Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
- 18
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Canada is having an immigration Crysis (the country can't run that many people on the hardware it has, it would need a huge upgrade to handle the influx). The people are noticing. Like many cities in the USA that are finally having to face up to the immigration policies they have supported and voted for, it is leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
It may actually lead to replacing Castro's secret son this next election cycle.
The change in tone in the Canadian spaces that I frequent online and in person (being a border state and having family there) has been nothing short of unbelievable. Where I was called out as a stupid bigoted American (in less severe terms) for opposing open borders in my own country (while canada had a much more restrictive immigration policy going on I might add (am I including too many parenthetical asides?)), now Canadians are the ones telling me that no one speaks English/French anymore and that pretty soon their downtown is going to look like New Delhi at rush hour.
Wait times at medical clinics have gone from weeks to months to years, housing is 5x more out of whack than the US, and many expats once seeking a kinder Canadian way of life are returning home to the USA.
-Notes from a Canadian adjacent person
Is the problem just ("just") that Canada also has a housing crisis? There's the old joke about how all of Canada lives as close as they can possibly get to the US. Except it's not really a joke, they really do live in just a handful of cities, clustered next to the border. I realize the climate in most of Canada is extremely harsh, but it seems like that should be manageable with modern technology. There's plenty of space, just build more cities.
See also: indigenous nations using their special legal status to bypass housing regulations
There are plenty of cities & towns far from the border -- you could build more houses there if necessary, but the existing ones already go pretty cheap. (particularly by comparison to Vancouver/Toronto, but attractively so even by the standards of saner markets)
The trouble ('trouble') is that hardly anyone who's family hasn't already been in Canada for a few generations seems to want to live there -- no idea what anyone finds attractive about present-day Vancouver/Toronto (Vancouver used to be nice, Toronto has sucked longer than I've been alive AIUI) but nobody is forced to live there.
The immigrants that do penetrate to the hinterlands seem to get along just fine, so I'm pretty sure they aren't being hemmed in by racist rednecks -- maybe they just like terrible cities better? I would fully support a 2-5 year stint north of ~55ish as a citizenship requirement though.
It just feels like a weird idea to seek jobs in the hinterlands? Impressionistically isn't hinterland resource extraction jobs unstable and mostly passed down generationally? In any case for places that the lack a existing immigrant community it is even more alien and harder to figure out how the place works at all for new immigrants.
We're talking about Canada here -- there are plenty of jobs in logging, mining, and O&G plus the processing of these things that more or less need to take place in the hinterlands. These jobs pay much better than anything else an immigrant who isn't already a doctor or something will get, and the cost of living difference borders on an order of magnitude if you're comparing to Vancouver/Toronto.
I'm not sure your second point is actually true, other than the extent to which there are areas of the GVRD/GTA that have been essentially taken over by specific immigrant groups such that immigrants can live indistinguishably from their home country -- if one doesn't happen to be a member of the right group, I'd imagine things could be unpleasant. Certainly the first-gen immigrants that have trickled out to my section of the hinterlands assimilate very well. My impression would be that in many cases they are more Canadian (in terms of the values of 30+ years ago) than the white progressive community. (which is very much the dominant memeplex in the aforementioned urban agglomerations)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link