Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/canada-must-end-reliance-on-cheap-foreign-labor-minister-says-1.2031458

by djkivi • 2 years ago

65 52 2 years ago

badcppdev• 2 years ago

The world must end reliance on cheap labour or we're always going to have slums next to the factories that make our clothes.

Can you have a population of 8 billion humans with something close to a modern lifestyle... we can try I guess

electric_mayhem• 2 years ago

Obligatory Neal Stephenson:

“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery” ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

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

gosub1002• 2 years ago

I'm more concerned about the people in Canada being shafted out of entry-level jobs. Who do their government represent, Indians or Candians?

goodSteveramos• 2 years ago

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

canadiantim2• 2 years ago

Easy fix. Simply increase immigration to a million+ people per year thereby driving down domestic wages and now voila we have cheap domestic labour.

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

A less easy fix, but one that's better for everyone is that we all just stop buying mountains and mountains of absolutely useless plastic and digital crap.

Sure we need lots of human labour to keep the world going round, but dealing with the obscenity of consumerism is where a better world begins.

These are the results [0], a kind of misery and 'poverty' (an 'affluenza') caused by unchecked material indulgence.

Surely we can address this culturally on the demand side?

[0] https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell...

BigFnTelly• 2 years ago

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

maxglute4• 2 years ago

We already have cheap domestic labour, we fly in Mexicans and South Americans and squeeze them in share houses to do cheap and dangerous migrant labour work on a seasonal basis.

But you're suppose to keep that unsightliness away from cities / urban dwellers. People start to question when one bedrooms become unaffordable and basements are housing 8 students / food couriers whose bike just exploded in the subway and now no one can bring ebikes on transit. Cheap labour is suppose to make us feel richer and be invisible.

dade_• 2 years ago

Except we are also complaining about a housing crisis. Homeless shelters that were already full of the homeless, are now joined with refugees, and apparently international students that also can't find a home to share with 24 other people.

https://www.blogto.com/city/2024/01/25-international-student...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mayor-refugees-shelte...

Analemma_• 2 years ago

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

kzz102• 2 years ago

This looks like the result of an abuse of the foreign students visa as work visas, partly due to leftover pandemic era policy. In a typical government response, instead of actually fixing the loophole, they use the blunt weapon of cutting visa quotas, and then make generalized comments against foreign labor.

lainga• 2 years ago

Possibly someone has just got ahold of internal poll figs and are making moves (inter alia the said generalized comments against foreign labor) to appease swing voters

Scoundreller2• 2 years ago

He will announce further changes soon to restrict students’ off-campus work hours

He just extended the “temporary” increase to the weekly hours limit 2 months ago…

And expanded it to a larger group of study visa students.

https://www.cicnews.com/2023/12/canada-extending-internation...

He doesn’t even need to start by changing anything, he could have started by doing nothing and let his own department’s exemptions expire.

canadiantim2• 2 years ago

The current government is filled with a very special kind of person

maxglute4• 2 years ago

500k -> 1.1M foreign students since end of covid. Truely absurd. I hope this is 5th dimension chess to con Indians on false hope of PR to inject a few years of expensive international tuition to pay for covid response. Doesn't make sense to let them work and possibly send remittances back home (as if cost of living is not high enough) because that's what you get when you start brain draining more than those who can afford to buy citizenship.

biotopia• 2 years ago

I see you're trying to drive a wedge between India and Canada, dirtyid, or Chinese citizen who lives in Canada who loves China and hates western world. It really doesn't matter what you're doing you know, China is a Great Depression and will stay there for 20 years.

Also proving the point that Canada and US should not be importing more Chinese pinkies into the country

maxglute4• 2 years ago

Oh no, you got me.

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

apwell23• 2 years ago

ok this explains why 90% of college age kids in my neighborhood are in canada now.

codeisawesome• 2 years ago

I’m an immigrant. I’ll be the first in line to agree that all the demands (and the specifics of those demands: personal space, hygiene, clothing, noise etc) for assimilation by western societies that I’ve ever heard re: immigrants, are reasonable - assuming such luxuries can be afforded (nobody crams themselves 8 to a room by choice).

But, people aren’t robots whose movements are controlled by an on-off switch. The government introduced the means for people to arrive and work, and so the people arrived. They are continuing to arrive because the policies have not been updated yet. How is it the immigrants’ fault? Why the hate and the attacks on their dignity & humanity?

The nonstop online vitriol hurts me deeply to read - nowhere is “safe” - Reddit, HN, Instagram… the hate spewers seemingly spend all their time spewing on these platforms to manipulate opinions and tap into the fundamental atavistic psychological flaws of the human mind.

ikesau• 2 years ago

i recently saw a refreshing perspective on canadian immigration that addressed these issues at their origins: failures in housing policy and complacent governance. it's the perspective i wish more canadians held so we could steer the government towards policy that's better for all. maybe nativist nimbyism isn't inevitable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQkzE9PsAv4

llm_nerd• 2 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nacho2sweet• 2 years ago

If you are a 19 year old Canadian who is priced out of everything and is in a line at the local movie theater 100 long with desperate foreign students trying to get your first job you're going to feel cheated and pissed off.

If you are a 37 yo millennial who still doesn't own a house, can't afford to have kids moving back into the shitty style of apartment you lived in your early 20's but now it costs $2700 a month, you are going to be fucking pissed off.

If you are a new parent waiting 9 hours overnight in an packed emergency room, you are going to feel pissed off.

It is hard to tell Canadians this is good for them when everything has gotten worse.

IlikeMadison• 2 years ago

I think this is because immigration is mostly pushed by people with heavy ideological reasons (far left, no border militants, etc.) but also rich employers who just want cheap and malleable workers.

Now you have the common people to whom you never asked their opinion about mass immigration: they now understand that instead of increasing wages, giving better benefits and improve working conditions to attract potential workers where it is lacking (supply and demand), the rich employers cheated the game with the help of elected politicians, by bringing hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to do it for less.

Add to this difficulties to buy a home, wages stagnation, rent going up, general inflation... The rich get richer, the rest gets poorer. This is how hatred is born unfortunately.

gosub1002• 2 years ago

The government introduced the means for people to arrive and work, and so the people arrived.

and the government of whatever nation you came from severely failed, which is why so many want to leave. Why don't you assign responsibility there?

Tiktaalik• 2 years ago

The root causes of all this is the fact that way back in like the 1990s in order to balance the budget the Fed Liberals under Chretien did big time austerity and cut transfers to the Provinces, and then the Provinces reacted by doing big time austerity and cutting budgets to post secondary education. Then post secondary education reacted to that budget hole by increasing the amount of foreign students they brought in to cover the shortfall.

This continued on and on and at some point folks really started to realize these high foreign student tuitions were an exploitable, profitable business, and we started seeing more and more private for-profit diploma mill style schools bringing in foreign students. The students paid a high price for useless hotel management degrees but in exchange got a boosted chance at permanent residency.

At some point the current government realized that they had a labour shortage and that all these foreign students milling about getting useless degrees were a source of cheap labour. Accordingly they relaxed rules and allowed them to work more hours.

Really poor and gross decision making all around dating back decades.

In 2014 the current PM, when he was in third place in the polls, wrote a scathing op-ed against the related Temporary Foreign Worker program but after being elected did nothing but make everything worse.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/justin-trudeau-...

Given that the Conservatives were the ones that kick started the abuses of the TFW program. It's hard to believe either Liberals or Conservatives are credible on this file.

asdfasdfasdf222• 2 years ago

The real issue is Canada's demographic decline. Immigrants were brought in to fill that gap and pay for pensions and other goodies that expect a growing base of tax paying productive workers. We're not getting rid of these people, they will become citizens if they choose to. Personally, I doubt that any announcement by the government will be anything but a temporary hold, to be returned to high levels post-Liberal election victory. All of these people have already been educated (to varying levels of quality) so on paper, they fill out the population pyramid.

The problem is the policy driving it is bad. Rather than high-skilled workers, we're letting in low-to-mid-skilled young people. On paper, this plugs the demographic hole. But a lack of planning on infrastructure (housing, etc.) means that prices of those assets has gone through the roof. This has created poor economic incentives to invest in labour intensive industries and housing rather than the innovative, productive part of the economy. What happens when you want to open a software company but can't find workers? Maybe you open a house painting company instead, if the money on offer is high enough.

We shouldn't blame the immigrant -- they are trying to improve their lives. But you definitely can blame poor policy.

office_drone• 2 years ago

Immigrants were brought in to fill that gap and pay for pensions and other goodies that expect a growing base of tax paying productive workers.

This is not true.

1) Immigrants are not brought in with the goal of topping up the numbers to the existing level, immigrants are being brought in with the intent of tripling the population. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative whose founders are advisors to the federal government.

2) Canada does not need immigrants to pay for its pensions. CPP and other pension in Canada are well run, invest their money, and don't just route money from young people to old. Rather, they pay the money out from the money already put in.

candiodari• 2 years ago

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

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

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

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

adventured• 2 years ago

The problem is the policy driving it is bad. Rather than high-skilled workers, we're letting in low-to-mid-skilled young people.

The US has been running its immigration system this way for many decades. It's a disaster. With low to modest economic growth, lifting tens of millions of poor, low education, low skill, non-english speakers up out of poverty is almost impossible. You need persistently rapid economic expansion to do that. The US is getting a long-term under economic class of non-English speakers with low education levels: forever low income laborers. There are large special interests (business and political) in the US that like this and have kept our immigration system this way on purpose for decades despite the mess it has caused. Canada should avoid replicating this failed approach to immigration. The US also has a lot of sprawl space to live in, Canada for the most part does not (most of Canada isn't reasonably inhabitable obviously), so you just get ever more intense density problems in Canada with bulk immigration.

The other huge problem for Canada's immigration change, is that the low skill workers won't contribute enough in taxes net to make a difference in the fiscal demographic problems of the coming decades. The net tax contribution of a low skill worker is between zero and very low across their lifetime. Whereas with Canada's former policy of focusing on high skill immigration, you get a large tax surplus per person, which pays for expensive social programs.

michaelmrose• 2 years ago

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

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

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

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

darth_avocado• 2 years ago

Maybe I am misinformed, being in the US I always hear that Canadian points based immigration policy is way better than US and it encourages high skill immigration. Is that not true?

KorematsuFredt3• 2 years ago

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

maxglute4• 2 years ago

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

red-iron-pine• 2 years ago

American in Canada.

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

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

Scoundreller2• 2 years ago

Chain migration is great imo.

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

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

A lot of immigration happens somewhere in the middle.

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

wly_cdgr• 2 years ago

Good luck!

freedom-fries• 2 years ago

Contrary opinion: well, we like paying less! We get angry on high prices, swan at deals, and then get mad that businesses want to pay less too!

Something has to give - either the buyers get shafted, or the workers. I don't believe that margins will be the first to get a cut - margins go to the wealthiest of the bunch who're running the show :)

betaby2• 2 years ago

Canada is very expensive. Cheap labor doesn't help average Joe at all.

tester756• 2 years ago

Is Canada attractive country to live in in compare to e.g Poland?

nickd20013• 2 years ago

Challenge 1. "Soaring rents and house prices" Challenge 2. Lots of immigrants wanting a decent job and competing with existent population to apply for these.

In a country with as much undeveloped land as Canada has, I think, there might be a win-win solution to be had here? ;)

OK ok, to be fair it takes a little while to train as builders, electricians, plasterers etc etc, but it does seem like Canada has the solution right in front of them. Just build a couple more Torontos, and, problem solved?

betaby2• 2 years ago

Please show on the map where would you prefer a New Toronto located.

nickd20013• 2 years ago

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

hulitu• 2 years ago

Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

That's why they are not a superpower like US.

Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

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