Trump Apparently Idolizes Hitler

My guess is Ivanka and Jared Kushner. Their Jewish affiliation makes the irony too good to avoid.

 

@Stanislav - I believe he lived here for some years. I mean, do you even know anything about tadj?
And it's "Erika" not "Erica." I mean, do you even know anything about Erika?

Get more Erika here: https://mubi.com/en/cast/erika-eleniak

 

It's basic fact that Justin didn't cause Canadian problems with productivity. They predate his government by decades.

 

Agreed. They were a topic of discussion when I was a kid and had just arrived here. 70 years ago. St. Laurent days -- then Diefenbaker...

 

Certainly, Canada was overall relieved when Justin moved here...

 

I am now 40. I have lived in Canada for 24 years, so I know a few things about this country. ;-) I left Ontario around the time when Justin Trudeau took office. I’ve attended middle school, high school and post-secondary school in Canada. I currently live in Warsaw, the Polish city where I was born.

Here’s the latest warning about excessive immigration from Chrétien-era Liberal appointee Governor of the Bank of Canada, a PhD graduate in Economics from Princeton (https://www.bankofcanada.ca/profile/david-dodge/)

Link: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-how-record-high-immigration-could-be-hurting-canadian-productivity

“Canada’s recent turn towards record-high immigration is already having measurable impacts on housing prices and employment numbers – but in a recent report, former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge suggested that it is also eroding the country’s competitiveness and long-term productivity.”

“In the last years, we have altered an economic immigration system that stood as a model for the world,” declares a Dec. 11 report co-written by Dodge for the law firm Bennett Jones. But where Canada once oversaw a carefully managed immigration system that prioritized “highly skilled workers,” the report said Ottawa has now “ramped up significantly” the intake of foreign students and other low-skilled temporary workers.”

“Poor administration and the abuse of some programs are damaging the credibility of the system for immigrants and Canadians,” warned the report, which also cautioned that the “large and rising inflow of workers with lower skills” risks depressing wages.”

“Most notably, Dodge and his co-author argue that by constantly flooding the Canadian market with cheap and often temporary labour, Ottawa is propping up “un-competitive” businesses — and ultimately doing long-term damage to Canadian productivity.”

“The last thing we want is a bunch of low-productivity businesses hanging on because we provide them cheap labour. That’s not the way we’re going to raise national income,” Dodge told the Globe and Mail in a Monday interview.”

“The OECD, for one, has forecast that Canada is set to be the world’s worst-performing advanced economy until at least 2060. In July, a report out of TD Economics warned that Canada was lagging behind the rest of the developed world in “standard of living performance” and that “little turnaround appears to be on the horizon.”

“The Bennett Jones report warned that if Canada doesn’t alter its current course, the country is destined to enter an era of “reduced consumption” and “no increase in perceived living standards.”

“Meanwhile, the massive influx of newcomers is having noticeable effects on Canada’s existing housing shortage as well as overall employment numbers.”

In just two months — from August to September – Canada added slightly more than 100,000 jobs, according to a Statistics Canada labour force survey. However, given that high immigration was adding about 50,000 new workers into the economy each month, the agency said that the unemployment rate remained completely unchanged.”

 

Based on that passage it seems the critiques in the David Dodge report are largely specific to temporary workers and (also temporary) international students.

 

Again, we are supposed to believe that foreigners push housing prices and are also low-skilled minimum wage workers. Also, students are not low-skilled perpetually. Color me dubious. To be fair, when this guy talks about "poor administration and abuse" of government programs, I believe he's not wrong. I worked in administration of one federal government program; not that we were incompetent (we were not), but what's good for the Executive Cadre of Her Majesty's Public Service and what's good for the taxpayer are two very different things. I heard some stories about the temporary work permit program that, yeah, sounds like abuse. This is most emphatically not on the immigrants though.

 

I heard something about the program that really got to me. Apparently China was sending temporary workers (with permits) to a facility they own and operate here in Canada. I think it was mineral refining. The workers would stay the length of the permit, then be returned to China and more workers (with permits) would replace them.

The kicker - the Chinese co. was paying these workers about 45% less than Canadian workers get for the same job. I think it took a long time for the authorities to wise up to this - and a long time to react, once they had. The permit people had to be severely prodded.

China - keep your working poor. Underpay them on your own turf.

 

Globalization, with all thy faults we maybe don't love thee so much still?

 

Immigrants don't. Few are wealthy enough to achieve this. Most have to save for a while before they even have a down payment. And the relative few that can purchase a house immediately - they pay the going price - or less if they can negotiate; they don't increase it.

Foreigners do. By remote control, from their homeland. We have allowed massive speculation and foreign buying by idnividuals and corporations that buy properties solely for resale at a profit. There's not been nearly enough Government clamping down on this.

The presence of numerous new immigrants requiring rental accommodation does indeed facilitate even more gouging by landlords. Any excuse. Lately I've seen "bidding wars" on apartment rentals. Don't blame the immigrants. Blame the landlords, taking advantage of high demand. And the Ontario Conservative Government of Mike Harris in 1990s. They monkeyed with rent control, to allow landlords to gouge - and manufacture the conditions under which gouging was allowable. If there's greed -- it has to be controlled. If not - tents in the public parks, homeless deaths - all that we have now.

There's not a prescription pair of glasses in the world that would enable Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford to see this.

 

The US has this problem domestically. There are corporations that speculate by buying up numerous houses in selected areas - 15, 50 or even 100 at a time in one area. This makes housing artificially scarce in these areas. Naturally, prices rise - the company releases a few houses at a time as prices hit pre-determined points - while they buy a few more somewhere else. By the time the original batch has been sold -- millions have been made.

The growth in this "industry" started, I think, with 2008-9 and the real estate crash associated with the "ninja loans" debacle. "Buy houses cheap -- and wait. It won't be long." The ninjas moved on -- but the disaster continues -- in a different form. I never liked ninjas.

 

Not sure I ever did. At all. Globalization of people and cultures - cool. Economic matters - not so much. Full of one-sided non-reciprocal bargains and advantages. I don't think it was supposed to turn out that way - but it did. The worst aspects of human nature at work. Bad things perpetrated and perpetuated.

I particularly balk at dealing with nations - buying, sending them money - that build prison camps -- e.g. Uighur camps in China. Then again, the US has even more incarcerated people than China. The most of any nation in the world. With less than 1/3 the population. Something to think about -- and I do, often.

 

@Stanislav I agree that people often blame immigrants unfairly for their country's financial woes. I just tell them Iceland went bankrupt (and subsequently restructured its financial system) in 2009. They've had a ZERO immigration policy for many, many years. Dang. There goes my dream - life in a deluxe ski chalet at Akureyri! Fjandinn!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–2011_Icelandic_financial_crisis

 

Inside Job, the documentary, has a great segment on this. The banks aggressively pursued US-style deregulation and then hired regulators and their lawyers to push the policies and defend the banks against the regulators, who were outmatched. This has become a common tactic now (hiring the regulators to find ways to get around the rules.)

 

I just saw this article in today's "Globe and Mail" (centrist-moderate in terms of leanings) newspaper, so I thought I'd share it:

Link: https://archive.is/FPijV

Opinion: Can we talk about immigration?

The Trudeau Liberals have begun to find words to describe how they broke Canada’s immigration system, which was once a model for the world. But they have yet to start fixing what they broke. Instead, the breaking continues. At breakneck speed. Statistics Canada’s quarterly estimate of the country’s non-permanent population shows it rose to 2½ million this fall, from 1.7 million a year earlier. At this rate, the number of temporary residents could grow to around four million by the end of next year – roughly 10 per cent of the Canadian population. This is unprecedented. In 2000, Canada had 227,000 temporary residents.

What was so good about the old Canadian immigration system? It was a marriage of generosity and self-interest. It was about using the points system to choose immigrants according to the skills they brought to Canada. It was about recruiting future citizens, not minimum-wage guest workers.

And though Canada’s immigration rate in the three decades to 2015 was higher than most developed countries, Canada also had more stringent border control measures than most countries. We were very welcoming, and we were very selective.

Contradictory? No, complementary. It’s why Canadians – almost unique among Western countries – saw immigration as a net-positive. This carefully cultivated ecosystem was the result of a multigenerational consensus among Conservatives, Progressive Conservatives and Liberals.

The Trudeau government has flattened it with a bulldozer. The government’s signature immigration policy is a sharp increase in traditional immigration, from around a quarter of a million in the years before 2015 to half a million a year by 2025. That doubling wasn’t justified by anything other than politics – but it’s not the big change the Liberals brought. The most important change was the fostering of a huge and growing shadow immigration system. The result, occupying a political sweet spot where progressive desires and business interests overlap, comes close to erasing the border for temporary residents. The number of temporary foreign workers that businesses can get approval to recruit appears to be almost unlimited. And the number of student visas Ottawa is willing to issue is unlimited.

However, with unlimited numbers of student visas on offer, Ottawa created perverse incentives for universities, colleges and businesses. People outside Canada know they can buy the previously unattainable right to enter this country, to work, and maybe even get citizenship, simply by paying tuition to a Canadian school.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller recognized this obvious reality when he recently admitted that a big part of our student visa system is “puppy mills that are just churning out diplomas.”
He found the words, and that’s something. But what’s he doing about it? Not much.

And Canadian GDP per capita has been falling, as the government performs another unprecedented feat: expanding population faster than the economy.
It’s time to get back to an immigration system that was the envy of the world.

• Only allow temporary foreign workers in high-wage jobs: Canada needs a program to recruit skilled workers – such as tens of thousands of family physicians. Do we need a program to suppress the wages of low-income Canadians by recruiting hundreds of thousands of minimum-wage workers? No.
• Substantially cut the number of student visas: We can raise GDP per capita by aiming for immigrants who are more educated and earn higher incomes than the average Canadian. We should only offer visas, and postgraduation work permits, to those in programs meeting that criteria. Yes to more visas for university degrees in engineering. No to more visas for college certificates in hospitality and food service.
• End the right of foreign students to work off campus while in school: Applications to diploma mills will plummet. Applications to better educational institutions will not.

 

What kind of "diploma mills" are we talking, here? We pretty well have ZERO unaccredited (or equivalent) universities. Or Community Colleges. This is not the US. We talking about "career schools?" NOBODY should be coming halfway across the world with the intent to study at ANY such school. That should just NOT be allowable grounds to enter Canada.

 

Most people who use the term "diploma mill" don't use it in an accurate way. But we already knew that. It's not a big surprise.

 

If the writer is talking about properly authorized schools - e.g. my alma mater, Niagara College - then something is wrong here. Niagara has a state-of-the-art campus devoted to hospitality - including wine and beer-making. There's been a micro-brewery on campus for many years. This IS wine country and smaller wineries abound. This is tourist country too - there is a hospitality industry.

If the Feds don't like people coming into the country to study this - they have the means to screen them out. However I don't believe they think this way, or that they should. Sounds like the writer believes these to be industries not worthy of study - of little value, just an ultra-easy diploma. A false excuse to enter Canada. Dead wrong. Serious scorn and discrimination, here.