Canada bet big on immigration. Now it's hitting the brakes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/23/canada-immigration-international-students/

by raydev • 2 years ago

33 36 2 years ago

washingtonpost.com

mneedham• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/95Me6

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I wonder how many Health Refugees (Retirees) are going to Canada from the US ?

david-gpu2• 2 years ago

Good luck immigrating to Canada as a(n old) retiree, unless you have immediate family there that can sponsor you. It's the only path I'm aware of for that sort of candidate.

voisin4• 2 years ago

Simple: pay to enroll at Conestoga College.

adventured2• 2 years ago

The answer is very few. The US historically has a low emigration rate. Currently immigrants are using Canada to try to get into the US, record numbers of illegal border crossings are happening from Canada to the US.

https://www.newsweek.com/us-canada-border-migrants-crossing-...

"Officials for the Swanton Sector in Vermont said there were 1,109 apprehensions in March 2024. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures, this is up from 756 in March 2023, and just 61 in March 2022. The March 2024 figure of 1,109 is higher than the total amount of crossings in all of 2022, which was 1,065."

"In a post on X, Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia of the Border Patrol Swanton Sector said the 1,109 apprehensions last month included people from 40 different countries."

"The top three nationalities apprehended were 408 Indian, 323 Bangladeshi, and 170 Mexican nationals," Garcia said.

bawolff3• 2 years ago

Still seems higher in the other direction. According to https://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/statistics/Pages/Irregular-bor... there were 14,000 illegal border crossings between jan-mar 2023. Even dividing by 3, that is higher than your number.

dmix• 2 years ago

90% of the problems this has generated could be solved by a massive reform of housing law at every level. We're getting hammered by food, gas, etc prices worse than most places. But everything goes back to housing because its by far the biggest expense on every persons list and the speed it's increasing is insane.

I guess the US isn't melting down at the speed of Canada because they can still build houses in many places where immigrants first land (the south like Texas). It's way worse here in Canada. Imagine SF but even in the suburbs and small towns basic houses go for millions.

The entire country is basically waiting for the current gov to go away so the next one can actually attempt to fix it. It's very depressing and this is 100% contributing to the flight of our best domestic talent to the US more than ever (it was bad enough the last 2 decades).

adventured2• 2 years ago

And the US doesn't have universal healthcare. Scaling that type of system up rapidly (while dealing with pre-existing supply constraints) is very difficult to say the least. Rapid immigration will just make every big shortage that much worse, and healthcare is particularly difficult to increase in terms of supply (doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc; just takes a lot of time).

voisin4• 2 years ago

The entire country is basically waiting for the current gov to go away so the next one can actually attempt to fix it.

It is wild that the deal between the Liberals and the NDP is constitutional. All it did is disenfranchise Canadians for 3 years. Trudeau should be forced to have his government subject to non-confidence votes - sink or swim on his decisions, and if there isn’t confidence (which seems totally obvious!) then go to an election.

Edit: I would love to hear from those who downvoted this. What’s your take? It seems indefensible to me.

bawolff3• 2 years ago

sigh people really don't understand how parlimentry democracy works. Of course supply & confidence agreements are constitutional. Its not even a coalition government, which would also be constitutional. sheesh

Edit in response to your edit [i did not downvote you] - for starters this is a really common feature of most parlimentary democracy. It helps mitigate some of the downsides of first past the post & vote splitting (NDP+liberals have > 50% of the popular vote. They are fairly simlar politically, agreeing on many things. Why shouldn't they get to do the things they agree on, since a majority of the country voted for them when combined, presumably a majority like the parts of their platform that are the same)

The second thing, is that politics involves compromises, generally it is expected some wheeling and dealing might occur. e.g. MPs from alberta might vote for something that benefits fishermen in Nova Scotia in exchange for NS MPs voting for something that benefits alberta. I dont see anything wrong with that, this is just a more formal version.

Last of all, the agreement is non-binding. NDP is allowed to pull out any time it wants with no penalty other than the liberals being mad at them. So it is not like it prevents a non-confidence motion if the NDP is unhappy (for that matter, individual MPs do not have to vote with their party on anything, the only penalty is they might get kicked out of their party. If the MPs don't like treadau they can kick him out anytime they want regardless of what party leadership thinks.

bryanlarsen2• 2 years ago

Toronto and Vancouver build housing at a much higher pace than any similarly sized American city. At one point Toronto had as many skyscraper construction cranes as all American cities put together. But they're growing even faster than housing is built.

red-iron-pine3• 2 years ago

are they growing, or are people buying up all the housing with foreign money, and/or large corporations grabbing a piece.

1 in 5 properties across much of Canada are owned by investors. That makes it harder for 1st-time buyers

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/housing-inve...

randomdata4• 2 years ago

the speed it's increasing is insane.

I suppose you are referring to rent? On average, the price of buying a Canadian home in nominal dollars hasn't really changed since 2021, which, thanks to inflation, means that buying a home is around 12% less expensive now. That's a decrease, and not an insignificant one at that.

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

Have you looked at this per province or per 1mm+ population city, rather than a Canada wide average? I don't think it's true if you use the proper data scope because the places that went absolutely bonkers (toronto area, vancouver area) have had a pull back from insane while the places that were only bad (i.e. Calgary, Halifax, probably montreal and Winnipeg) have pushed significantly higher. The places that were totally unaffordable haven't become affordable, they just became less unaffordable and the places that were previously somewhat affordable have become much less so. On top of that, most of the brown field development is catastrophically affecting rent because it's chopping the bottom end out of the rental market as it is redeveloped at the same time demand is surging from immigration.

voisin4• 2 years ago

Is it really a “bet” when you make absolutely no provisions for ensuring there is adequate housing, jobs, health care for these immigrants, let alone the rest of society?

I guess it is a “bet” the way buying a lottery ticket and hoping for the best is a bet.

randomdata4• 2 years ago

Yes, the bet was that the provinces would agree with the action. As you point out, it turns out they did not.

You win some, you lose some. 'Tis the nature of betting.

briga3• 2 years ago

I think a lot of this was done with the hope that more immigrants would translate to higher economic productivity, but this simply hasn't been the case. Unemployment rate is 1-2% higher than in the US. GDP per capital is stagnating. Most of the highest skilled workers leave for the US. I don't think the problem is the immigrants per se, but rather our government's addiction to deficit spending and printing money. Not to mention the tacit refusal to enforce anti-trust legislation against the major companies in the country which seems totally corrupt. The number of public sector jobs has ballooned and none of the public services have improved--quite the opposite. Canada needs some major reforms to get out of this mess.

To their credit there has been a movement across the country to scrap single-family zoning restrictions and allow more housing development. Which should improve the housing situation but it's still unlikely the housing market can keep up

voisin4• 2 years ago

rather our government's addiction to deficit spending and printing money

The deficit spending is clearly to try to buy votes but I think he reading the tea leaves wrong - the average person is way more concerned about inflation, their job, and the economy, and I think this spending is unpopular, even from those who tangentially benefit from the spending!

briga3• 2 years ago

Definitely. The writing is on the wall for the current government. I wonder if there's anyone left that still believes their lies and platitudes

bsder2• 2 years ago

Most of the highest skilled workers leave for the US.

I have been hearing this for years. Capitalism is supposed to increase salaries until that stabilizes.

So, why hasn't it?

bawolff3• 2 years ago

Capitalism is not supposed to increase salaries forever. Certain regions are more developed in certain industries and can demand higher salaries in those industries. Thus people move where the jobs are. Brain drain is perfectly consistent with capitalism and an expected affect.

briga3• 2 years ago

Capital doesn't place too much emphasis on borders. When a person can double or triple their salary just by moving a few hours south it's easy for all the capital to get concentrated in one place (namely the US)

timbit42• 2 years ago

Unemployment is calculated differently in each country. If Canada used the US calculation, its unemployment rate would be lower than the US rate.

pseudo0• 2 years ago

The key takeaways:

There were more than 1 million international students here in 2023, up 245 percent from a decade earlier and 60 percent since 2019. Canada, a country of 40 million, had roughly the same number of international students last year as the United States, a country more than eight times its size.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller said last month that Canada would for the first time set targets for the number of temporary immigrants. He had already announced a temporary cap on undergraduate study permits and increased the amount of money that international students must have to study here. The ministry also barred students in programs run by public-private college partnerships from applying for postgraduate work permits. Some, Miller said, run “the diploma equivalent of puppy mills,” offering poor curriculums in exchange for the prospect of permanent status.

This isn't just a housing or infrastructure problem, productivity is also tanking. These strip mall college degrees are effectively worthless, and these programs function as a backdoor mechanism to suppress the cost of low-skill labor. Why invest in automation or equipment when you can just hire more cheap foreign workers?

TMWNN• 2 years ago

Context: Like the US, Canada allows international students to work. Unlike the US, Canada allows those students to work off campus, up to 40 hours a week. This has caused the rise of an entire industry, in which so-called institutions of higher learning (Lambton, Confederation, and the example the article uses, Conestoga) have 99% Indian "students" that work off campus, destroying the local job and housing markets.

The above influx has further stressed an already rickety healthcare system. An amazingly high portion of Canadians don't have a family doctor <https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/despite-more-doctors-many-cana...>. In Atlantic Canada (the four easternmost provinces) it is impossible, repeat impossible, to get a family doctor if you don't have one <https://web.archive.org/web/20190226051406/https://www.thete...>. It's one thing to have shortages in rural areas—that happens in the US too—but Halifax?!? I've heard the same occurs in Vancouver too.

tiahura• 2 years ago

Your nation and culture are a gift from your ancestors to your descendants. It’s sad that counterculture types have seized power in much of the west and proudly toil to undermine their endowment.

SleepilyLimping• 2 years ago

Canada has neither, though. My parents and their parents assimilated quickly from Eastern Europe, forgot their language, and then set up a system where they pulled up a ladder behind them for housing, opportunity and stability.

Boy does it feel great to be constantly shamed for being a white male as the source of our country's problems while not being rich enough to influence the political system like billionaire donors. Boy does it feel great that our industries and political system are completely captured, so they can shame us out of one side of their mouths while making sure their donors who are bought into the housing market (and they themselves, who are too) will never have to worry about their house of cards collapsing.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Canada bet big on immigration. Now it's hitting the brakes

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