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| 2026-02-18 | 0 |
Trudeau compared all the crime these people are committing to all the Italians that came here in the early and mid 1900's. What an insult.
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| 2025-10-08 | 0 |
I lived in Canada for 11 years, 2008 - 2019, went to university and worked in Toronto. I come from an upper-middle class family in China, went to a top university in Canada, landed good jobs and I speak English like a native. I got my PR in 2015 and I remember the painful uphill battle I had to go through just get that. All the bureaucracy, redtape, unnecessarily rigid rules, high cost and long wait I received from CIC/IRCC felt like a humiliation to me. Every document was scrutinized and every step had obstacle that fealt unreasonable (my TOEFL examiner ask me why I had to do the language test required by CIC, and I had to visit a notary to validate my Chinese national ID card). It felt uneasy but I understood that these were the rules that everyone had to go through, and moving and integrating into a new society was never meant to be easy.
I went back to Canada in 2021 and 2024, and it was evident that the country I once called home had gone down the hill. The streets were screaming crime, unemployment, inflation, drug and filth, it's total social rot. As someone who went through the whole immigration process (and many of my friends who went through the same have left Canada for good, like myself), I attribute much of this to failed immigration policy. I cannot help but feel confused, angry, betrayed and humiliated when I look at the recent immigration policies of Canada and their results, and compare with what I had to go through. The feeling sums up to: Canada penalizes the hard-working and law-abiding people, and rewards the undeserved and the cheaters. Example: when the US creates wars in the Middle East, why does CANADA bear the cost of bringing in refugees?
I never regretted moving back to China and East Asia, and I feel bad for those who still truly think of Canada as home, as I am one myself. When the leadership of a country deviates from pragmatism, reason and common sense, and instead embraces idealogies, hypocrisy and political optics, this is what happens. The prices are paid by everyone, immigrant or not. For this, Trudeau deserves a court trial for his incompetence and dereliction of duty; and the people of Canada need some honest and serious retrospection. I will share some words of wisdom by the late Lee Kwan Yew: “Whoever governs Singapore (LKY was the PM and founding father of Singapore) must have that iron in him. Or give it up. This is not a game of cards, this is your life and mine. I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody is going to knock it down.” I hope the clownish weakling politicians in Canada (and, in much of the western world nowadays) can be enlightened a little bit.
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| 2024-08-04 | 0 |
There are now quite a few news stories in Canada of immigrants leaving the country - some back home and others to the USA and other places. Many just get a Canadian passport and then leave. There are public health care and pensions, so it can be an asset and also a convenient travel document to have. A lot of Canadian university graduates have a very hard time finding work in their fields and a lot of them look to the US for a better future. Both immigration and unemployment in Canada are much higher that in the US - so more people are chasing fewer jobs that often pay less and are taxed more than in the USA. Opportunities are generally a lot fewer in Canada than the US, and the business environment is not as favourable, and taxes significantly higher. You would be getting some of the entrepreneurs from Canada moving to the US for more favourable conditions as well to launch a business and also now a lot more rich investor types, so-called high net worth individuals wanting to relocate, because they just raised the capital gains tax in Canada. Capital gains is also triggered on inheritance in Canada with a deemed sale of property and assets, so rich people would prefer the American system and want to be residents there for tax purposes and have their assets grow in value in the US compared to Canada. There are very large numbers of foreign students and other categories of immigrants which may have as their goal going to the US after getting a temporary visa to Canada which is easy to get - maybe something like half a million to a million people in those categories depending on the year, plus around another half million regular immigrants and refugees now. The Trudeau administration has increased immigration to record numbers. It has been steadily going up over the years for several decades since 1990. Because of family re-unification it can have a snowball effect and could significantly exceed 1 million per year. A lot of the sending countries have much larger populations than Canada, so there are a lot more that can be potentially sent to Canada in the future. About 1/4 of the population of Canada has been added in the past few decades. Add to that visitors and temporary visas - that is a lot of people potentially moving to the US. Before the 1990s Canadians visiting the US were not required to have a passport and a drivers' license or birth certificate was adequate. Now a passport is required. It is impossible to effectively control the long Canada-US border, so there could be some unified policies in that area agreed on between Canada and the USA on immigration and refugees. Canada currently has a very open immigration policy with the government actively seeking out more immigration beyond its current processing capacity and trying to take rejected immigrants from other countries. The Canadian government, especially in recent years under Trudeau is immigration hungry. It might be the only country in the world doing that. What some news reports are now saying is that some immigrants are actually leaving, since they find it so difficult in Canada and some are worse off than they were in the countries they came from, which were considered to be less developed than Canada.
\nWashington currently has more immigration controls and administrative competencies than Ottawa, so US pressure and influence is a faster way to get reforms into the system than waiting for local politicians to do anything, which is unlikely. Canada is seen by some as a backdoor into the US. Biden's immigration policies could be seen as very conservative in Canada compared to Trudeau's. It used to be in the news about how refugees were trying to get to Canada and walking across the border in Quebec and out west from the US earlier, but now there are more news stories of immigrants leaving Canada trying to go the other way, probably due to high costs and unemployment because the government took in more people than it could absorb into the economy. They have the idea that immigration drives GDP growth so that they can borrow and spend more, expand the civil service, etc. without making any cutbacks or efficiencies, supposedly without the Debt to GDP ratio getting worse, just by bringing in more people as if that would drive the economy. A lot depends on who you bring in as well. Are they going to go on welfare, are they going to increase crime, will they somehow contribute to society, are they a net tax benefit or cost in terms of government services, will they invest money, will they start a business and create jobs for others ? Those issues do not factor into government decision making in Canada for the most part. Ontario Premier Doug Ford did say there were too many foreign students. It is bad planning not to consider those factors since there are other costs that grow with those policies as well, and infrastructure has to be expanded. I think that the real immigration numbers to Canada are not transparent or made public, nor are the costs involved, if anyone even knows what they are. Nor is the impact on crime. You can guess from what the reports are in other countries. The Fraser Institute has made some estimates on the net costs of immigration to the government budget a few years ago, which were very high and which by now have increased - the cost equivalent of several new aircraft carriers each year. They are big numbers which are not publicized, but it amounts to the fact that immigration is subsidized by the taxpayers in Canada and it is not paying for our pensions as an ageing society as has been claimed. There is less money for education, health care and pensions per person, and those social benefits will probably have to be reduced over time. Social programs can only be delivered to the extent that the government has money. The bigger social system a county has, the more such immigration policies are going to cost. Trudeau has been expanding various social programs as well, so higher taxes and debt are likely with that approach. Then more productive people and companies will want to leave Canada and go to the US. Probably the government does not know what the actual numbers and costs are and doesn't actively keep track of that information beyond what is required. Probably nobody knows what the true immigration figures and their associated costs are in Canada, and hardly anyone has even studied those issues. If they can just walk across the US border and get papers so easily making an asylum claim, it is not surprising, since it would take them longer to get a regular visa and work permit if they did it legally. You could call that a loophole in the US immigration system which is being exploited. The US is better governed in general and has a better system in many ways, but I am not sure if it is the same on that. People have arrived on boats and have not been sent back. At least in the US you have more open information about those issues. In Canada it is hard to find out anything about it. Deportations from Canada are very few.
\nOn other issues in Canada when voting in federal elections you have to show a government issued photo ID like a drivers' license or passport to vote and bring a card that was mailed out to eligible voters that gets updated addresses when a person files their taxes. I have never heard of mail-in ballots in Canada, but there are remote areas of the country in the far north who may have special system for voting. It is easier to get a Canadian citizenship than US and many more citizenships are handed out in Canada each year in proportion to the population than in the US. Canadian might be one of the easiest citizenships to get in the world. The official line now is that it is a country of immigrants. Based on current trends, will very little opposition to it in the parliament and most MPs supporting it, future immigration to Canada could increase to several million per year because of the rapid growth of population in the world, and the momentum already growing of immigration to Canada, so it may change significantly in the future. Historically around the world you can see many examples that country names, borders, flags and languages change over time with population changes, so it might not be called Canada anymore in 50-100 years. For example, Bulgaria used to be called Thrace which had been a powerful kingdom in antiquity and had a different language which is barely known about anymore. Over the past 2,000 years it has gone through a number of changes and had various regimes governing it, has been independent and also part of several different empires. Canada has only been a country for a short time in comparison and has been been going through significant changes. Trudeau has said that Canada is a post-national country. Canada is also going through a period of critical self-examination and deconstruction-revisionism. A lot of what had been viewed as positive from its history now is seen more critically, with re-naming and removing historical figures now seen as negative.\nDiscussing immigration policy critically is considered by many to be taboo in Canada, unless a person is saying good things about it in general. You can hear people say that the government isn't processing enough people, for example, but not often that there are too many or that it costs a lot of money. The trend of migration from Canada to the US would only increase much more in the future as it is going currently, and its role as a stepping stone to migration to the US could increase. The way this would be seen by many in Canada is that they are losing valuable people to the USA whom they consider assets, since a lot of officials have been trying to bring in more people into the country, but not everyone wants to stay in Canada nowadays because of a lack of jobs and opportunities. Canada is quite laissez-faire about migration, with Toronto being a sanctuary city as well.
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| 2023-12-30 | 0 |
Interesting video! Here's my perspective:\n\nI'm from Quebec City, of Chinese descent, born and raised in Montreal, where I lived for 21 years. I've also lived in Vancouver for 3 years, Toronto for 5 years, returned to Montreal for another 3 years, and have now been in Quebec City for 15 years.\n\nAs a Quebec City resident and business owner, I find the city amazing. During the pandemic, there were many programs and subsidies available. I even wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau regarding the CEBA program for businesses, suggesting some changes to the eligibility criteria. They followed through, and Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau sent a detailed response, signed by him but likely written by his staff, explaining the revised criteria and suggesting other potential programs. Provincially, my MP's staff guided me through various programs. Ultimately, I received nearly everything I needed to survive and potentially thrive through the pandemic (to be confirmed in 2024).\n\nTaxes are high, but I feel safe in Quebec City. Crime rates are low, and I've experienced little racism, possibly due to my fluency in French. Starting a business here has been easy, with minimal costs and bureaucracy.\n\nAs a gay man, I've never felt endangered. I can comfortably express affection for my spouse in public without feeling judged.\n\nHealthcare, including access to medication and doctor consultations, is extremely affordable. Super Clinics offer next-day appointments at no cost.\n\nI own a commercial condo for my business, which cost significantly less than it would have in Toronto or Vancouver. My rent for a one-bedroom apartment is CAD 755, and electricity bills are remarkably low.\n\nWith the shift to online business, I've accessed international markets while benefiting from a low-cost, safe environment. I received a CAD 2400 subsidy from the Canada Digital Adoption Program, among other government-funded programs, to expand internationally.\n\nAlthough homelessness exists in Quebec City, many supportive programs are available, and most homeless individuals here are polite, likely because they face less stigma.\n\nI believe it's crucial to explore different locations when moving to Canada. Many smaller cities offer great opportunities, which works to my advantage.\n\nRegarding the judiciary system, it's not perfect but feels less biased compared to the Supreme Court of the United States, such as in cases like Roe v. Wade.\n\nMy advice to immigrants is to learn the local language fluently for effective communication. Utilize all available federal and provincial tools, like legal aid, and don't hesitate to contact your MP. In my experience, they've been very helpful.\n\nAll the best, Febby!
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