Canada is increasing immigration. I admit to being a bit misleading with that opening statement because for many, including myself, the immigration to other countries is what Canada is causing. That's really emigration but it's still immigration because when you do it, you don't change your visa at the "emigration" office. Hoooo hooooo trust me, just those two words together - immigration and office - give me the willies and I don't love willies! While referencing the IT Crowd I'll continue to say that although we like to put Canada on a pedal stool, many, maybe most immigrants tend to find the whole experience of relocation to Canada at best a damp squid, and at worst a friggin' nightmare.
Oh, I am also talking about what we all think of when we hear the word "immigration" as well. So before we get into the immigration from Canada to other countries, let's do a bit of fakety-fake history taken from highly (and purposefully) misleading Stats Canada immigration numbers, shall we?
I'll only go back to the 90's but we know I could go further back. Allegedly, 2.2 million people came to Canada in the 90's making it the highest immigration total for a decade... at the time. Today Canada has the highest percentage of immigrants in the G7 with 23% (2021). At today's population of 41,000,000, 23% would be around 9.43 million people. HOWEVER... there are permanent, non-permanent, student, and of course illegal immigrants. The REAL total is certainly not lower! Last year, for example, there were (again according to highly biased statistics) 471,771 perm, 804,901 non-perm, 485,000 study permits, and who knows how many illegals? If you add this up and account for a highly optimistic total of around 400,000 illegals, you have in one year the number of immigrants we had in the entire decade of the 90's. That'll give you some idea of what has happened in Canada since then. And it is steadily increasing. The goal is to "level out" at half a million perm. a year and most likely higher in all other categories.
As far as illegals and "students" who are actually using student visas as back door entries into permanent Canadian residence, the government agencies like IRCC (Immi. Refugee, Citizenship Canada), IRB (Immi. Refugee Board of Canada) and such overtly ENCOURAGE such illegal behavior. If you want to see what a mess it has become for (largely Indian) international students you can watch this vid I have posted before. In it, former minister of Immigration Sean Fraser says it's distasteful. He hated the student immigrant scams in Canada SO much... he quit being the minister of immigration. Now it's Marc Miller a long time friend of Justy who lent him a pencil in English class in Quebec when they were young. I have heard of recent cuts to student immigration (which is really what it is) and limits on working while on a student visa, but I have also seen vid of Miller admitting that international students commonly work full time - a breach of their visas. If I remember correctly (and I posted the vid somewhere on this blog) he called it their "RIGHT" to work full time in breach of their visas. So I don't see anything happening any time soon.
You may wonder why this is allowed, or at least a blind eye has been turned towards students working far beyond their caps be they 20 or 24 hours a week. I know, and know many people who know, international students who work more. It's harder to find one who works less. What gives? Well it all has to do with the myth of perceived worker shortages in Canada. It's as simple as this: Canadian citizens know you can't get anywhere working full time on 18 bucks an hour. I won't get too far into the reasons for that but the largest is because of the housing shortage and explosion in accommodation costs that have been created by massive immigration. And the programs to hire immigrant workers to build the houses we need to drive housing prices down have already started. No experience, we will train. Any programs like these for Canadian citizens? Nope. We are left with the 18 dollar an hour jobs and have international students and illegals to compete with. There's your "worker shortage." I know a guy who was turned down for work as an electrician. He was told they only hire "from within." It was a program such as this:
Good old extremist Canada committing massive discrimination in reverse of the norm and brainwashing us into believing it's not just plain discrimination. Are you honestly going to tell me we don't have people already living in Canada who are out of work or working shitty jobs who would give a kidney or a spleen for these opportunities? You - no. Our government - that's what they expect us to believe. Worker shortage my ass! A shortage of these jobs for workers is what we have. We also have reverse discrimination but heeeey, don't be negative, Canada is a kind, nice, wonderful country... what an insult to intelligent Canadians!
When I was working at the Centre For Newcomers in Calgary my students told me about all kinds of benefits such as this. They get housing assistance (not just finding housing and finding jobs building housing, but getting money to make rent more affordable), medical assistance, education/training for free, childcare for cheap or free, taxes done for free, all kinds of social outings and programs, and I constantly found myself (squeaking by on the $240/week I made there) asking if I could get in on some of this. Nope. Only for immigrants. While programs like that are only accepting applicants "from within," my job was NEVER going to become full time because, as my supervisor told me after 10 new teachers were hired part time and my hours did not increase, "Sometimes we have to make 'outside' hires."
Most of the feel-good stories in Canadian immigration are from the refugees who back in the 90's were mostly from Iran, Bosnia/Herzegovina, and Sri Lanka while these days (and I know this from teaching and getting to know them) the majority are from Syria, Iraq, Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But not even all of these, in fact I'd venture to say FEW of these are feel-good stories. At least not right away. READ THIS ARTICLE. It's about a couple from Pakistan who were both professionals. He was a branch manager at a big bank, and she was a teacher who had a master's in education. They immigrated to Calgary where they struggled for 7 years to get permanent residence. He installed carpet and she was unemployed. They went through many rejections for jobs for which they were overqualified, even suffered the scams of people who say they will get you work if you sign up for their program for a non-refundable fee. Eventually she got work as a lunchtime supervisor at one of her kid's schools and he got on as a forklift operator in an oil warehouse. Finally she took a two-year course (probably free due to her immigrant status and unavailable to non-immigrants) to get work as a teacher's assistant and he got a job through his oil connections as a pricing analyst in the industry. Those 7 years left them scarred physically and with the kind of PTSD that I and a LOT of other people try to avoid by getting the fuck OUT of Canada. She suffered years of stress and weight loss and he got high blood pressure and cholesterol along with diabetes. This is a "success" story of Canadian immigration but it is nothing like the scenarios of hope and success the millions of immigrants have been bringing to Canada since the 90's. If those pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams could be tempered with reality like the couple from the article, perhaps Canada would not have the problems it has with immigration.
Have you ever heard of Stompin' Tom Connors? That's Canadiana for you! He is the artist responsible for The Good Old Hockey Game.
He also wrote a song called Believe in Your Country. This was back in 1991. In it he writes "... if you don't believe your country should come before yourself, Ya can better serve your country by living somewhere else." He sings about factories closing down, politicians dividing our precious land, and our jobs being traded away. But Canadians know him better for the Hockey Song.Maybe... just maybe if Canadians believed in Canada or stood on guard for it as they sing with unconscious irony before most hockey games, I could live in my own country. Maybe if we started making programs for people IN Canada instead of importing folks who are not necessarily going to be any better or even stay in the country, we'd have a little more to believe in.
We're told that onward migration from Canada is way up. 31% according to this:
The video contains a few good examples of why. In a nutshell, a lot of immigrants, and a lot of Canadians are not getting the message that Canada believes in them, so it's hard for Canadians to believe in Canada and all the more difficult for immigrants. Most immigrants would rather go home when they encounter difficulties in their adopted countries. That's what they're doing. When you get screwed (as I have) by your own country in education, taxes, employment, accommodation, and cost of living, the very staples of life, what do you have to believe in?I agree with Stompin' Tom but the solution is not for people to get out of Canada, it's for Canada to transform from its current state back into a country worthy of pride, belief, and faith. That's got to start at the political level and I'm sorry but every last politician I've wasted the time researching appears to be one of the many zeros coming to save the day that Stompin' Tom sings about. I agree that, as he sings, we are short on heros, but as long as politics is our largest corporation and we recruit businesspeople rather than those who believe in Canadians, this trend will continue. You know who would better serve our country by living somewhere else? The greedy scumbag politicians, bankers, and captains of industry who persistently shatter the faith in Canada of both those who are Canadian and those who come to Canada hoping for better lives.
Canada definitely has more immigrants than the 23% it wants us to believe. Them, along with the untold numbers of nationals who can't get by on shitty jobs that are available and for which they are probably overqualified, can easily go from wanting to get out of Canada to believing in it again. We can't believe in a place where we can't live dignified lives. We need more money. But with the hyper-capitalistic protocol that pervades all government action, we could raise minimum wage to 40 bucks an hour, but businesses would just find a way to pass whatever percentage that raise amounted to AND THEN SOME right back onto the customer. That's what has fucked things up in Canada. We can't expect the banks, government, and industry to UNfuck what they have fucked. When this is the case, which it is, even Stompin' Tom can't expect us to believe in Canada.
I have to be honest, I am Jim, Jackie, John, and May. If I can find a good job in America (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) I'll leave the crappy, permanent part time jobs, or full time low wage jobs that are the only ones available to me in Canada for someone else. In that way I am serving my country better by living somewhere else. Take a look at how sad even the success stories of newcomers to Canada are while actually having many advantages that the locals do not. A lot of them think THEY are better off leaving Canada too. If THEY don't wanna stay there what chance do I have of success?
Any advice?
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