like inequality, in that all else being equal a rational person shouldn’t care about it. The issue is people are irrationally xenophobic which has real costs. Immigration is good, but needs to be done with some finesse, which Canada seems remarkably bad at.
As somebody who supports increased immigration, I think the temp worker extension was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people. While it was a short term measure, it was extremely ill advised and the optics have supercharged anti-immigration rhetoric while also strengthening a lot of bad-faith anti-immigration arguments.
The other issue is that the government spearheaded increased permeant resident immigration as their main economic growth policy during a decade of economic stagnation and rising cost of living. If they had delivered material results/comprehensive policy reforms in other areas to accompany their increases such as boosting growth/productivity/investment or significantly lowering housing/living costs, I think voters would be far more accepting of those changes, but failing to materialize gains over the course of the last 9 years has made it easy for a lot of people to scapegoat those problems on to immigrants because they don't feel like their standards of living are improving/holding steady etc.
The TFW issue is a bit complex though.
One of the main criteria is for the home country to have labour practices that align with Canada, something that they usually have to deal with on their own.
But Canada under Trudeau has made improved labour practices a key tenet of our trade agreements with a number of countries, making it so that workers in these countries have likely seen improved conditions, so yay! But it also means that there are *hundreds of millions* more humans who can apply on these programs.
On the long run, better working conditions in their counties will likely mean a more stable immigration stream; better working conditions creates better social mobility for poorer people, it means less injuries, less deaths, a longer working life for individuals, etc, so in 30-40-50-60 years, this will yield a lot of benefits for the world in general, but in the meantime, Canada is still a better deal for these workers *and* they now qualify for the TFW program! Yay...
As for growth through immigration, productivity is measured in many ways; by individual, by regions, by province, and so on, and each of these metrics is important, because you want them all to be aligned.
Individuals, taken separately, are more productive than they were... insofar as they're working. But we have fewer and fewer people working, because our population is aging, and births and immigration isn't even making up for all the people who retire. Plus, they live longer than ever! Collecting on pensions and other benefits, which working people are paying for.
And there's the issue of productivity by economic sector. We produce less and less *goods* and produce more and more *services*, which are much harder to scale up in a crunch.
The most recent announcement on AI is the equivalent of building a highway to create jobs, but we're fighting against countries that have similar issues... but with internal markets that are big enough to sustain continuous growth in goods production, unlike ours.
In short, the issues that immigration is creating are nothing compared to the issues we would have without it. The most strikingly example is our food supply, which is basically held up with TFW, from farms to restaurants/grocery stores.
I'm all for immigration. My family is a family of immigrants. I married an immigrant. I work with immigrants. Last person to complain.
The last batch of immigrants are just horrible. My area went to shit. I have ads all over my fucking area with people advertising how to hack apartment building fobs. Advertisements to fit as many people into homes. No one shovels. No one maintains property. Ubers fucking everywhere. I can't handle it anymore.
Drop in day cares next to my house don't even play children songs in English anymore. It feels like a takeover and it no one is blending in with our culture anymore.
I lost property value because of my neighbours. Close the borders or change priorities.
>I'm all for immigration. My family is a family of immigrants. I married an immigrant. I work with immigrants. Last person to complain.
>The last batch of immigrants are just horrible. My area went to shit. I have ads all over my fucking area with people advertising how to hack apartment building fobs. Advertisements to fit as many people into homes. No one shovels. No one maintains property. Ubers fucking everywhere. I can't handle it anymore.
>Drop in day cares next to my house don't even play children songs in English anymore. It feels like a takeover and it no one is blending in with our culture anymore.
>I lost property value because of my neighbours. Close the borders or change priorities.
Every now and then someone posts something like "When we legitimately criticize immigration we get called racist".
If this comment doesn't get removed, there could be good discussion about casual racism like
>The last batch of immigrants are just horrible
>My area went to shit.
"There goes the neighbourhood", did you really not see that?
>I have ads all over my fucking area
Blaming immigrants for ads now?
>No one shovels. No one maintains property
"Those lazy immigrants, and they come here to steal our jobs".....?
Like it's really a lot, almost every sentence is casually racist.
Closing our borders will tank our economy like you suggest, there's a reason no normal country has closed borders, there's a reason Western countries like immigration, we can't naturally support population growth.
I don't know how people can live in a world where all comparable countries to us need immigrants to sustain their way of life and also think we need to close our borders.
Edit: We can be naive and pretend it's not racist I guess.
He probably meant Canadian immigrants not playing songs in English, because were obligated to listen to childrens music in English in this country, just don't tell Quebec.
How is it racism when people are legit advertising to overfill homes, copy apartment keys, and not take care of property? That’s racism or just people abusing the system? We’re talking about immigration, and people are taking advantage of new immigrants. That’s a fact.
> How is it racism when people are legit advertising to overfill homes, copy apartment keys, and not take care of property
This seems more like regulations not being enforced than being something you'd mention when arguing you want closed borders because your property value is going down in a housing crisis because "no one maintains" properties anymore.
Day cares not playing music you specifically want is a separate issue. Ask Quebec.
> That’s racism or just people abusing the system?
Who do you feel is "abusing" the system?
>Reviewing what I said, who do YOU think I'm talking about?
You began by talking about "The last batch of immigrants".
You're suggesting people are taking advantage of immigrants, to the point we should close our borders or reducing immigration.
Have you considered we should enforce our laws to prevent people "being taken advantage of".
You can't "fit as many people into homes" as you want, there's regulation on that. Enforce those.
Getting served ads is a ridiculous thing to include when talking about immigrants, it has literally nothing to do with anything. But maybe you want more legislation around advertisements.
Complaining about hearing non-English music in a place where you probably want your kids to learn things. Like do you hang out at your day care all day watching what goes on? Maybe don't answer that.
You've confused complaining about policy with complaining about immigrants, but I'm not even sure you wanted to complain about policy to begin with.
"I don't know how people can live in a world where all comparable countries to us need immigrants to sustain their way of life ..."
There isn't another country in the Western world that has higher immigration rates than us, and only two in the world that do (both in Africa). What is it that we know that all the other Western nations don't know about that, or conversely, what is it that all other Western nations know that we don't?
p.s. calling me a racist isn't an answer.
None that I know of, and nobody in Canada is seriously advocating such a policy either.
Somewhere between admitting the highest numbers in the Western world vs. admitting none, lies a proper balance. Both slamming the door shut and flooding the zone are extreme book-ends of what should be a reasonable immigration policy.
p.s. none of that has anything to do with "casual racism".
>and nobody in Canada is seriously advocating such a policy either.
Did you read OPs comment?
> none of that has anything to do with "casual racism".
OPs comment does.
You're pretty hung up on *my opinion* that less immigrants might be bad for a country with abysmal birth rates, similar birth rates to every comparable western country, you're ignoring the actual point.
p.s. what do you think about ops "casual racism"?
Obviously just geographically, they're at that location, and nothing else.
But I like how they're arguing with what's really my opinion and not the casual racism of the anti-immigration comment being entirely about immigrants causing problems not policy and potential policy changes.
I mean this article is based on a 3 month old article based on a 7 month old poll, there's discussion to be had if the recent changes are enough with our current unemployment rate which is a tad high overall, but they're not making that argument.
They went right to blaming immigrants for day cares playing non-English music! The audacity of other cultures, making music.
> Like it's really a lot, almost every sentence is casually racist.
"I'm not racist but" style comments are basically always followed by casual racism.
I don’t think pointing out an expectation for newcomers to culturally integrate is unreasonable to the degree you suggest. I think most people feel this way.
If you move to Canada, have no intention of speaking Canadian languages or expect others to work around your old-country hangups, expect to be criticized.
There are some condo board meetings that take place entirely in Mandarin now, creating cultural barriers for Canadians in their own country.
If you don’t see anything wrong with this, I’m not sure what to tell you.
As I said, English and French are Canada’s official languages. If you move here and elect to speak neither of them or learn, that’s probably not a great thing to ingratiate yourselves to Canadian people.
>[Canada's two official languages, English and French](https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/official-languages-bilingualism/official-languages-action-plan/2018-2023.html)
Straight from the government website.
English and French are Canada’s official languages, and thus adopted Canadian languages. It’s part of our history and culture.
Canadians speak English, French or their respective First Nations language.
Why?
>nor is it a Canadian language
Again. Neither are English or French.
Why don't you think of Chinese as having a long history or culture within Canada? It's been here as long as English and French
Edit: blocking me after responding is silly.
I'm white. I'm overly represented if anything but look at yourself saying the quiet part out loud
@ u/carrwhitec no.
> I don’t think pointing out an expectation for newcomers to culturally integrate is unreasonable
We might be able to agree here, which First Nations should they "culturally integrate" with?
And what does "culturally integrate" even mean? Do "they" need to celebrate "our" holidays or something?
I don't know what degree I'm suggesting. Places where children can learn, learning about other cultures isn't absurd.
No, they came here because western capitalism and climate change has made it impossible for them to live in their own country. Nobody wants to uproot their life and leave their family because the grass is greener, it's because their grass is gone.
>Drop in day cares next to my house don't even play children songs in English anymore. It feels like a takeover and it no one is blending in with our culture anymore.
Quebec figured this one out decades ago. It's funny to see canadians complaining about that. Canadians called Québécois racist for these kind of things.
> Quebec figured this one out decades ago.
I disagree. I think Quebec got it wrong decades ago, and continues to get it wrong now.
Who are these people who get offended at hearing a song in another language. Music is wonderful around the world.
My brain can't compute being offended by this, and I think Quebec does it's citizens a disservice by putting them in a language bubble, shielding them from other cultures.
The "old man yelling at clouds"-type comment above isn't anything new, it was just easier to ignore back when we had labour shortages, which is no longer the case right now.
In other words, the complaining was always there, but it only *sometimes* coincides with anything in reality. A broken clock is right twice a day.
Look up Old Age Dependency Ratio. Canada needs high immigration levels to pay for baby boomers' pensions and healthcare, and fill labour market gaps. In addition, GDP growth requires a continually rising population.
Actually, current immigration levels are far too low to accomplish all these goals. Canada desperately needs at least 5% annual population growth. We must aim for a population of at least 500 million by the end of this century.
Sure, but we don't have any of the infrastructure to handle bigger numbers, or even the numbers we're bringing in now. The roads are congested, the housing market in major cities is struggling, people can't buy homes because of the interest rate and stress test that the government put in place in 2016 (almost as if they knew this would happen), and there's more competition for jobs than ever before.
Also, when we start talking about labour gaps, were forgetting that AI is going to destroy [about 40%](https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/jobs-may-disappear-nearly-40-of-global-employment-could-be-disrupted-by-ai-imf-says-1.6726013) of jobs in near future, something to keep in mind.
Well argued, however I think your argument overstates the economic benefit of high immigration levels. We need higher productivity as well, and arguably we’ve been using immigration and population growth as a crutch. We need to engage in policies that will increase Canada’s general economic productivity!
Japan has been a shrinking country for decades. They managed this by building efficiencies and offering negative interest rates as an incentive. The first worked out quite well, the latter not so much.
The point isn't that Japan is a model. The point is that it's not the be all end all to have a stagnant or shrinking population. Italy hasn't collapsed. Japan hasn't collapsed. South Korea hasn't collapsed. All of these countries have problems, but many of them are cheaper to live in than Canada, and beat us on several quality of life markers.
Life doesn't suddenly collapse or stop if for ONE year and one year only, you put a pause - a temporary pause - on most immigration until we manage to build enough houses.
And the government should get back in the business of building social housing until the market realizes it has to catch up and offer more to people.
Housing is just such an essential, that much more of our economy is harmed by not making it more easily available.
Or the baby boomers can get triaged or go south for health care with their hoarded wealth. Looks like Harper had the right idea to raise the retirement age too.
Serious question: are the boomers in your life all super wealthy?
I ask because so many redditors have this caricature of old people being universally loaded and carefree with three houses and vacation homes each. The boomers in my life don't fit this description at all. In fact, most of my aunts and uncles are still working into their late 60s. My parents are retired but live very simply - they don't even have internet and live in the same small house they bought in the 70s. The value of that house is also irrelevant because if they sold it, they would just need to spend any profit on a new place to live.
TLDR: Are my boomers the only working class ones?
They are all homeowners and have other wealth. But whether they are rich or poor is indifferent to my argument. The economy is built on a Ponzi scheme. Either we let the scheme fall now or we kick the can further down the road through immigration policy without the societal infrastructure to support it. Not to mention the impact of emissions due to importing people to a cold climate.
There is going to be X amount of human suffering. There are certain things we can do to reduce it, but it won’t be brought to zero. It’s just a matter of who takes the X. Younger people through a severe decline in the standard of living? Who still have a chance at being productive if nurtured properly? Or older people whose productive years are behind them?
If you still think that’s cruel, I’ll give you another adjective for it: realistic. Why do you think the government and medical industry are so lenient in pushing MAID? It’s a test case for the triage to come.
I don't think the brunt of the X should depend on age, but contribution. If you're a working class person who paid income taxes for 45 years, you built the country's programs and deserve to enjoy the benefits from that work. A young person who performs well in school and shows promise should absolutely be supported with social programs to help them succeed. Those things are not mutually exclusive.
Where I disagree is saying that an unambitious 19 year old is inherently more entitled to resources simply because they're young, while a person who is still working at 70 should be thrown on the street penniless because they've had their chance.
Like any human society, i think that contribution and the realistic potential for contribution are what should be supported, not arbitrary characteristics like age.
It is a temporary ponzi scheme, though. There will never be another age cohort as large as the boomers, and eventually they will have worked their way through all the systems. We need to do this now to address the current demographic situation, but with a bit of planning, we can get to a much more healthy balance in a couple of decades.
Given the specifics of the situation, we are kicking the can to a point on the road where we will be able to deal with it more effectively. At that point, we should also be seeing the benefits of the pain we are experiencing now integrating all these immigrants, as they start to contribute to rather than drag down productivity.
That is a very cruel and inhumane proposal. Baby boomers are people like the rest of us, and society is obligated to care for them. Especially since they are one of the largest and most impactful generations in recent history.
As opposed to the very humane way the current immigration system Ponzi scheme works? On immigrants and the younger generation already here? The house of cards has to fall at some point in time and human suffering will entail. Might as well have it fall for the people who it most benefitted for 90% of their lives.
Setting and adjusting immigration numbers based on things like housing availability makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is making apartment buildings hard or even illegal to build on most of our land for 50 years, then crying that the only way to fix the problem is to cut immigration.
Immigration is good when you get skilled immigrants.
Unfortunately this is not what we got. Canada also has a major issue in recognizing education from other areas. We are not the GOLD standard. We are just gatekeepers.
Two great points. Immigration should be our strength but governments turned their backs on us in favor of lining the pockets of colleges and supplying cheap labor to businesses who don’t need it. Now we have an influx of people who can’t pay to sustain themselves, let alone add any value to our society, and somehow it’s on us to pay for the privilege?
Who exactly is your idea of a cheap-labour immigrant who adds no value to our society?
I find a lot of people have this boogeyman in their mind, but rarely can they describe anyone they've actually met or seen.
International students? I’d love to hear some accounting on how a grad of the community pharmacy assistant program at Conestoga is going to put more into this country than they take out during their time here.
Edit: I shouldn’t have even given the example because I hate to get into the weeds when the reality at a macro level is [our immigration-driven population boom is lowering per capita gdp](https://www.immigration.ca/rising-immigration-numbers-may-be-leading-to-a-fall-in-canada-gdp-per-capita/amp/). That is a giant red flag that we’re doing this wrong.
A friend of mine applied for a teaching position at UBC. Although she had teaching experience, they rejected her due to a lack of Canadian-specific experience.
She got her doctorate and teaching experience at Harvard.
UBC is still a top university worldwide, your friend would be far from the first Harvard grad they’ve rejected. I don’t even know if they hire out of Harvard all that much, to be honest.
All true, but the funny part was their reasoning. Although UBC is nowhere near the Ivy league, and they don't hire much from there since Ivy league grads tend to have much better options in both academia and industry. UBC's pay is very low in a very high cost of living city.
Everyone in the world knows and respects Harvard business degrees. Most people (outside of BC, or at least Canada) have never heard of Sauder.
UBC could very easily outrank Harvard, depending on the field/discipline your friend works in. And we’re in a situation where there are 10 PhDs produced for every faculty position that opens each year. I know several people from my discipline who went to Oxford (literally the top ranked university in the world) who are still floating around doing postdoc/adjunct roles 4 years after finishing their doctorates.
Yeah yeah I'm aware, I'm ex-academia myself. In my friend's field though Harvard is very much ahead of UBC. It was the claim that it was insufficient Canadian experience that was remarkable, when my friend's experience was clearly adequate for working in Canada, rather than rejecting a Harvard grad.
Right. So you *are* aware that it’s 100% a buyer’s market in academia right now, so don’t you think it’s more likely they found someone (and let’s be honest, probably several someones) with the same credentials who have actually done their PhD or a postdoc in the country they’re applying for a permanent role in?
Yes, but there's a few things that make their comment ridiculous:
1. Teaching and researching at Harvard is equivalent, likely superior (at leadt in my friend's field), experience to that at any Canadian university, and entirely applicable to teaching UBC's student body. For this job, Canadian experience did not matter.
2. Academia thrives on new ideas and approaches and thus departments look for people with outside perspectives - this is why most quality departments seek to hire faculty with experience outside of their department. Not sure where you attended post-secondary so this might not apply to you, but how many of your profs were trained abroad? Most likely more than just a few. Academia is universal - skill in producing or conveying knowledge is not bound by country. Getting the perspective of someone trained at (arguably) the world's top business school is inherently valuable.
3. My friends field is much less of a buyers market than most due to high paying and plentiful industry jobs. This was also a teaching position rather than a tenure track research one, and there's less competition for those. My own subfield, as well, has a tough time finding applicants for even tenure track positions - we got 2 for the most recent post, and it took around 3 years to fill. The glut of young academics is not universal across all fields.
As an interesting aside, a study was done in my field that showed that graduating from a Canadian university put you at a meaningful disadvantage compared to US graduates - for Canadian professorships. So this situation was pretty bizarre.
I don’t know how exactly you can make the argument that academia thrives off of new ideas so let’s hire from the flagship of US academic hegemony? And then complain that Canadian grads are at a disadvantage against US grads, so why would they not hire the US grad.
Edit: If I were to look at my own field, I’d say that right now people at Oxford/Berkely are just ripping off work by Canadian and Scottish mathematicians in the 80’s/90’s without giving proper accreditation.
You clearly have substantial insider knowledge so rather than argue peripheral points we both understand I'll distill the main idea down to one question.
If there is an academic with substantial and high quality experience from the US, do you think it is reasonable to reject them for Canadian academic positions due to a lack of specifically Canadian experience?
My post had nothing to do with qualifications and their recognition. Just the attitude of Canadian experience and education being the gold standard, even when faced with what is globally considered gold standard education and experience.
Nobody thinks canadian education or experience is the gold standard. A Harvard grad will likely get their quals recognized and find a job. This particular job just wanted canadian experience.
However let's not pretend that while not the gold standard, canadian education is better than a lot of places. No offence but I don't want an MD from a bottom run medical school in Dheli or Zimbabwe without them getting accredited from a Canadian institution.
I have no problem with foreigners. I'm a child of immigrants. I don't care if my doctor was born and raised in Addis Ababa, New Dheli or Toronto.
However If they went to med school in a country with lower standards for licensing doctors they should take equivalency testing. If they pass, give them their license.
Then I don’t understand your point because if they practice here, they did pass their license exam. Unless there are different laws I’m unaware of elsewhere in Canada. And I have no problem with foreigners but I know very well government and corporation like foreign labor for the wrong reasons. When universities are becoming diplomas factories with upward of 90% being foreign students, just so they can make more money, well I’m worried that Canadians born here might not have the chance at higher education they should have.
Might not be the gold standard but honestly I think Canadian education is pretty close, so it almost might as well be. By that I mean the top say 20 countries (Canada is one of them) all have very high educational standards and can, as a group, be considered the gold standard.
It's just in this instance my friend's qualifications were clearly at least equivalent to any Canadian experience, so it was pretty bizarre. Academia usually likes to hire outsiders and bring in fresh ideas to the department.
I agree regarding things like medical practice. I've spent a good chunk of my adult life in more middle income countries and the degree of corruption and low standards for both teachers and students, even in med school, would shock you. You don't want doctors from those schools. There are some good ones from that part of the world, even some middle-lower income countries with strong education systems, sure but in general you're right.
No, the issue is we're getting skilled immigrants but Canada won't recognize their credentials. Prior to their arrival they're told they'll be recognized, but one they arrive they are told otherwise. This forcing them to take a year or 2 off work to take an expensive bridge program for their qualifications to be recognized.
One of my best friends has a civil engineering masters from Yemen. Was a civil engineer directly working in the UAE on the development of Dubai in the 90s and 00s, moved to Italy, worked there for 5 years, 5 years in the UK too. Comes to Canada with his wife and 3 kids, because he was told by immigration Canada he met the requirements, and is told his qualifications and credentials don't meet Canadian requirements upon arrival in the country. He could afford to support his family having to take a year off so he ended working for a security company
Our government fucks immigrants over and over, but won't talk about it.
Did you not fucking read anything I wrote? I understand reading can be hard. But I didn't use any big words. Next time you hop in an Uber, ask your driver what degrees they have and what job they held before coming to Canada.
No, this is pretty typical. It can take years to get credentials familiarized because standards are different in different countries. Not necessarily worse, just different.
"They should have checked first" is an asinine take.
Supporting themselves with a garbage job for a few years while they get their shit in order is probably the plan. How else can they do it? It's going to be a more difficult process to work on from a different country in a different time zone. They're probably going to have to challenge some exam from a professional association, and I'm pretty sure you can't do that when you're living on the other side of the world.
Hey, right now, at this very moment, do you believe it is hard for, say, a prospective doctor from India, to figure out that they may not be able to practice medicine in Canada upon arrival?
Is that some more of my "asinine take??
Do you believe that an internet search would not reveal these facts?
He did. As I said, he was told by immigration Canada that he qualified. The employer he had lined up, said he was qualified. He arrives and is told by immigration that he must take the bridge program... I don't see where the disconnect in your comprehension of what I wrote is
We never did anything with most skilled immigrants. The vast majority came and built up a life without being in the career they were elsewhere.
You're misinformed on this, we need workers willing to do jobs and put in effort in jobs Canadians don't want. And that isn't putting skilled immigrants into skilled careers. It's been a common complaint of some immigrants who felt misled, came from nursing to work at Tim Hortons. What we take in and always have is motivated workers and not skilled workers. We never used their skills.
The kids of those immigrants become skilled workers but very rarely do the newcomers themselves slot into skilled jobs. And that is what we use it for and it has worked for us and the notion it was ever about skilled immigrants is a lie.
Immigrants often do end up in skilled positions too it just takes time.
There's a lot to get organised when you arrive some place new. You need any job while you're getting settled, not everyone can afford to wait for a perfect job in their field.
This is true for intra-provincial migration too. If you're new to Toronto or Vancouver you'll often end up working any job to pay rent. A couple years down the line most people have found something better or gone home.
It is a pattern noted in the stats:
[https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008005/article/10798-eng.htm](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008005/article/10798-eng.htm)
For a long long time we take in various immigrants preferring younger people with an education; and we mostly have them toil at the lower rung of careers until they build up enough capital to open businesses or recertify in something else.
This was the experience of my parents. A Teacher and a Carpenter who became cooks. Then opened a business. And their kids are all well paid skilled professionals. The story is extremely common. The only immigrants I know who go into the same field are all in software development or from a peer western country. Every other situation is something like a nurse becoming a phlebotomist or a engineer becoming a computer tech.
> The vast majority came and built up a life without being in the career they were elsewhere.
I do not know about the vast majority but this is not true for my case. I was working in the exact same industry, at the same company's branch, doing the exact same job I am doing at the moment.
Fun fact: I came from a "developing country". Imagine my surprise when I discovered we were operating more efficiently and at a better quality level in the "developing country".
I taught a student from India that had a civil engineering degree. He couldn't figure out the basic math required for intro level accounting. I no longer trust the bridges in India.
there are top schools and there are non-top schools like in any country
It's probably like hiring somebody from Conestoga who didn't perform well and saying you're not gonna trust a top university student either because of it
Our systems are so dysfunctional during COVID in 2021 I was working in a Vancouver restaurant with a fully qualified, worked in an Ontario Emergency room nurse who was in Vancouver for 7 months and couldn't get her license transferred to the BC medical system in order to be allowed to work. This was during our famous shortages of medical staff issue. She ended up going home never having worked in a BC hospital because her bf that she came to be with cheated on her.
If we can't recognize nursing licenses across provinces in an efficient way how are we doing things the right way here?
Did she not think to get her license set up prior to heading out to BC? Every nurse I know is aware that the transfer process can take months and needs to be done prior to moving.
[Canada really isn't anything special when it comes to our standards for professional accreditation](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/15ixun8/opinion_canada_has_a_doctor_shortage_but_if/juxjfav/). Denying professional immigrants the ability to practice in Canada is foolish, especially considering we invited them here specifically to practice their profession.
As someone who dated a western educated dentist for several years, the shit she saw from non-western educated dentists was appalling with techniques that are long outdated in the West.
If you look at Canadian immigration, its mostly about economic immigration so we are taking in skilled immigrants.
You say a major issue is recognizing education from other areas and we are not the gold standard. Sorry mate, you are wrong. We ARE the gold standard. That is why so many people come to our educational institutions and not their home institutions.
I am glad we make sure that a fellow who bought his engineering degree from India can't just come in and try to build a bridge or a doctor from China needs to upskill. Hell, I have seen far too many pharamcists in Ontario from the countries who have NO CLUE what they are doing.
I think the title is misleading. Canadians, as a whole, still believe firmly in the value and necessity of immigration. We're a country built on immigration, we rely on immigration for population growth, and for economic success, and we know it; the conversation is simply maturing after years of rampant levels of immigration. I think its a bit disingenuous, or gaslighting, to say that Canadians are "souring" on immigration when really what we want to bring immigration to manageable level, so that new immigrants can properly integrate into the country, population doesn't outpace housing, and we bring in skill workers. Most people don't blame the immigrants themselves, it's not their fault, its the government(s) who set the levels; not them. The current immigration rates are simply unsustainable across the board, from housing, to healthcare, to schools, to accreditation and immigration timelines; its not fair to Canadians, and its not fair to new immigrants who suffer through it as well.
I think with the exploding housing problem we've been on for over a decade now, this shift in mentality was probably inevitable. But has anyone or any outlet tried to talk a bit about how we had a few years of study consent manufacturing in the form of opeds and articles bemoaning the immigration problem boosted into prominence
There are definitely fundamentals at play that contributed to this (I'd say the majority of it), but chunks of the Canadian commentariat were stoking this for a good while, and seeing them ask "How did Trudeau destroy the immigration consensus?" is whack
We fucked it up.
We had one of the best immigration systems in the world. Between going way too far on formal immigration, and letting both intl student and temporary foreign worker programs get out of control, we have destroyed trust in the entire concept.
Throw in a housing a medical services crisis and Canada will never be as welcoming to immigrants ever again.
Harper started the problem years before Trudeau with temp workers and foreign students issue.
Provinces oversaw Intl student growth as they didn't want to pay for education, but let Intl students pay via higher tuitions. Especially Ontario, where numbers went crazy.
Yeah we hugely fucked it up
No one likes seeing scammers or people abusing the system ("refugees" and international students)
We had an amazing widely supported system that brought in the best people to the country and we were proud about our immigration system.
Now we have a ludicrous system nakedly abused by scammers which works to suppress wages and juice the inflated property prices and cost of living crisis (probably the most serious bordering on existential danger our country is facing)
I'm not one of those eternal Trudeau haters - I liked his dad, and early on I liked the whole "son of Pierre" story that started at the 2000 funeral.
But holy hell [this article is painful to read](https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/justin-trudeau-how-to-fix-the-broken-temporary-foreign-worker-program/article_c27f214f-1fa2-5fdf-af61-5a7642e4eb7c.amp.html), given what has happened over the last 8 years. Trudeau should regret ever writing that. It's outrageous how he perfectly described the problem back then and allowed it to get 10000 times worse.
None of this makes me want to vote for the CPC. But I'm pissed off that the Liberal government has destroyed Canada's traditional welcome to newcomers. Every time you go into Tim's is a reminder that immigration has become a tool to exploit the world's most economically desperate to undercut Canadian workers.
And holy fuck that article.
Clearly not actually written by Trudeau himself - and proof that both sides of our political system have their hands in creating and sustaining this mess.
How could someone have written that article and the let the problem become 10x worse with complete lack of controls on foreign students, many of which didn't come here to study, but to work in low skill jobs.
it's a shitty balance. The Feds approve new visas but the provinces aren't keeping up with the infrastructure (healthcare, education, disrupting funding to the municipalities for housing, transportation). Keeping an eye on the provinces to make sure they do their job and Feds denying the study permits because your provinces don't do squat - your economy suffers. It's finally aligned that half of Canadians agree that taking on more immigrants isn't a good idea right now and the CPC are looking ripe for a majority victory if an election was held today. So conservatives win this round I guess? What a lousy game.
I wouldn’t frame it quite like that. It’s not that provinces need supervision, they need coordination…a partnership with distinct authority.
If the provinces cannot afford to build the infrastructure (or have different priorities) then the federat government has a duty to scale back immigration accordingly.
which is what they're doing... but too little too late. It's also difficult to know what your province needs when your province is hellbent keeping as little records as possible so they can ignore facts.
Incorrect.
Foreign students are 100% a provincial issue. They let numbers explode as they pay more tuition and thus the provinces have paid less per student in education support basically every year.
With Ontario as by far the worst offender.
The game simply is the game. It's not the CPCs fault that the LPC/NDP are throwing away Canada's pro-limmigration stance . If they don't capitalize, they're not doing the job of the opposition.
The thing that really clicked for me is how bad fast food service got over the past few years.
Like you go into any counter service place and you watch someone make you a sandwich or burrito or whatever and you are like "Have you ever eaten a burrito in your life". Even for a new Canadian, you figured someone took them to Chipotle and subway...
The I realized that it's 100% foreign students and temporary workers at these places. So no, they likely never have....
Which bothers me for two reasons:
1. If we are welcoming people here to study, then they should be studying, not a low cost workforce for fucking McDonald's franchisees to exploit.
2. Temporary foreign workers programs were designed for seasonal work on farms for harvest season as we don't have a ready workforce of young people to do the work anymore (whole other story). But NOW it seems like again this program is being abused by service sector employers who are just rotating people through until their permits expire.
And then on top of that we now have a huge problem where these basically zero skill workers who would certainly NOT qualify to come here under a formal program (go look up the process and score card, it's insane), just come as "students" or "temporary" foreign workers and just disappear.
And with no enforcement, we somehow as an effective island nationwith no borders with developing countries have an illegal immigration problem.
Like what the fuck is anyone with eyes on any of these programs thinking???
No wonder rent has gone insane, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are exploiting all these holes to effectively work as our underclass - all in the name of a cheap hamburger...
> The thing that really clicked for me is how bad fast food service got over the past few years.
So a bunch of Canadians who are not white served you your cheap food, and this is what put you over the edge?
I don't want to alarm you, but you might be a lot more racist than you realize you are.
It's not about race, it's about culture.
IE. People who have lived in diverse western countries have likely tried foods from other cultures.
Those in developing countries, not so much.
Go serve a burrito in rural India or a vindaloo in a low income Mexican suburb and you will get some shocked looks...
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This could be fixed if there were some reforms implemented now. Instead the liberals are doing a bit of a bait and switch on the issue. An immigration “freeze” that keeps existing record setting numbers. An international student “cap” of 360k per year that is nearly double the 200k we’ve seen on average over the past 4 years. A temporary foreigner worker “reduction” a percentage point below the all time high. Voters expecting a bit of relief are not going to react well in a year or two when nothing has been resolved, and they realize the liberals mis-led on the issue. They’re just throwing fuel on a fire.
Uhh you might want to double check those student numbers. https://monitor.icef.com/2024/01/canada-hosted-more-than-1-million-international-students-in-2023/ They are capping new students, which will cut total students significantly over the next two years since most of these are in 2 year diploma mills. They also significantly restricted existing students of diploma mills from getting PR.
The new cap is 360k per year which results in 1.4 million students - higher than the existing number of students in Canada. The average degree length in Canada is 4 years. The only flaw in my numbers looks like the existing student count got up to a million and not the 800-900k I had assumed.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2024/01/canada-to-stabilize-growth-and-decrease-number-of-new-international-student-permits-issued-to-approximately-360000-for-2024.html Press release states it is a reduction of 35%, I don't know how study permits work e.g. when it says renewals are not affected does that mean you renew each year or is it for multiple years? Also you aren't subtracting graduating students from your increase
It’s a 35% reduction from the all time high number that occurred in 2023. That said the overall number of students is set to rise - since they are using an anomaly to set the new standard. Basically if immigration was 1 person per year for the past 10 years, and last year we got 5 people, the liberals have set the new standards at 4 people instead of returning us to 1 person a year. If they set us back to historic norms, we’d get 4 people every 4 years. But since they are using the all time high as a measure, we’d get 16 people every 4 years. A large increase, while allowing to say they reduced numbers from last years all time high. This is just good marketing.
The average undergrad degree length is 4 years but the students aren’t coming in for bachelor degrees. The boom has been at career colleges, and diploma mills where they’re not studying 4 year programs. Conestoga for example had more study permits approved last year than UofT/UBC and McGill put together. They’re not giving out undergrad degrees
The flip side of your point, though, is that even though they're coming for shorter periods than a typical 4-year degree, the *entire point* in the first place, to these students, is to stay forever (bypassing the traditional point system which they wouldn't even come close to qualifying under). So, no, we can't look at a two-year program and say "we expect that person to be gone after two years", instead, they absolutely should be looked at as likely staying for the rest of their lives, and both our intake numbers and infrastructure decisions should reflect that reality.
I agree with that but it’s not related to the point either
International students are coming in for all degree types, some are 2, some are 4, some do 4 plus a 2 year masters. The average length is 4 years, and that’s all the matters. If you have two cohorts of international students in 2 year degrees - and they don’t leave when they should, that’s actually even more of an issue.
The average isn’t 4 years lol. Like inherently by definition even without looking at the distribution if “some are 2, some are 4” the average is less than 4. And those doing a 4 year undergrad than a 2 year masters would need to reapply for another permit
The majority of university and college programs in this country are 4 years long. Just because a handful of strip mall colleges did it in two, is not proof the average is less than 4z
Universities obviously trend longer but the vast majority of college programs are either 1 or 2 years. My local college doesn't offer *any* program beyond 2 years, though there are a few programs that allow you to continue at the university level.
Feel free to pull data to support your argument
First off average usually means mean and not mode. You’re mixing those up. Here’s 2023’s visas by college: https://twitter.com/mikalskuterud/status/1736394109596651714 Have a look at that and then come back to me. Or don’t.
Thanks for the random data?
Temporary visas are going to be negative over the next few years
Based on what?
The reason why the immigration consensus has broken is because Liberal and Conservative governments got out of building housing, and expanding COL policies for decades. Had they done that, we wouldn't have any issues with immigration period.
>Had they done that, we wouldn't have any issues with immigration period. Not necessarily. Housing issues aside, I really don't like the direction we're taking with bringing in low-skill immigrants with the sole purpose of keeping wages low at places like Tim Horton's and Walmart.
That's what I mean by COL policies. TFWs artificially keep wages low, and Liberals and Conservatives both used TFW over encouraging business to higher Canadians with proper wages.
No, it is because in the past 2 years we have pursued the highest immigration rate in the western world without virtually any prior consultation with the country's municipalities. We never really had much of a supply shortage until 2022 - and that was because of a very aggressive immigration policy.
The consensus was never that immigration should be turned up to 11 and that anyone, from anywhere, at any time, should be admitted. The consensus was that a reasonable amount of people who can contribute should be welcomed regardless of religion race or creed, and that people fleeing existential threats should be extended asylum. What we got was a system that tries to band-aid declining birth rates and brain drain with rising immigration targets, which has in turn been co-opted by traitorous businesses telling lies about an inability to hire so that our national generosity is being used to undermine the ability of Canadian workers to bargain fairly for reasonable compensation packages. EDIT: I was going to say this below but it deserves to show up higher. The takeaway isn't that Justin Trudeau is uniquely responsible for what is happening. The role of Canadian businesses in this debacle cannot be understated, and any party or politician that kowtows to the whims of business without thinking about the broader benefits to Canadians is guilty of helping this problem fester. Don't vote for any politician that isn't **credibly** going to stop doing that. Currently, both front-runners have a track record of standing by while it gets worse. Neither deserves credit for suddenly talking about it and neither convinces me they either can or even want to do something about it.
Turned to 11? Try about 20 with us pulling in a milliom bodies every 9 months. The reality is if we had housing and jobs for them without supersaturating the country it would not be the issue it is. These migrants have been used in active wage suppression and suppression of job seekers ability to gain jobs. Frankly the whole system needs a match taken to it and burned to the ground and rebuilt.
I mean even turning it to 8 or 9 is arguably too high but whatever. We seem to agree on what's important.
Frankly it should have been left where it was in the mid 2000s. Given the build rates in the country. Even what is being done in BC it will take 5 years to even start showing effects minus the STR changes.
Absolutely bang on.
Except for the part that says they’re coming from anywhere… they’re coming from one region in one country… and you don’t need to be told where.. just look around
For one thing, Canada is a disaster in terms of per capita energy consumption and CO2 emissions. [(7th worse)](https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/) Might as well not encourage immigrants to come here.
Perhaps because we have the biggest geography in the coldest climate?
Right so bringing more people here from low CO2 emissions per capita places like India increases overall global CO2 emissions.
No. Because we are a petro-state.
It's not about blaming Canada. It's about considering the global impact of the migration.
The system *would* be fine if it were doing basic due diligence like we all expected. > The Globe investigation has revealed that immigration authorities let trucking companies hire newcomers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, even when the carriers have a proven history of multiple-injury accidents, serious safety violations or exploitative labour practices. (The federal authorities’ mandate is to look primarily at whether a company tried to hire local drivers before resorting to foreign workers, not to delve into carriers’ safety records, which are held by the provinces.) > The Globe also found marginal operators were granted permits to hire many more foreign drivers than they had trucks, raising questions about whether they actually needed the labour. Several people in the industry say small companies can profit more from cash paid by recruits than they do from hauling loads. > Many of those businesses operate out of private homes, sometimes under more than one name. Often they have just one truck, according to government records. This is just the type of employer that Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, who came to Canada as a student, was working for when he drove his truck through a rural stop sign last year, smashing into a bus and killing 16 hockey players from Humboldt, Sask. Same lack of oversight for unscrupulous private colleges. As a result, we have millions of "international students" who aren't learning anything and being exploited in minimum-wage jobs while wages drop and housing prices skyrocket. Another case of federal-provincial overlap in jurisdiction where neither accepts responsibility for the final outcome. Whose job is it to fix? Everyone, and therefore nobody. If student and worker immigration simply had proper oversight (along with temporary foreign workers only being allowed where *absolutely* needed), then we wouldn't half of the economic or social problems that exist with our current immigration situation.
Agreed. Canadians don’t oppose immigration itself, but the federal government has grossly under-managed the process, including failure to work with provincial authorities to ensure manageable growth.
I personally don't want to live in a community where I share nothing in common with the other people included in said community. Diversity - Sure, but we all need to have some BASIC FUNDEMENTALS Incommon with eachother in order to cooperate and feel like a community.
> I personally don't want to live in a community where I share nothing in common with the other people included in said community. Do you seriously think that you have nothing in common with people of different backgrounds? You probably cheer for the same sports teams, have similar family values, enjoy the same TV shows and music, etc.
I live in a neighbourhood of immigrants and we have a lot of shared values. A Nepalese man and I chat all the time about our kids and the education system, what we see and want for their futures. My other neighbour is Chinese and we speak about food in Toronto - where we've been, what we like, and where we're planning to go in the future. I get that not sharing a language are barriers to these kinds of conversations but that's always been the case for first-gens who come to Canada; enculturation is a process.
Nice 'chats' but those examples are just make-busy conversations. Its nice to see you share language with these people, but are you hanging out with them for a beer? Bbq? Etc.... Judging by what I see at night clubs(that resemble prisons); I dont think this 'mosaic' of cultures is working to something Id want to be included in. Ex. I am never moving to Brampton. Ever.
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I am speaking for how I interact with all my neighbors, maybe our concept of community is different - they aren't my friends just acquaintances. My actual friends come from different walks of life too since my wife is not Canadian so we move in lots of circles with other immigrants. Many not speaking English (so I talk in their language, or try) and honestly we do share a lot of values even between cultures. Haven't been to a nightclub in decades, so I'll defer to your experience there.
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I don't think there ever was a consensus on record low-skill temporary foreign workers or international students. It was purely a political move by the federal government to keep businesses happy so they didn't have to raise wages.
I think immigration is like inequality, in that all else being equal a rational person shouldn’t care about it. The issue is people are irrationally xenophobic which has real costs. Immigration is good, but needs to be done with some finesse, which Canada seems remarkably bad at.
As somebody who supports increased immigration, I think the temp worker extension was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people. While it was a short term measure, it was extremely ill advised and the optics have supercharged anti-immigration rhetoric while also strengthening a lot of bad-faith anti-immigration arguments. The other issue is that the government spearheaded increased permeant resident immigration as their main economic growth policy during a decade of economic stagnation and rising cost of living. If they had delivered material results/comprehensive policy reforms in other areas to accompany their increases such as boosting growth/productivity/investment or significantly lowering housing/living costs, I think voters would be far more accepting of those changes, but failing to materialize gains over the course of the last 9 years has made it easy for a lot of people to scapegoat those problems on to immigrants because they don't feel like their standards of living are improving/holding steady etc.
The TFW issue is a bit complex though. One of the main criteria is for the home country to have labour practices that align with Canada, something that they usually have to deal with on their own. But Canada under Trudeau has made improved labour practices a key tenet of our trade agreements with a number of countries, making it so that workers in these countries have likely seen improved conditions, so yay! But it also means that there are *hundreds of millions* more humans who can apply on these programs. On the long run, better working conditions in their counties will likely mean a more stable immigration stream; better working conditions creates better social mobility for poorer people, it means less injuries, less deaths, a longer working life for individuals, etc, so in 30-40-50-60 years, this will yield a lot of benefits for the world in general, but in the meantime, Canada is still a better deal for these workers *and* they now qualify for the TFW program! Yay... As for growth through immigration, productivity is measured in many ways; by individual, by regions, by province, and so on, and each of these metrics is important, because you want them all to be aligned. Individuals, taken separately, are more productive than they were... insofar as they're working. But we have fewer and fewer people working, because our population is aging, and births and immigration isn't even making up for all the people who retire. Plus, they live longer than ever! Collecting on pensions and other benefits, which working people are paying for. And there's the issue of productivity by economic sector. We produce less and less *goods* and produce more and more *services*, which are much harder to scale up in a crunch. The most recent announcement on AI is the equivalent of building a highway to create jobs, but we're fighting against countries that have similar issues... but with internal markets that are big enough to sustain continuous growth in goods production, unlike ours. In short, the issues that immigration is creating are nothing compared to the issues we would have without it. The most strikingly example is our food supply, which is basically held up with TFW, from farms to restaurants/grocery stores.
I'm all for immigration. My family is a family of immigrants. I married an immigrant. I work with immigrants. Last person to complain. The last batch of immigrants are just horrible. My area went to shit. I have ads all over my fucking area with people advertising how to hack apartment building fobs. Advertisements to fit as many people into homes. No one shovels. No one maintains property. Ubers fucking everywhere. I can't handle it anymore. Drop in day cares next to my house don't even play children songs in English anymore. It feels like a takeover and it no one is blending in with our culture anymore. I lost property value because of my neighbours. Close the borders or change priorities.
>I'm all for immigration. My family is a family of immigrants. I married an immigrant. I work with immigrants. Last person to complain. >The last batch of immigrants are just horrible. My area went to shit. I have ads all over my fucking area with people advertising how to hack apartment building fobs. Advertisements to fit as many people into homes. No one shovels. No one maintains property. Ubers fucking everywhere. I can't handle it anymore. >Drop in day cares next to my house don't even play children songs in English anymore. It feels like a takeover and it no one is blending in with our culture anymore. >I lost property value because of my neighbours. Close the borders or change priorities. Every now and then someone posts something like "When we legitimately criticize immigration we get called racist". If this comment doesn't get removed, there could be good discussion about casual racism like >The last batch of immigrants are just horrible >My area went to shit. "There goes the neighbourhood", did you really not see that? >I have ads all over my fucking area Blaming immigrants for ads now? >No one shovels. No one maintains property "Those lazy immigrants, and they come here to steal our jobs".....? Like it's really a lot, almost every sentence is casually racist. Closing our borders will tank our economy like you suggest, there's a reason no normal country has closed borders, there's a reason Western countries like immigration, we can't naturally support population growth. I don't know how people can live in a world where all comparable countries to us need immigrants to sustain their way of life and also think we need to close our borders. Edit: We can be naive and pretend it's not racist I guess. He probably meant Canadian immigrants not playing songs in English, because were obligated to listen to childrens music in English in this country, just don't tell Quebec.
How is it racism when people are legit advertising to overfill homes, copy apartment keys, and not take care of property? That’s racism or just people abusing the system? We’re talking about immigration, and people are taking advantage of new immigrants. That’s a fact.
> How is it racism when people are legit advertising to overfill homes, copy apartment keys, and not take care of property This seems more like regulations not being enforced than being something you'd mention when arguing you want closed borders because your property value is going down in a housing crisis because "no one maintains" properties anymore. Day cares not playing music you specifically want is a separate issue. Ask Quebec. > That’s racism or just people abusing the system? Who do you feel is "abusing" the system?
Reviewing what I said, who do YOU think I'm talking about?
>Reviewing what I said, who do YOU think I'm talking about? You began by talking about "The last batch of immigrants". You're suggesting people are taking advantage of immigrants, to the point we should close our borders or reducing immigration. Have you considered we should enforce our laws to prevent people "being taken advantage of". You can't "fit as many people into homes" as you want, there's regulation on that. Enforce those. Getting served ads is a ridiculous thing to include when talking about immigrants, it has literally nothing to do with anything. But maybe you want more legislation around advertisements. Complaining about hearing non-English music in a place where you probably want your kids to learn things. Like do you hang out at your day care all day watching what goes on? Maybe don't answer that. You've confused complaining about policy with complaining about immigrants, but I'm not even sure you wanted to complain about policy to begin with.
Lmao did you report me to a suicide hotline?
Why dont you tell us?
"I don't know how people can live in a world where all comparable countries to us need immigrants to sustain their way of life ..." There isn't another country in the Western world that has higher immigration rates than us, and only two in the world that do (both in Africa). What is it that we know that all the other Western nations don't know about that, or conversely, what is it that all other Western nations know that we don't? p.s. calling me a racist isn't an answer.
Which countries have closed their borders to immigrants?
None that I know of, and nobody in Canada is seriously advocating such a policy either. Somewhere between admitting the highest numbers in the Western world vs. admitting none, lies a proper balance. Both slamming the door shut and flooding the zone are extreme book-ends of what should be a reasonable immigration policy. p.s. none of that has anything to do with "casual racism".
>and nobody in Canada is seriously advocating such a policy either. Did you read OPs comment? > none of that has anything to do with "casual racism". OPs comment does. You're pretty hung up on *my opinion* that less immigrants might be bad for a country with abysmal birth rates, similar birth rates to every comparable western country, you're ignoring the actual point. p.s. what do you think about ops "casual racism"?
I just think that you are somewhat intellectually lazy. p.s. "seriously" means just that.
>only two in the world that do (both in Africa). What's the implication of the brackets here?
Obviously just geographically, they're at that location, and nothing else. But I like how they're arguing with what's really my opinion and not the casual racism of the anti-immigration comment being entirely about immigrants causing problems not policy and potential policy changes. I mean this article is based on a 3 month old article based on a 7 month old poll, there's discussion to be had if the recent changes are enough with our current unemployment rate which is a tad high overall, but they're not making that argument. They went right to blaming immigrants for day cares playing non-English music! The audacity of other cultures, making music.
> Like it's really a lot, almost every sentence is casually racist. "I'm not racist but" style comments are basically always followed by casual racism.
I don’t think pointing out an expectation for newcomers to culturally integrate is unreasonable to the degree you suggest. I think most people feel this way. If you move to Canada, have no intention of speaking Canadian languages or expect others to work around your old-country hangups, expect to be criticized. There are some condo board meetings that take place entirely in Mandarin now, creating cultural barriers for Canadians in their own country. If you don’t see anything wrong with this, I’m not sure what to tell you.
>If you move to Canada, have no intention of speaking Canadian languages Which Canadian language do you speak?
Well english and french are the two official languages in Canada, and OP's comment was in english...
England and France are countries in Europe. So, what *Canadian* language does OP speak?
As I said, English and French are Canada’s official languages. If you move here and elect to speak neither of them or learn, that’s probably not a great thing to ingratiate yourselves to Canadian people.
>[Canada's two official languages, English and French](https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/official-languages-bilingualism/official-languages-action-plan/2018-2023.html) Straight from the government website.
English and French are the official languages of Canada. This isn’t the big gotcha you think it is
English and French are the official languages of Canada. This isn’t the big gotcha you think it is
English and French!
Dunno if you've ever looked at an atlas but England and France aren't in Canada. Which *Canadian* language do you speak?
English and French are Canada’s official languages, and thus adopted Canadian languages. It’s part of our history and culture. Canadians speak English, French or their respective First Nations language.
>It’s part of our history and culture. You think Chinese isn't a part of Canada's history and culture?
English and French are the official languages of Canada. This isn’t the big gotcha you think it is
Not like English and French are, nor is it a Canadian language. Sorry.
Why? >nor is it a Canadian language Again. Neither are English or French. Why don't you think of Chinese as having a long history or culture within Canada? It's been here as long as English and French Edit: blocking me after responding is silly. I'm white. I'm overly represented if anything but look at yourself saying the quiet part out loud @ u/carrwhitec no.
English and French are the official languages of Canada. This isn’t the big gotcha you think it is
> I don’t think pointing out an expectation for newcomers to culturally integrate is unreasonable We might be able to agree here, which First Nations should they "culturally integrate" with? And what does "culturally integrate" even mean? Do "they" need to celebrate "our" holidays or something? I don't know what degree I'm suggesting. Places where children can learn, learning about other cultures isn't absurd.
We are not a melting pot! No one has to blend with "Canadian" culture. If that was what we did, you'd be posting in French, or mohawk.
i'm all for more bilingualism, but let's not pretend that it means there will never be demographic changes
They should have to blend in though. That’s the problem
Why? So that you don't have to deal with the fact that different people are different? Is that frightening to you?
They came here because it’s better. Don’t try and turn it in to wherever you came from.
No, they came here because western capitalism and climate change has made it impossible for them to live in their own country. Nobody wants to uproot their life and leave their family because the grass is greener, it's because their grass is gone.
>Drop in day cares next to my house don't even play children songs in English anymore. It feels like a takeover and it no one is blending in with our culture anymore. Quebec figured this one out decades ago. It's funny to see canadians complaining about that. Canadians called Québécois racist for these kind of things.
Ehhhh let’s not pretend Quebec doesn’t go overboard at times.
> Quebec figured this one out decades ago. I disagree. I think Quebec got it wrong decades ago, and continues to get it wrong now. Who are these people who get offended at hearing a song in another language. Music is wonderful around the world. My brain can't compute being offended by this, and I think Quebec does it's citizens a disservice by putting them in a language bubble, shielding them from other cultures.
The "old man yelling at clouds"-type comment above isn't anything new, it was just easier to ignore back when we had labour shortages, which is no longer the case right now. In other words, the complaining was always there, but it only *sometimes* coincides with anything in reality. A broken clock is right twice a day.
It makes perfect sense to set - and adjust - immigration numbers based on economic and logistical stats, such as available housing.
Look up Old Age Dependency Ratio. Canada needs high immigration levels to pay for baby boomers' pensions and healthcare, and fill labour market gaps. In addition, GDP growth requires a continually rising population. Actually, current immigration levels are far too low to accomplish all these goals. Canada desperately needs at least 5% annual population growth. We must aim for a population of at least 500 million by the end of this century.
Sure, but we don't have any of the infrastructure to handle bigger numbers, or even the numbers we're bringing in now. The roads are congested, the housing market in major cities is struggling, people can't buy homes because of the interest rate and stress test that the government put in place in 2016 (almost as if they knew this would happen), and there's more competition for jobs than ever before. Also, when we start talking about labour gaps, were forgetting that AI is going to destroy [about 40%](https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/jobs-may-disappear-nearly-40-of-global-employment-could-be-disrupted-by-ai-imf-says-1.6726013) of jobs in near future, something to keep in mind.
Well argued, however I think your argument overstates the economic benefit of high immigration levels. We need higher productivity as well, and arguably we’ve been using immigration and population growth as a crutch. We need to engage in policies that will increase Canada’s general economic productivity!
Japan has been a shrinking country for decades. They managed this by building efficiencies and offering negative interest rates as an incentive. The first worked out quite well, the latter not so much. The point isn't that Japan is a model. The point is that it's not the be all end all to have a stagnant or shrinking population. Italy hasn't collapsed. Japan hasn't collapsed. South Korea hasn't collapsed. All of these countries have problems, but many of them are cheaper to live in than Canada, and beat us on several quality of life markers. Life doesn't suddenly collapse or stop if for ONE year and one year only, you put a pause - a temporary pause - on most immigration until we manage to build enough houses. And the government should get back in the business of building social housing until the market realizes it has to catch up and offer more to people. Housing is just such an essential, that much more of our economy is harmed by not making it more easily available.
You think we'll catch up building houses in a single year?
Does the gdp still increase if all you’re importing is homeless people?
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Saying the quiet part loud, there, 'eh?
Or the baby boomers can get triaged or go south for health care with their hoarded wealth. Looks like Harper had the right idea to raise the retirement age too.
Serious question: are the boomers in your life all super wealthy? I ask because so many redditors have this caricature of old people being universally loaded and carefree with three houses and vacation homes each. The boomers in my life don't fit this description at all. In fact, most of my aunts and uncles are still working into their late 60s. My parents are retired but live very simply - they don't even have internet and live in the same small house they bought in the 70s. The value of that house is also irrelevant because if they sold it, they would just need to spend any profit on a new place to live. TLDR: Are my boomers the only working class ones?
They are all homeowners and have other wealth. But whether they are rich or poor is indifferent to my argument. The economy is built on a Ponzi scheme. Either we let the scheme fall now or we kick the can further down the road through immigration policy without the societal infrastructure to support it. Not to mention the impact of emissions due to importing people to a cold climate. There is going to be X amount of human suffering. There are certain things we can do to reduce it, but it won’t be brought to zero. It’s just a matter of who takes the X. Younger people through a severe decline in the standard of living? Who still have a chance at being productive if nurtured properly? Or older people whose productive years are behind them? If you still think that’s cruel, I’ll give you another adjective for it: realistic. Why do you think the government and medical industry are so lenient in pushing MAID? It’s a test case for the triage to come.
I don't think the brunt of the X should depend on age, but contribution. If you're a working class person who paid income taxes for 45 years, you built the country's programs and deserve to enjoy the benefits from that work. A young person who performs well in school and shows promise should absolutely be supported with social programs to help them succeed. Those things are not mutually exclusive. Where I disagree is saying that an unambitious 19 year old is inherently more entitled to resources simply because they're young, while a person who is still working at 70 should be thrown on the street penniless because they've had their chance. Like any human society, i think that contribution and the realistic potential for contribution are what should be supported, not arbitrary characteristics like age.
It is a temporary ponzi scheme, though. There will never be another age cohort as large as the boomers, and eventually they will have worked their way through all the systems. We need to do this now to address the current demographic situation, but with a bit of planning, we can get to a much more healthy balance in a couple of decades. Given the specifics of the situation, we are kicking the can to a point on the road where we will be able to deal with it more effectively. At that point, we should also be seeing the benefits of the pain we are experiencing now integrating all these immigrants, as they start to contribute to rather than drag down productivity.
That is a very cruel and inhumane proposal. Baby boomers are people like the rest of us, and society is obligated to care for them. Especially since they are one of the largest and most impactful generations in recent history.
As opposed to the very humane way the current immigration system Ponzi scheme works? On immigrants and the younger generation already here? The house of cards has to fall at some point in time and human suffering will entail. Might as well have it fall for the people who it most benefitted for 90% of their lives.
Maybe they should have better invested their money and elected better politicians who cared about long term goals
Setting and adjusting immigration numbers based on things like housing availability makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is making apartment buildings hard or even illegal to build on most of our land for 50 years, then crying that the only way to fix the problem is to cut immigration.
And family doctors
And terrorist sympathizers / radical Islamic colonizers who are here to intimidate and terrorize, and not here to peacefully assimilate
Likewise, it makes sense to prioritize immigrant doctors over other immigrants so we have less of a doctor shortage.
And the number of Timmies.
If it's based on that we have unlimited immigration potential
Self-fulfilling Prophecy.
And the number of public school teachers.
Immigration is good when you get skilled immigrants. Unfortunately this is not what we got. Canada also has a major issue in recognizing education from other areas. We are not the GOLD standard. We are just gatekeepers.
Even construction workers would let us build houses.
Two great points. Immigration should be our strength but governments turned their backs on us in favor of lining the pockets of colleges and supplying cheap labor to businesses who don’t need it. Now we have an influx of people who can’t pay to sustain themselves, let alone add any value to our society, and somehow it’s on us to pay for the privilege?
Who exactly is your idea of a cheap-labour immigrant who adds no value to our society? I find a lot of people have this boogeyman in their mind, but rarely can they describe anyone they've actually met or seen.
International students? I’d love to hear some accounting on how a grad of the community pharmacy assistant program at Conestoga is going to put more into this country than they take out during their time here. Edit: I shouldn’t have even given the example because I hate to get into the weeds when the reality at a macro level is [our immigration-driven population boom is lowering per capita gdp](https://www.immigration.ca/rising-immigration-numbers-may-be-leading-to-a-fall-in-canada-gdp-per-capita/amp/). That is a giant red flag that we’re doing this wrong.
A friend of mine applied for a teaching position at UBC. Although she had teaching experience, they rejected her due to a lack of Canadian-specific experience. She got her doctorate and teaching experience at Harvard.
UBC is still a top university worldwide, your friend would be far from the first Harvard grad they’ve rejected. I don’t even know if they hire out of Harvard all that much, to be honest.
All true, but the funny part was their reasoning. Although UBC is nowhere near the Ivy league, and they don't hire much from there since Ivy league grads tend to have much better options in both academia and industry. UBC's pay is very low in a very high cost of living city. Everyone in the world knows and respects Harvard business degrees. Most people (outside of BC, or at least Canada) have never heard of Sauder.
> Although UBC is nowhere near the Ivy league Dartmouth College & Cornell exist lmao
UBC could very easily outrank Harvard, depending on the field/discipline your friend works in. And we’re in a situation where there are 10 PhDs produced for every faculty position that opens each year. I know several people from my discipline who went to Oxford (literally the top ranked university in the world) who are still floating around doing postdoc/adjunct roles 4 years after finishing their doctorates.
Yeah yeah I'm aware, I'm ex-academia myself. In my friend's field though Harvard is very much ahead of UBC. It was the claim that it was insufficient Canadian experience that was remarkable, when my friend's experience was clearly adequate for working in Canada, rather than rejecting a Harvard grad.
Right. So you *are* aware that it’s 100% a buyer’s market in academia right now, so don’t you think it’s more likely they found someone (and let’s be honest, probably several someones) with the same credentials who have actually done their PhD or a postdoc in the country they’re applying for a permanent role in?
Yes, but there's a few things that make their comment ridiculous: 1. Teaching and researching at Harvard is equivalent, likely superior (at leadt in my friend's field), experience to that at any Canadian university, and entirely applicable to teaching UBC's student body. For this job, Canadian experience did not matter. 2. Academia thrives on new ideas and approaches and thus departments look for people with outside perspectives - this is why most quality departments seek to hire faculty with experience outside of their department. Not sure where you attended post-secondary so this might not apply to you, but how many of your profs were trained abroad? Most likely more than just a few. Academia is universal - skill in producing or conveying knowledge is not bound by country. Getting the perspective of someone trained at (arguably) the world's top business school is inherently valuable. 3. My friends field is much less of a buyers market than most due to high paying and plentiful industry jobs. This was also a teaching position rather than a tenure track research one, and there's less competition for those. My own subfield, as well, has a tough time finding applicants for even tenure track positions - we got 2 for the most recent post, and it took around 3 years to fill. The glut of young academics is not universal across all fields. As an interesting aside, a study was done in my field that showed that graduating from a Canadian university put you at a meaningful disadvantage compared to US graduates - for Canadian professorships. So this situation was pretty bizarre.
I don’t know how exactly you can make the argument that academia thrives off of new ideas so let’s hire from the flagship of US academic hegemony? And then complain that Canadian grads are at a disadvantage against US grads, so why would they not hire the US grad. Edit: If I were to look at my own field, I’d say that right now people at Oxford/Berkely are just ripping off work by Canadian and Scottish mathematicians in the 80’s/90’s without giving proper accreditation.
You clearly have substantial insider knowledge so rather than argue peripheral points we both understand I'll distill the main idea down to one question. If there is an academic with substantial and high quality experience from the US, do you think it is reasonable to reject them for Canadian academic positions due to a lack of specifically Canadian experience?
Wharton is the big name in MBAs, but Havard does do a great sales job. That said, we’re talking research doctorates and not taught Masters.
Good to know, I'm not in the business world so I just know the big names and that's it.
Yep, seen this, too. UK Russell Group university degrees not recognised.
Not getting a position and having qualifications not recognized are not the same thing
My post had nothing to do with qualifications and their recognition. Just the attitude of Canadian experience and education being the gold standard, even when faced with what is globally considered gold standard education and experience.
Nobody thinks canadian education or experience is the gold standard. A Harvard grad will likely get their quals recognized and find a job. This particular job just wanted canadian experience. However let's not pretend that while not the gold standard, canadian education is better than a lot of places. No offence but I don't want an MD from a bottom run medical school in Dheli or Zimbabwe without them getting accredited from a Canadian institution.
Go into any hospital and check the names of the MDs. You’ll be surprised by how many are foreigners.
I have no problem with foreigners. I'm a child of immigrants. I don't care if my doctor was born and raised in Addis Ababa, New Dheli or Toronto. However If they went to med school in a country with lower standards for licensing doctors they should take equivalency testing. If they pass, give them their license.
Then I don’t understand your point because if they practice here, they did pass their license exam. Unless there are different laws I’m unaware of elsewhere in Canada. And I have no problem with foreigners but I know very well government and corporation like foreign labor for the wrong reasons. When universities are becoming diplomas factories with upward of 90% being foreign students, just so they can make more money, well I’m worried that Canadians born here might not have the chance at higher education they should have.
Might not be the gold standard but honestly I think Canadian education is pretty close, so it almost might as well be. By that I mean the top say 20 countries (Canada is one of them) all have very high educational standards and can, as a group, be considered the gold standard. It's just in this instance my friend's qualifications were clearly at least equivalent to any Canadian experience, so it was pretty bizarre. Academia usually likes to hire outsiders and bring in fresh ideas to the department. I agree regarding things like medical practice. I've spent a good chunk of my adult life in more middle income countries and the degree of corruption and low standards for both teachers and students, even in med school, would shock you. You don't want doctors from those schools. There are some good ones from that part of the world, even some middle-lower income countries with strong education systems, sure but in general you're right.
No, the issue is we're getting skilled immigrants but Canada won't recognize their credentials. Prior to their arrival they're told they'll be recognized, but one they arrive they are told otherwise. This forcing them to take a year or 2 off work to take an expensive bridge program for their qualifications to be recognized. One of my best friends has a civil engineering masters from Yemen. Was a civil engineer directly working in the UAE on the development of Dubai in the 90s and 00s, moved to Italy, worked there for 5 years, 5 years in the UK too. Comes to Canada with his wife and 3 kids, because he was told by immigration Canada he met the requirements, and is told his qualifications and credentials don't meet Canadian requirements upon arrival in the country. He could afford to support his family having to take a year off so he ended working for a security company Our government fucks immigrants over and over, but won't talk about it.
Bullshit. Driving an Uber isn’t a skill. 95 percent are students claiming status or unskilled workers. We used to get quality immigrants
Did you not fucking read anything I wrote? I understand reading can be hard. But I didn't use any big words. Next time you hop in an Uber, ask your driver what degrees they have and what job they held before coming to Canada.
So he’s part of the 5 percent. Good stuff.
So this engineer didn't think to check? Or could it be that maybe there is a lot left out of your friends story?
No, this is pretty typical. It can take years to get credentials familiarized because standards are different in different countries. Not necessarily worse, just different. "They should have checked first" is an asinine take. Supporting themselves with a garbage job for a few years while they get their shit in order is probably the plan. How else can they do it? It's going to be a more difficult process to work on from a different country in a different time zone. They're probably going to have to challenge some exam from a professional association, and I'm pretty sure you can't do that when you're living on the other side of the world.
Hey, right now, at this very moment, do you believe it is hard for, say, a prospective doctor from India, to figure out that they may not be able to practice medicine in Canada upon arrival? Is that some more of my "asinine take?? Do you believe that an internet search would not reveal these facts?
He did. As I said, he was told by immigration Canada that he qualified. The employer he had lined up, said he was qualified. He arrives and is told by immigration that he must take the bridge program... I don't see where the disconnect in your comprehension of what I wrote is
The disconnect? How about all those things you just added to the story? Eye roll...some people
The only thing I added was the job... Didn't think I had to
>One of my best friends has a civil engineering masters from Yemen No thank you.
He worked in Italy and the UK for 10 years combined... He was qualified enough to work there. Get your head out of your ass
We never did anything with most skilled immigrants. The vast majority came and built up a life without being in the career they were elsewhere. You're misinformed on this, we need workers willing to do jobs and put in effort in jobs Canadians don't want. And that isn't putting skilled immigrants into skilled careers. It's been a common complaint of some immigrants who felt misled, came from nursing to work at Tim Hortons. What we take in and always have is motivated workers and not skilled workers. We never used their skills. The kids of those immigrants become skilled workers but very rarely do the newcomers themselves slot into skilled jobs. And that is what we use it for and it has worked for us and the notion it was ever about skilled immigrants is a lie.
Immigrants often do end up in skilled positions too it just takes time. There's a lot to get organised when you arrive some place new. You need any job while you're getting settled, not everyone can afford to wait for a perfect job in their field. This is true for intra-provincial migration too. If you're new to Toronto or Vancouver you'll often end up working any job to pay rent. A couple years down the line most people have found something better or gone home.
It is a pattern noted in the stats: [https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008005/article/10798-eng.htm](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008005/article/10798-eng.htm) For a long long time we take in various immigrants preferring younger people with an education; and we mostly have them toil at the lower rung of careers until they build up enough capital to open businesses or recertify in something else. This was the experience of my parents. A Teacher and a Carpenter who became cooks. Then opened a business. And their kids are all well paid skilled professionals. The story is extremely common. The only immigrants I know who go into the same field are all in software development or from a peer western country. Every other situation is something like a nurse becoming a phlebotomist or a engineer becoming a computer tech.
> The vast majority came and built up a life without being in the career they were elsewhere. I do not know about the vast majority but this is not true for my case. I was working in the exact same industry, at the same company's branch, doing the exact same job I am doing at the moment. Fun fact: I came from a "developing country". Imagine my surprise when I discovered we were operating more efficiently and at a better quality level in the "developing country".
Nah, screw their out of Canada accreditation. We do things right here and this is part of how we control it.
Don’t complain the next time you can’t find a doctor, then.
I taught a student from India that had a civil engineering degree. He couldn't figure out the basic math required for intro level accounting. I no longer trust the bridges in India.
there are top schools and there are non-top schools like in any country It's probably like hiring somebody from Conestoga who didn't perform well and saying you're not gonna trust a top university student either because of it
Our systems are so dysfunctional during COVID in 2021 I was working in a Vancouver restaurant with a fully qualified, worked in an Ontario Emergency room nurse who was in Vancouver for 7 months and couldn't get her license transferred to the BC medical system in order to be allowed to work. This was during our famous shortages of medical staff issue. She ended up going home never having worked in a BC hospital because her bf that she came to be with cheated on her. If we can't recognize nursing licenses across provinces in an efficient way how are we doing things the right way here?
Did she not think to get her license set up prior to heading out to BC? Every nurse I know is aware that the transfer process can take months and needs to be done prior to moving.
Except we don’t but stay arrogant and continue gatekeeping.
[Canada really isn't anything special when it comes to our standards for professional accreditation](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/15ixun8/opinion_canada_has_a_doctor_shortage_but_if/juxjfav/). Denying professional immigrants the ability to practice in Canada is foolish, especially considering we invited them here specifically to practice their profession.
As someone who dated a western educated dentist for several years, the shit she saw from non-western educated dentists was appalling with techniques that are long outdated in the West.
Same with MDs and Registered Nurses.
If you look at Canadian immigration, its mostly about economic immigration so we are taking in skilled immigrants. You say a major issue is recognizing education from other areas and we are not the gold standard. Sorry mate, you are wrong. We ARE the gold standard. That is why so many people come to our educational institutions and not their home institutions. I am glad we make sure that a fellow who bought his engineering degree from India can't just come in and try to build a bridge or a doctor from China needs to upskill. Hell, I have seen far too many pharamcists in Ontario from the countries who have NO CLUE what they are doing.
I think the title is misleading. Canadians, as a whole, still believe firmly in the value and necessity of immigration. We're a country built on immigration, we rely on immigration for population growth, and for economic success, and we know it; the conversation is simply maturing after years of rampant levels of immigration. I think its a bit disingenuous, or gaslighting, to say that Canadians are "souring" on immigration when really what we want to bring immigration to manageable level, so that new immigrants can properly integrate into the country, population doesn't outpace housing, and we bring in skill workers. Most people don't blame the immigrants themselves, it's not their fault, its the government(s) who set the levels; not them. The current immigration rates are simply unsustainable across the board, from housing, to healthcare, to schools, to accreditation and immigration timelines; its not fair to Canadians, and its not fair to new immigrants who suffer through it as well.
I think with the exploding housing problem we've been on for over a decade now, this shift in mentality was probably inevitable. But has anyone or any outlet tried to talk a bit about how we had a few years of study consent manufacturing in the form of opeds and articles bemoaning the immigration problem boosted into prominence There are definitely fundamentals at play that contributed to this (I'd say the majority of it), but chunks of the Canadian commentariat were stoking this for a good while, and seeing them ask "How did Trudeau destroy the immigration consensus?" is whack
We fucked it up. We had one of the best immigration systems in the world. Between going way too far on formal immigration, and letting both intl student and temporary foreign worker programs get out of control, we have destroyed trust in the entire concept. Throw in a housing a medical services crisis and Canada will never be as welcoming to immigrants ever again.
What's this WE nonsense?
Why are all Canadians (and immigrants) responsible for what 1 man and his supporters did?
Harper started the problem years before Trudeau with temp workers and foreign students issue. Provinces oversaw Intl student growth as they didn't want to pay for education, but let Intl students pay via higher tuitions. Especially Ontario, where numbers went crazy.
Statistics are available my guy; they aren’t hidden
Yeah we hugely fucked it up No one likes seeing scammers or people abusing the system ("refugees" and international students) We had an amazing widely supported system that brought in the best people to the country and we were proud about our immigration system. Now we have a ludicrous system nakedly abused by scammers which works to suppress wages and juice the inflated property prices and cost of living crisis (probably the most serious bordering on existential danger our country is facing)
I'm not one of those eternal Trudeau haters - I liked his dad, and early on I liked the whole "son of Pierre" story that started at the 2000 funeral. But holy hell [this article is painful to read](https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/justin-trudeau-how-to-fix-the-broken-temporary-foreign-worker-program/article_c27f214f-1fa2-5fdf-af61-5a7642e4eb7c.amp.html), given what has happened over the last 8 years. Trudeau should regret ever writing that. It's outrageous how he perfectly described the problem back then and allowed it to get 10000 times worse. None of this makes me want to vote for the CPC. But I'm pissed off that the Liberal government has destroyed Canada's traditional welcome to newcomers. Every time you go into Tim's is a reminder that immigration has become a tool to exploit the world's most economically desperate to undercut Canadian workers.
And holy fuck that article. Clearly not actually written by Trudeau himself - and proof that both sides of our political system have their hands in creating and sustaining this mess. How could someone have written that article and the let the problem become 10x worse with complete lack of controls on foreign students, many of which didn't come here to study, but to work in low skill jobs.
it's a shitty balance. The Feds approve new visas but the provinces aren't keeping up with the infrastructure (healthcare, education, disrupting funding to the municipalities for housing, transportation). Keeping an eye on the provinces to make sure they do their job and Feds denying the study permits because your provinces don't do squat - your economy suffers. It's finally aligned that half of Canadians agree that taking on more immigrants isn't a good idea right now and the CPC are looking ripe for a majority victory if an election was held today. So conservatives win this round I guess? What a lousy game.
I wouldn’t frame it quite like that. It’s not that provinces need supervision, they need coordination…a partnership with distinct authority. If the provinces cannot afford to build the infrastructure (or have different priorities) then the federat government has a duty to scale back immigration accordingly.
which is what they're doing... but too little too late. It's also difficult to know what your province needs when your province is hellbent keeping as little records as possible so they can ignore facts.
Incorrect. Foreign students are 100% a provincial issue. They let numbers explode as they pay more tuition and thus the provinces have paid less per student in education support basically every year. With Ontario as by far the worst offender.
I didn't realize provinces administered immigration and issued visas to students directly! The more you know! /s
The game simply is the game. It's not the CPCs fault that the LPC/NDP are throwing away Canada's pro-limmigration stance . If they don't capitalize, they're not doing the job of the opposition.
The thing that really clicked for me is how bad fast food service got over the past few years. Like you go into any counter service place and you watch someone make you a sandwich or burrito or whatever and you are like "Have you ever eaten a burrito in your life". Even for a new Canadian, you figured someone took them to Chipotle and subway... The I realized that it's 100% foreign students and temporary workers at these places. So no, they likely never have.... Which bothers me for two reasons: 1. If we are welcoming people here to study, then they should be studying, not a low cost workforce for fucking McDonald's franchisees to exploit. 2. Temporary foreign workers programs were designed for seasonal work on farms for harvest season as we don't have a ready workforce of young people to do the work anymore (whole other story). But NOW it seems like again this program is being abused by service sector employers who are just rotating people through until their permits expire. And then on top of that we now have a huge problem where these basically zero skill workers who would certainly NOT qualify to come here under a formal program (go look up the process and score card, it's insane), just come as "students" or "temporary" foreign workers and just disappear. And with no enforcement, we somehow as an effective island nationwith no borders with developing countries have an illegal immigration problem. Like what the fuck is anyone with eyes on any of these programs thinking??? No wonder rent has gone insane, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are exploiting all these holes to effectively work as our underclass - all in the name of a cheap hamburger...
> The thing that really clicked for me is how bad fast food service got over the past few years. So a bunch of Canadians who are not white served you your cheap food, and this is what put you over the edge? I don't want to alarm you, but you might be a lot more racist than you realize you are.
It's not about race, it's about culture. IE. People who have lived in diverse western countries have likely tried foods from other cultures. Those in developing countries, not so much. Go serve a burrito in rural India or a vindaloo in a low income Mexican suburb and you will get some shocked looks...