Indigenous person here from northern Ontario .... I think immigration is a good thing for this country ... the more diversity and mixing that happens, the better it is everyone in general. Canada was founded on the mixing of cultures, races, ideas and religions ... even though a small segment of society wanted to identify themselves as the dominant ones. In the face of one colonial culture that wanted to dominate everyone and everything ... diversity was always in the background driving the country's development (most often against the will of a minority few).
I can't change who I am nor my ideas nor my culture nor my race ... I live how I was taught and the same goes for everyone else and their backgrounds.
The change that happens is gradual and happens over generations. The ones to come after us will mix my culture with yours and anyone else and will create a new hybrid culture that may or may not be the same as mine or yours. They will always keep elements of our past but they will combine them with the best (or the worst) of who their descendants were.
The diversity I like to think about is not the diversity we have now or want to magically create today ... the diversity I like to imagine is the one we will leave behind once we are gone.
As an immigrant myself, yes. It is very attractive just by the fact that Canada's government isn't 100% corrupt and it's honestly very family friendly. Sure, there are problems, but they pale in comparison to a lot of other countries'.
It took me 5 months to find a good job (that wasn't service) - so competition is tough and the initial steps are ridiculously expensive, but it's all good. Infrastructure and systems are suffering right now, but in the next 20 years, I'm confident it will catch up.
It's really easy to say something like that when you're blind to the actual corruption in the world. We have it incredibly good here in Canada - you must be quite privileged to lead a life where you think we are massively corrupt, since you have nothing to compare it to.
Every now and then the world goes into a dark place which is what (I believe) we are heading into now. But the world has come out stronger from most of those dark places and I believe it will simply repeat this cycle
it sometimes takes interacting with people from other places in the world
I read that a lot: going out and experiencing different cultures gives one a better perspective. I spent a number of years in America, for instance, and I definitely missed Canadian healthcare from 1999. I still do, but a bit less; but I still do.
I know one political party loves to screech about this, but do you have numbers?
Is it worse than the same year where we signed FIPA into law and then, same year, a backdoor for China into our customs database? I think that was a rough year for us and our self-worth, but awesome for comedians.
You may not be wrong. It depends on how things play out though. How quickly, what happens to our population numbers by then. Whether the US remains whole or the blue states separate. There may be more interesting permutations than a peaceful annexation.
It's because the jobs are concentrated in those areas. Yes, other provinces have some work but relative to Toronto and Vancouver it's pretty light. I got lucky and moved to Kitchener last year, but what i really wanna do is live on Vancouver Island. Some day!
Most immigrants coming into the country won't be able to secure a fully remote job right off the bat. Most need Canadian work experience first before getting anything but an entry level customer service job
Many companies are walking back their permissive remote work policies which adds a layer of uncertainty for immigrants when considering living outside of an urban centre.
it means that companies can start looking to expand into cheaper
Yeah, everyone gets that it's a benefit to the employer to run with WFH staff, but it's often a struggle for old-school manager who validate their existence through home-room attendance. My current employer had to re-up a contract during CoViD, and the only change was a pay bump to handle inflation and "100% WFH" (in legalese).
And the employer sold the desks - sometimes to staff - and released the space it was renting. So easy. One guy is onsite to receive Fedex, and there's a few 'hotel' desks that see regular use.
That's a very good point. For the footprint you must have, it lets a company choose to relo to a place that can use the tax revenue and looks far better on paper.
... but then the '100% remote' clause needs to be etched into stone, lest the management decide to "just" pull everyone back in to an office far away from their current home or abandon their jobs!
But yeah, the cost of office space in the flat land is potentially so much lower, that I'm surprised smarter people than me at business - and there's a lot - haven't jumped on the opportunity to improve shareholder value or something by a relo to some place better.
Many companies are walking back their permissive remote work policies
I interviewed today. I told the guy that the Commute policy WILL drive the costs up, as I'll want that separate add-on to cover the policy, like a CoLA clause. The math is simple, and will work out to a bit of a bump per day if that day is mandated onsite.
But they're competing against a job I have that is paying X and the "100% remote" is in the contract in plain language, among other factors. I feel for them, as it'll be harder to get actual talent like the astounding people I work with, when all they can offer is some cruel dotcom wage-slave term set. (according to my spreadsheet, it's gonna be double just to make par).
Yeah, I wish companies would get their heads out of their butts and realize that people were just as productive working remotely as they were in the office for most jobs. We live in a world of distributed teams! Even at my company, my team is in Seattle, Mountainview, Sydney, and Boston! It logically makes no sense anymore to mandate in-office work, yet they're doing it because they always have
Oh you moved to the boonies boonies haha. Love that the Wikipedia page for Ocean Falls has a photo captioned "An uncharacteristically sunny day in ocean falls"
Noo, Ocean Falls was a ghost town once the sole employer moved out with the pound-foolish reduction of manufacturing in this region. I only learned of it from my wife's dad's stories of growing up in this remote community; and then learned it's a unicorn town with a surprisingly advanced infrastructure and travel potential that gives it massive potential for restoration as a quiet, remote community for select workers and some eco-tourism operations.
So it's a common schtick to champion it as a prime candidate for reopening and investment, since it has the infrastructure to support a small but dense population with modern mixed-use buildings and ship-based trade, even though the population has been essentially 3 people for decades and there's no road in.
I stopped in Ocean Falls around 10 years ago. Walked through the condemned Hotel there. Felt like walking through a building straight out of Fallout with the collapsed ceiling and old newspapers/flyers and other stuff everywhere. But aside from that Hotel was a nice place.
To add to that, most immigrants coming through the skilled worker's programs work in specialized professions that are heavily concentrated around major urban centers.
If you look at the cut-off points for the last two years, the trend has been really high, mostly focusing on people under 30, with high level of English/French, and master's or PhDs.
Land ain't cheap where most of the immigrants end up going. Canada still offers a better quality of life but that will dimminish over time if housing issue is not addressed.
that will [diminish] over time if housing issue is not addressed.
Housing and Benefits funding are intertwined. It's easy to kick the temporaries out, but no country will want to kick out the tax-paying short-timers who will eventually return home LONG before they retire and start really needing our support. Cost/Benefit-wise, our declining population needs TFWs who (outside aggra) pay high taxes and need fewer services, to stay afloat, like any caring nation needs.
The nordics have really figured this out, and despite a nine year waiting list for rentals in some urban centers, they still have TFWs and can still afford to maintain infrastructure.
What we need is further investment in tech hub towns and cities, like Halifax did. In places that don’t burn/flood seasonally and have a reliable power supply. If that got spread out, housing wouldn’t be as much of an issue.
But not invulnerable. Water is a growing problem in the Prairies, and as we're seeing from drought conditions in Southern Alberta, Canada is not immune from the problems we're seeing in the US.
They're far from invulnerable, the nature of climate change is feedback loops, all it's going to take is an unusually hot, dry summer and some bad luck and you've got crop failure.
Yep, if people don't pull their shit together we are gonna need to ban those camping or the fire will effectively erase camping grounds. (yes, I know natural cause fire exists.) We still have somewhat advantage in terms of fresh water precipitation so we don't need to import drinking water. But we still need some general civil engineering to deal with those flood/fire/heatwaves/arctic vortex cause they are going to be more common.
I fully agree with you and it's encouraging to see things like "Alberta Is calling" campaign. But, I wish the federal goverment would be more involved in spreading the immigrants around our vast land. It feels like all they do is set targets and "job done"...
You mean the radio spots that tell me I can own a house for 400k in Alberta? As much as I want to believe that that's not complete bullshit, I think it is bullshit and pity everyone who goes through just to come back to wherever they were before.
You can totally own like a nice 3-bedroom house in a nice area in Winnipeg right now for 400K. My house cost that much and even had a finished basement and is one, a much bigger plot than most houses.
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