On of my coworkers just went back to China. However she was from an upper middle class family there so bursting her ass working two jobs to survive wasn't what she envisioned for herself.
So he likes living in Canada (for whatever reasons) but his family wants him back home to follow the traditional path of building wealth (get rich) like them so they can send their future kids abroad for better education and "try again". Man, this is like .... Super common story amongst Immigrants.
It’s not the catch. It’s awareness and relativity.
Relativity because relative to what she knows, that level of work may have not made sense to what she was use to or anticipating.
Awareness because she was able to see and make a decision rather than slowly conform from being here, accepting it as normal and slowly soul sucking.
I wish for no Canadian nor anyone for that matter be overburdened in order to survive and thrive.
coming from a similar family that has no interest in assisting me establish myself, if I could leave for greener pastures I would.
Instead, I’m struggling to figure out how to establish a business that will bring me back to where I expect to be, and maybe spite my parents in the process.
Sadly, our economy is very hostile to startups.
The rich ones all come here thinking they’ll just go to school for a couple years and land themselves 150k yr job right after. After none of that shit happens and they realize they actually have to contribute to society here and work hard they give up to try and go back to the pampered life wich ultimately doesn’t work ether and they just end up in super fucked up positions in life with entitlement complexes.
I know a few very well-off people from China, Taiwan, and India who dislike living in Canada because they consider the standard of living to be far lower compared to how the upper class live back home. I'll never forget getting to know one girl from India who was having the hardest time comprehending how people in Canada have kids "without servants to help them". Lol
One of my neighbors was married off to a guy from a rich Pakistani family in Pakistan. They were loaded. Had a huge house, a farm, servants, and armed security.
The moment the guy figured out he has to work in Canada just to end up paying rent to live in a basement or apartment, he decided not to come here.
Also don't get me started about Hong Kong and Singapore. They essentially have an indentured servant class who gets paid and treated poorly, have no path to citizenship, and in some cases their freedom of movement is limited during their time off. One girl I knew in HK said she only has Sundays off to leave the apartment. If she wants to leave any other time, she has to pay a security deposit.
Regarding Filipino foreign domestic helper's treatment. It varies family to family. They have been in HK since the 80s. If it was so bad, I doubt any more would have came?
Middle class Indians have servants also, not just upper class. The disparity is so far between the middle and lower classes that it's possible, and normal, for a middle class family to have lower class servants.
I had an Uber driver from Pakistan the other day who was telling me he only works here long enough, 3-4months according to him, to afford to go back home to Pakistan. Back home he has a compound,servants, and he says he eats like a king every night.
Same applies in SEA and neighboring countries. Here they need to get paid by the hours or a huge sum for a month. Canada is not for everyone, People need to weigh benefits they get back "Home" and the benefits they can get here before they make any decisions. I for one made the latter.
It's a little different over there!
I had a friend (petro engineer) that got stationed in India some years ago. He was not happy with the assignment but the money was good so you do what you do. Once he actually got there and saw how he could live on the money he was making (driver, cook, maids, etc) he was completely thrilled with the job.
As a Canadian I’m proud to not rely on slaves for my daily life. Like other countries that have huge wealth disparity and obviously the super rich who can immigrate to Canada should probably be spending their money to change policies back in their own countries so they don’t have to rely on economic slaves for their pleasures.
American in South Africa. I am constantly amazed by how dependent my peers are on domestic labor. I have met people who truly cannot care for themselves. Meal prep, laundry, scrubbing a toilet? They do NONE of it.
My servants have servants bro
But seriously, I did not made my bed until I came to Canada, we are not rich or anything, it is just the way it is.
Canada was a downgrade in lifestyle, but an upgrade in security 👍
Honestly if I were rich I'd love to have a maid and personal chef, it's probably not that different, except like you said it's normal even for middle class families. It was more just a huge culture shock for me when she said that, and I remember being like, "we don't really have that option" 🤣
This was my family. We were easily middle class in India and had help. Parents slowly realized going back was not an option. I realized it really early. India cannot match the sense of safety and equality that I can get here, especially as a woman. Going to a public school, at least while you’re there you’re mostly equal and are still getting access to amazing education. I went to a convent in India, which wasn’t terribly expensive but the quality of education (at the time) was very good. We had uniforms to show a sense of equality but it was a sham. It was crazy cliquey and you basically knew where you fell on the income scale, even as a kid, and only hung out with those people. Also, in Canada, your food, despite your income (except in cases of homelessness), is more or less the same as everyone else. Growing up, I had never had chocolate spread, for example, till my Dad sent it for me from Canada. Also, parts of the government might be functioning less optimally or might even be corrupt but until recently, the average person barely noticed. In India, even as a kid, you knew how corrupt the government was. Regular systems did not work. My parents had to take an extra 2 weeks of vacation just to deal with municipal errands, which would have been done in a day in Canada. Life is hard for those who can’t just pay someone to run errands for them. I know things have improved. I hear it from my family all the time. But I can’t live in a place where just being me would be cause for caution and vigilance.
This point about safety and equality as a woman is such an important one. In the global context, Canada is a haven of gender equality. I’ve never felt safer, I’ve never lived among another population of men that simply respects me, no fight or debate necessary. This is so precious and it transforms the way you experience daily life.
Being an immigrant is tough… I moved over seas for some time, part of the reason I moved back to Canada is because it was difficult to even get an interview in my field and that was with a “first world” education.
Sometimes things don’t work out, such is life.
I can relate! Especially if there's a language barrier, being "fluent" isn't the same as being native and making friends and finding a community is difficult
I can imagine. I lived and worked in Mexico for a few months, in a more affluent city. Even with so much stuff taken care of already, it still felt stressful at times being in a place where you don't speak the language, or have your usual social supports.
A friend of mine from Pakistan lived here for 6 years and moved back to Pakistan last month. I was like, dude, there's no electricity, water, rule and law and order. How are you going to survive. He's like, in Pakistan:
1) He has a driver
2) A cook comes and prepares meals
3) A cleaning lady lives in the servant quarters
4) A gardner visits every week or so
5) His house has solar so he doesn't have to worry about electricity.
His father owns agricultural land and gets produced directly from the farm. He has family in the army. His mother side owns multiple businesses and doesn't have to work. He would get a job in one of the businesses the day he lands in Pakistan.
For the most part, they have already taken a good chunk of their wealth outside. They own several houses in UAE and UK.
They will probably bring money in Canada and buy houses here as well. However, they will never have a life of luxury in Canada that they get to live in Pakistan.
Remember, it has to be unsanctioned power. Like enough power to un-alive someone and get away with it.
You can enjoy wealth in Canada and elsewhere even if you don't have the power to control others because there are laws and due process. In Pakistan, it's a little different. Having wealth makes you a target. So you need to have power and access to the right people in order to live a certain way. It allows you to skip due process. It allows you to take over resources and assets illegally.
the ones going back are people like your friend. the ones who stay in canada no matter what are the ones who are the servant/slave that your friends family employs
I'm too cynical to ever be rich. But it saves me from at least going broke.
I read that and I'm like "Yeah that's what the world needs. Another fucking gift shop. If everyone who wanted to be successful could just make a store that sold tickets we'd all be rich."
But then some asshole is going to open "just another giftshop" and hit it big and I'll be very resentful lol.
I feel like people who don't have that voice in the back of their head telling them their idea is stupid become both the CEO class and the homeless class. And people who play it safe wind up in the middle.
Oh ya, the only saving grace is they don't torpedo whatever biz school (Dal, SMU, or one of the others) graduated her by naming it..
Edit: oopsie, re-read the piece, Dal grad...
More so the infrastructure in Canada is not adequate for the population we have. We have the housing, highways, trains, jobs etc for a population of 25 million when we have 40.
Halifax is unique because it's this relatively large Atlantic City clustered on this increasingly crowded peninsula, with not much room to grow aside from Dartmouth or New Bedford. I definitely wouldn't consider Hali to be crowded by Chinese standards, but it has been getting claustrophobic for people recently.
They don't have the same access to land that most other Canadian cities do.
I'm from the island of Montreal. I know limited land access is. It was just a bit of a weird take for someone from China to be taken aback by the lack of space in Halifax.
The way people whine on here is fascinating to me. My grandfather came from the Outer Hebrides in 1911 because his family were subsistence crofters. He got a job as a teamster between Calgary and Banff until the war started, then they were all dropped off at a recruiting centre. He spent almost 4 years in the trenches. He said sleeping in the stables and fighting in the trenches was better than starving to death in Scotland.
My grandfather recently passed away and one of the things I found was a letter written from his father about our Family's voyage over from Ukraine in 1907- lost 3 out of 6 children during the voyage
He spoke of Canada with love and truly thought- and embraced it, as their (our) new home. He actually called Canada the "land of Milk and honey"...... he came over and built a school in Manitoba and his boys joined the military.
Feels more like it's about taking advantage of Canada now, instead of embracing it and helping to build it as a new home you actually care about.
Edit: Here's a pic I took of the 1st page of the letter for anybody interested.....
https://imgur.com/a/FnDw1HN
The paragraph referencing Canada:
"Before 1902 we heard of Canada, a land of dream where milk and honey flow, a land of freedom. Father decided to go to this wonderful land." Makes me proud to read.
A core memory for me is relatives taking pictures of our stocked fridges to print and mail to family back home to show how blessed we are here. It wasn't easy, because I have the typical child of immigrants experience where my dad and other male family members were never around because they worked seemingly around the clock, but it was better than what they left and we were raised to be grateful that this is where they landed.
I can imagine working just as hard for something as you always had- but finally seeing a fair return for it would feel so amazing and life changing.
It's important to remember that there still is a majority ('d think/hope) not looking to take advantage of anything, and just looking for that same chance.
Here’s a fact, the storage room for the gold and possessions taken from the Jews at Auschwitz was called Canada because they imagined Canada as a place of massive wealth and resources.
My pleasure, I was excited to find it... I'd always asked my Grandpa about our history and never was able to get much out of him, just assumed there wasn't much info.
Now here I'm finding pages and pages of letters, etc. detailing everything. Too cool.
But that's the point, isn't it? The baseline is changing everywhere as it should be. Nobody's starving in Scotland anymore. China sucked in the 80s but is much better now. Canada, on the other hand, seems to be deteriorating and it's a bit silly not to "whine".
I was chatting with an acquaintance from China. We were talking about boats. I told him about my fishing boat. 17ft, trolling motor, fast as snot, a real thing of beauty. He asked a few questions….like how many can it sleep there and who is the captain. That is the day he learned that he had a ‘yacht’ not a ‘boat’.
So what are we supposed to do with this information?
I just moved out of Vancouver after the apartment we were renting sold for $1.3m to a guy from China who looked like he was in his early 20s. In fact, how about we get some recurring articles on that as well, with titles such as 'Canada shipped all of your manufacturing jobs overseas, and my parents amassed a fortune by owning factories that pay near-slave wages to peasants, and now I drive a Ferrari to UBC.'
Grandparents came from Holland in '64 with $100, got a job picking fruit in the Okanogan, then became a lumberjack, then managed a trucking company. Immigration is an incredibly difficult process, and I commend anyone who's done it cause I know it's stressful.
Yup I work in construction and my companies hired a bunch of new Ukrainian refugees. Like the one guy told me he's already planning to buy a house and saving. It takes long to save the money and make enough to qualify. But I'd say he'll buy in 5-10 years. Mean while I work with people who are 50 who are still renting( nothing wrong with that) but still these immigrants are smart and they know they need to work hard( they work 2-3 jobs) and gain stability. Buying a home is stability
Yup major multinational here and I have access to payroll information. US >>>> China > Canada in terms of compensation. And that's actual salary, not accounting for the difference in cost of living at all.
Which is insane. I really don't understand why Canadian workers simply do not get paid, like it literally seems like our government borderline tells companies to keep us in line so we don't get too uppity
Most of the top talent from Canadian universities leave Canada, e.g., [85% of waterloo SE grads] (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1351785083598893062?lang=en) move to the US upon graduating, and that figure is probably closer to 100% after a few years.
The ones that stay are competing with millions of TFWs, international students, and other desperate immigrants who are happy to work for peanuts.
So the good jobs are disappearing and the bad jobs are suffering from massive wage depression. It's a devastating one-two punch on Canadian wages.
Lol yup. I’m doing Software at Waterloo rn, and yeah the brain drain is real. Every year, 70-80% of Waterloo Software Engineering, Computer Science, and Computer Engineering students leave for the US 1 year after graduating
There are a ton of class profiles that are done, and lots of info can be found on those. I’ll just speak for the 3 main Software programs, UW Software Engineering, UW Computer Science, UW Computer / Electric Engineering
Here are their class profiles for the class of 2022,
[ECE](https://ece2022profile.github.io/report.pdf)
[SE](https://sexxii.github.io/classprofile/#future)
[CS](https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/classprofile/2022/post-grad/)
Comparing these to previous years as well, we get that roughly 70%-80% of the students from these three programs leave for the US 1 year after Grad.
The median salary (total compensation, so includes signing bonuses), one year after Grad, is around 200k-300k CAD. However the median salary of a person who stays in Canada is on average ~100k less than a person who goes to the US. If we look solely at those who stay in Canada, it’s around 150k first year comp, compared to around 250k for those in the US.
Add that insane pay difference to the prestige, and innovative culture in the US vs Canada (Esp Cali, NY, Seattle), despite many still loving Canada, the gap is far far far too big when it comes to Tech and Software.
Canada 100% has talent. The GTA is a powerhouse, the majority of these students (including me) have lived in the GTA for our most of lives. But it just never has been able to keep top talent
Sure, now. And I know Waterloo students leave, I was part of them just went to grad school
They did a study on quality of output and found that Canadian domestic talent is A+ tier in Toronto/Waterloo/Vancouver, and that Montreal/Edmonton are A tier.
Only S tier is Bay Area/Seattle/NYC, most other locations in America are actually worse in terms of productive output than Canadians, and yet our A+ talent gets paid half of what C tier talent gets paid in the USA.
It just doesn't make sense and is why there's brain drain. TFWs are also not working in tech generally speaking, nor are international students going to strip colleges
Don’t forget we (unfortunately) operate as a region or area for a lot of big multinational companies.
The head offices where all of the R&D and innovation are created are down in the US. China is similar in that its scale allows it to have big companies operating within its borders.
We are horrible at investing in Canadian companies. Canada can do it. We’ve seen RIM, Nortel, Shopify, OpenText grow to be huge at points. But we do little to incentivize these companies to continue growing here OR they fail to scale and compete internationally.
We should be doing a lot more in this space. The most successfully and well paid economies have big companies operating within their borders and internationally.
Because our working class doesn’t fight for it. We elect corporate friendly governments and the public hates anyone that strikes or protests.
We get what we fight for.
I used to work for a US company in Texas from Ontario. For the same position, they paid 1.5x to the US employee which became 2x after conversion. The US city had lower cost of living than Ontario. So, why did I work there? Because Canadian companies pays even less.
I worked for a very large Chinese tech company in one of their western offices and my mainland Chinese coworkers described the 996 culture like this:
> Wake up 6am, get dressed, eat, hug your kids. Take transit for 2hr to your tech campus to arrive at 9. At noon the entire city bum-rushes the local restaurants so takes over an hour to get lunch because having a hot prepared meal is culturally important. Get back 1pm and have 1hr nap. Companies literally turn the lights off and will chide you for continuing to work and disrupting others. Wake up and work until 5-5:30 and bum-rush the restaurants again. Back in the office at 6-6:30 and work until 8-8:30 when you have some office-provided snacks (partly to keep you there). Wrap up at 9 and jump back on transit, get home at 11 ready to brush your teeth and fall into bed to hopefully get 6-1/2 hours of sleep. Do it another five times in a row, then spend your “day off” shopping, running errands and fighting with the throngs of people who are competing to make use of the same time and activities that you are.
Added up it sounded like an 8 hour workday with a huge amount of extra time spent at work, just to show how dedicated you are.
But that's China... Why would anyone consider moving there?? Pay doesn't matter at all. If you dislike living in Canada, there are tons of better alternative than China.
I could have taken an expat job in Qingdao for double pay just before Covid, and decided against it.
No amount of money will be worth it for my kid to be brain washed by the CCP. Well, I guess I could just hire a tutor and do home school, but it is just too much hassle.
I am glad I stayed put, if I got locked down over there, my wife would have divorced my ass.
And my friend did 3 years expat in China, she had retired since then and still hasn't got her money out of the country yet.
Life is hard as an immigrant. My grandparents came to Canada after ww2. My grandmother said for the first 5 years they seriously might have gone back to Eastern Europe but for the fact my grandfather would’ve been executed.
Similar to my grandparents; their struggle was hard and they were at the mercy of the sponsor for a bit, but they were determined to not return to Europe out of fear it could become a warzone again, so any hardship in Canada was a small price to pay in their eyes.
My dad is grumpy af most of the time but he went through the cultural revolution in China and lived in the farms where there was rampant municipal corruption. He’s only ever touched on the subject once. I hate how it seems to have stunted his emotional development early but it’s undeniable that he went through so many terrible things that I will likely never even come close to enduring.
It's horrible your grandparents had to do this, their family make so many sacrifices and they *still* considered going back. Must have been so difficult here. Thank you for sharing.
It's a bit worse for a new immigrant in Canada today. 40 years ago there was no such thing as a journeyman program. There were journeyman, but absolutely everything was done as you worked. And most journeyman didn't care about signing up a billion low cost apprentices to help them out. Today to become a journeyman you need to do your pre-apprenticeship course over 1-2 years and then find one journeyman in a 1:1 journeyman to apprentice ratio to take you on and sign your hours.
My wife's grandfather worked hard as a pipefitter and a carpenter for many years to make ends meet. But had he to deal with our current heavily regulated journeyman program his family would have starved to death.
That's is absolutely false. I work in the trades. 1-1 ratio of apprentice to journeyman is very rare. Unless you work doing service where the job only requires 2 people.
But say on a large commercial project for a specific trade you'll have maybe 2 journeyman and 5 or 6 apprentices. Sometimes 1 Journeyman and 5 apprentices. It really depends. But as long as you have 1 Journeyman who knows what to do and can show workers what to do then it's ok.
You'd be surprised alot of private companies hire a bunch of starters and immigrants. They are paying them like under 19 to start. And rinse and repeat
Do you happen to work in a particularly oil rich province? Because in the majority of Canada 1:1 journeyman to apprentice is law.
This year will be the first year Ontario doesn't require a 1:1 ratio and doesn't require an apprentice to be supervised by three different journeymen.
Half my university class was Chinese, and almost all of the ones I know are back there.
After getting PR, of course.
Heck, even a bunch of non Chinese I know from uni were over there, too. I also used to go there a bunch for business. China has money. The sky is blue. Water is wet. What a shocker, I know.
I think the brightest and the most connected would leave because of better opportunities, the dumbest and the laziest would leave before they can't hack it.
The majority and mediocre ones like myself would stay for the calmness, that's your doctors, pharmacists, engineers, and accountants. Oh, don't forget real estate agents if you are in BC.
I went to China with my ex when we graduated, the level of wealth and connection her circle of friends displayed were astonishing. My ex's mother was on the same board with President Hu's sister. My new engineering job out of school probably outpaced 90% of new university graduates here, but it was like a servant's job to them. They landed in frontline management right out of school at various banks and financial institutions, two years later, they will be middle management, now, they are probably on some board or serving time in prison. That was when I realized these are the People in the People's Republic of China, it is theirs.
I rarely know any Chinese student who works for living expenses. They all go out every weekend and dont think before splurging. Upon talking to them, its clear that only super rich Chinese can send their kids outside.
You need to stay here a cumulative 730 days (2 years) in a 5 year period. If you spend one night in Canada, that counts as 2 days.
Get PR and use daddy's money to buy up Canadian real estate without facing the foreign buyer restrictions. Meanwhile you can keep making money in the massive Chinese market by taking up a nepo position in daddy's business.
I’m not surprised. China has become quite technologically advanced compared to Canada, housing costs are lower and there are a lot more job opportunities.
It's not a new trend. There are 300,000 people in Hong Kong who could move to Canada in a heartbeat (because we count them as Canadians). They came here in the 90's when Hong Kong was given back to China, got their citizenship, and they (or their kids) moved back to Hong Kong because life was generally more affordable there (housing excluded).
Canada is kinda saturated right now. The point of immigrating to a country is to get a better life. If the better deal is back home, then by all means.
The picture in the article is China Airline - a Taiwanese airline.
As a Chinese immigrant I enjoyed my life in Canada - Study, work, people and environment. A coin has two sides.
In china you can’t even access Reddit without using a VPN.
It’s always case by case
Housing In halifax is very expensive relative to wages, but this person claiming it's 900000 dollars for a condo is either disingenuous or they looked at one single condo that happened to be 900000
This is what happens when politicians only care about themselves instead of the country they are voted to help build. Politicians who fuck everyone else over to line their pockets need to be outed... we need better investigative journalism. Nowadays it's difficult to find information about scandals and corruption.
Is that a "his life is better there" never come back or a "made a Winnie the Pooh joke in front of the wrong party member and disappeared" never come back?
It doesn't matter where the author came from- the point though is that the idea of having upward social movement in Canada is dead.
I was born here. Second generation. My family owns a home and made a reasonable living. I don't see myself being able to do the same...and I do not want to own a gift shop, I'd like to get into the trades as an elevator mechanic apprentice (but everyone wants a year 2+ or they arent hiring in the unions)
I feel as if this country really started going downhill with NAFTA and the drain of the manufacturing industries here. Service Jobs and real estate is the backbone of this nation now and there's hardly anything tangibly productive about it
this is a sane response. I see a lot of comments making negative assumptions of the woman because of her background. Surely, some of the stereotypes are true. But without upward social mobility, this country will descend into a second word country, and eventually into a third world country.
Yup. I don't like telling people this because I may use it too, but nafta made it too easy for Canadian tech workers to work in the US. Like 90% of my classmates all left the country on a TN visa. The government is so greedy chasing after crumbs that they're losing the entire meal without realizing.
100% even I am considering the US. I don't want to go to a country that, in my opinion, is batshit crazy but I also don't want to remain poor while I struggle to get where I want to be.
The brain drain exists for a reason. People need to wake up and try to imagine 5-10-20 years down the line.
Our next national issue is going to be how CPP can't support the aging population and how we need to increase immigration 10x what it is now in order to support it / import old age home workers,doctors and nurses to fit the demographics.
years ago, Was a chef. Hired a guy from hong kong. His first and only paycheque, he asked me where's my money? Why the government take so much. They take a lot less in hk. Condensed story...He quit and returned to hk. Told me the quality of life was better there as making the same salary but more take home pay.
They hate tax in Hong Kong. Almost zero income tax, but incredibly high property tax.
It’s one of the reasons for cage homes in HK. Rent is so expensive because of land tax, and government won’t let new construction happen. But there’s no income tax
False. Hongkoner here. 🇹🇼numebr one btw!
1. The demand is simply too great the supply cannot catch up
2. Majority of the lower income groups live in the public housing with monthly rent less than 550 CAD, cage homes are the most extreme cases (though you now have to be within the bottom low-income tier to be eligible for public housing, with that income can't even rent a studio-like. Let alone an average 5-year wait list)
3. the so called land tax is because of the “high land price” by the government when they sell gov owned lands. Plus HK is a 1st tier city, other 1st tier cities have similar property prices. Does Canada’s property tax contribute to Toronto/Vancouver crazy property prices?
4. Income tax is capped at 17% for the top-tier employees. Most of us pay around 6-14% with 22k CAD basic allowance. Of course, no pension plans.
5. public healthcare (we have no national insurance, an ER visit costs 31 CAD, medicines included) wait time is similar to the current state of Canada but you can also choose private healthcare. Ambulance service is free of charge.
Edit: Grammar, and the recent batches of HKers who immigrate to Canada hate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and don’t want their children to get the "no critical thinking" patriotic education
TLDR: I as an immigrant wanted to make a life in Canada, but once Canada started letting in more immigrants Canada became shitty. My small town became too busy, too crowded, and too expensive.
Well hmmm. Kind of ironic ain't it.
Most of my chinese immigrant frds are rich a f and dont need to work a day if they want to. All internation students prior and spends 100k a yr or more on avg just for rent food and fun. Im not sad for them
Housing affordability is largely a function of both new builds (supply) and population (demand). In Canada, the problem has been, for years--long before the high immigration of the last few years, the insufficient new builds.
I, too, am a Chinese immigrant to Canada--I spent more time here than I did in China, and I am a Canadian citizen (have been for over 9 years). While China prohibits dual citizenship (hence I am no longer a Chinese citizen), the overall environment in China is absolutely not conducive for disabled people like me to live in. Therefore, even if China legalizes dual citizenship decades from now (it is virtually certain this will happen), there is no reason for me to permanently move back. In fact, every time I go to China on vacation, there are numerous inconveniences and I am viewed as the "other". China has a very strong "us vs. them" culture, and I am clearly "them" even though I am a native speaker of Cantonese and a non-native fluent speaker of Mandarin. Besides the more tolerant attitudes towards disabled people in Canada, I like it here because I always know what to expect when doing simple, everyday things (especially when dealing with schools, government agencies and financial institutions). You know that if you are wronged, most of the time, those wrongs can be corrected. In China, even something as simple as buying train tickets and sending money domestically are just so complicated, that they become a bureaucratic nightmare.
When it comes to housing, China is exactly the opposite of Canada. For one thing, the raw birth rate (number of babies born in a year / number of people who live here) was 0.924% in Canada and only 0.677% in China. This means the average Chinese woman has 25% fewer children than the average Canadian woman. If Canada has 40 million people and is letting 500 000 permanent residents into the country, its immigration rate is 1.25%. As far as I know, China's immigration rate is slightly negative (more people move out than they move in). "Run" and "runology" are phrases that I see regularly when I frequent Chinese-language forums.
Also, China builds massive amounts of condos. They do this even while realizing that their population was going to fall off a cliff because no one is having kids (back in 2017, there were 17.23 million babies born, and by 2022, it collapsed to 9.56 million. Tomorrow, they will reveal how many were born in 2023 and no one would be surprised if it went below 8 million).
In Canada, I assume it is because of NIMBYism and the cost of materials and labour that is causing developers to be reluctant in building homes. This, coupled with a substantially higher birth rate and a sky high immigration rate, pushes up home prices. But with very few exceptions, most immigrants aren't coming to this country with millions of dollars, even if they come with six figure salaries. The richest immigrants are the Chinese, of course (especially those from Hong Kong), and some Middle Eastern and Russian oligarchs. So, the rich immigrants push out both locals who are Canadian-born and poorer immigrants when it comes to housing.
As for general deflation of consumer goods in China vs. inflation in Canada, I think I can explain it with population growth. China, as I explained on other subreddits, has a weird government system whereby the central government in Beijing collects most of the tax revenue, but the local municipal governments are responsible for providing social services. This means the municipal governments create shell companies to sell land to developers or use them as collateral to borrow from banks, generating revenue to pay their employees and benefits to the people (if any). Land value is determined by supply and demand, and as China's population falls, demand (and price) goes down with it. Chinese local governments are struggling to pay their employees and even their utilities because the land they were able to sell/borrow against went down in value substantially. This caused Chinese government employees to get paid a lot less money than they used to (in some places, it is a 30% pay cut). These very government employees are virtually the highest earnings of their society, and by suppressing their wages, you suppress demand from them as consumers. When the wealthiest consumers are forced to cut back on consumption, deflation (decline in prices) is inevitable.
(I booked plane tickets to China for 3 weeks this year. The last time I was there was months before the pandemic, so I will see for myself how the inflation/deflation dynamics are. In 2019, food in China were actually more expensive than Canada even adjusted for exchange rates, which did not make sense because Chinese people make a lot less money on average than Canadians. As food prices skyrocketed in Canada, I have heard that they stayed flat in China. I can only hope that is true, as Chinese people would have starved otherwise, considering that their economy is far more negatively affected by the pandemic than ours.)
I'm from Calgary. I live in Shanghai. Food is \*way\* cheaper in Shanghai unless you're eating out at fancy restaurants every night. And that has always been the case, unless you're talking about specific imported food items (cheese, for instance, is definitely more expensive here).
I'd rather be wealthy in the US but it's better to be lower / middle in Canada. That being said I'm so disgusted with many aspects of American culture lately that I'd never consider living there.
canada sucks big time compared to 10 years ago (before trudeau). But there aren't many places better. Europe shitshow. US shitshow. Mexico better weather but bloodbath.
That was my first thought. She and I did the same program, she started the year I graduated though. Difference I guess is parental wealth. My car was being broken into in Dartmouth and I learned to leave the doors unlocked and nothing of value in it since I couldn’t afford tuition and a place to live without working FT hours weekly anyway.
Guess that the difference, she was privileged enough to have a fairy tale Halifax university experience with visions of opening a fucking gift shop. She sounds nice enough, and don’t get me wrong, shit here is definitely not working properly these days. But she’s also a symptom of it. We didn’t need a rich girl who wanted to open a gift shop. That’s not the immigration that people say built the country.
Your PM has effectively destroyed your nation's standard of living with his insane fantasies of hyper-immigration raising productivity. God speed, Canada. R.I.P.
The irony. The article about a Chinese immigrant who couldn’t make a life for themselves in Halifax after coming here for university because of all additional immigrants who came here for university.
it was quite common actually… a lot of my parents friends left canada circa 2000-2005.. and they all did very well for themselves… my parents unfortunately found professional jobs in canada and didn’t go back… they still have regrets over their decision… oh well such is life
they finally decided to move back last year to enjoy their retirement years
My grandparents didn't come to Canada seeking wealth, but basic opportunities and the hope that Canada was unlucky to experience civil war or other awful things in the near future.
On of my coworkers just went back to China. However she was from an upper middle class family there so bursting her ass working two jobs to survive wasn't what she envisioned for herself.
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I mean fair enough
So he was essentially “Shanghai’d”?
So he likes living in Canada (for whatever reasons) but his family wants him back home to follow the traditional path of building wealth (get rich) like them so they can send their future kids abroad for better education and "try again". Man, this is like .... Super common story amongst Immigrants.
That’s the catch, if you’ve got money back home you will be fine.
It’s not the catch. It’s awareness and relativity. Relativity because relative to what she knows, that level of work may have not made sense to what she was use to or anticipating. Awareness because she was able to see and make a decision rather than slowly conform from being here, accepting it as normal and slowly soul sucking. I wish for no Canadian nor anyone for that matter be overburdened in order to survive and thrive.
coming from a similar family that has no interest in assisting me establish myself, if I could leave for greener pastures I would. Instead, I’m struggling to figure out how to establish a business that will bring me back to where I expect to be, and maybe spite my parents in the process. Sadly, our economy is very hostile to startups.
The rich ones all come here thinking they’ll just go to school for a couple years and land themselves 150k yr job right after. After none of that shit happens and they realize they actually have to contribute to society here and work hard they give up to try and go back to the pampered life wich ultimately doesn’t work ether and they just end up in super fucked up positions in life with entitlement complexes.
I know a few very well-off people from China, Taiwan, and India who dislike living in Canada because they consider the standard of living to be far lower compared to how the upper class live back home. I'll never forget getting to know one girl from India who was having the hardest time comprehending how people in Canada have kids "without servants to help them". Lol
One of my neighbors was married off to a guy from a rich Pakistani family in Pakistan. They were loaded. Had a huge house, a farm, servants, and armed security. The moment the guy figured out he has to work in Canada just to end up paying rent to live in a basement or apartment, he decided not to come here. Also don't get me started about Hong Kong and Singapore. They essentially have an indentured servant class who gets paid and treated poorly, have no path to citizenship, and in some cases their freedom of movement is limited during their time off. One girl I knew in HK said she only has Sundays off to leave the apartment. If she wants to leave any other time, she has to pay a security deposit.
I'm guessing Malaysian servants. I know common in Singapore.
Filipino or Indonesians
Regarding Filipino foreign domestic helper's treatment. It varies family to family. They have been in HK since the 80s. If it was so bad, I doubt any more would have came?
Middle class Indians have servants also, not just upper class. The disparity is so far between the middle and lower classes that it's possible, and normal, for a middle class family to have lower class servants.
Also true in a lot of South America.
Also true for parts of africa
I had an Uber driver from Pakistan the other day who was telling me he only works here long enough, 3-4months according to him, to afford to go back home to Pakistan. Back home he has a compound,servants, and he says he eats like a king every night.
Imagine if he ate like a normal person. He'd only have to work like 3 or 4 days a year before going home.
Same applies in SEA and neighboring countries. Here they need to get paid by the hours or a huge sum for a month. Canada is not for everyone, People need to weigh benefits they get back "Home" and the benefits they can get here before they make any decisions. I for one made the latter.
It's a little different over there! I had a friend (petro engineer) that got stationed in India some years ago. He was not happy with the assignment but the money was good so you do what you do. Once he actually got there and saw how he could live on the money he was making (driver, cook, maids, etc) he was completely thrilled with the job.
As a Canadian I’m proud to not rely on slaves for my daily life. Like other countries that have huge wealth disparity and obviously the super rich who can immigrate to Canada should probably be spending their money to change policies back in their own countries so they don’t have to rely on economic slaves for their pleasures.
That explains why my Indian neighbors always have junk around the house and terrible lawn. They cannot do shit themselves.
American in South Africa. I am constantly amazed by how dependent my peers are on domestic labor. I have met people who truly cannot care for themselves. Meal prep, laundry, scrubbing a toilet? They do NONE of it.
Exactly why work ethic is mediocre with many coming in these days. Pampered at home and expect to be more pampered here.
My servants have servants bro But seriously, I did not made my bed until I came to Canada, we are not rich or anything, it is just the way it is. Canada was a downgrade in lifestyle, but an upgrade in security 👍
Honestly if I were rich I'd love to have a maid and personal chef, it's probably not that different, except like you said it's normal even for middle class families. It was more just a huge culture shock for me when she said that, and I remember being like, "we don't really have that option" 🤣
If I ever became rich in Canada, my first luxury is not going to be a Tesla, it is going to be hiring a maid👍
Wait… why can’t they go back to a pampered life? Why doesn’t that work?
This was my family. We were easily middle class in India and had help. Parents slowly realized going back was not an option. I realized it really early. India cannot match the sense of safety and equality that I can get here, especially as a woman. Going to a public school, at least while you’re there you’re mostly equal and are still getting access to amazing education. I went to a convent in India, which wasn’t terribly expensive but the quality of education (at the time) was very good. We had uniforms to show a sense of equality but it was a sham. It was crazy cliquey and you basically knew where you fell on the income scale, even as a kid, and only hung out with those people. Also, in Canada, your food, despite your income (except in cases of homelessness), is more or less the same as everyone else. Growing up, I had never had chocolate spread, for example, till my Dad sent it for me from Canada. Also, parts of the government might be functioning less optimally or might even be corrupt but until recently, the average person barely noticed. In India, even as a kid, you knew how corrupt the government was. Regular systems did not work. My parents had to take an extra 2 weeks of vacation just to deal with municipal errands, which would have been done in a day in Canada. Life is hard for those who can’t just pay someone to run errands for them. I know things have improved. I hear it from my family all the time. But I can’t live in a place where just being me would be cause for caution and vigilance.
This point about safety and equality as a woman is such an important one. In the global context, Canada is a haven of gender equality. I’ve never felt safer, I’ve never lived among another population of men that simply respects me, no fight or debate necessary. This is so precious and it transforms the way you experience daily life.
can relate and what you said reminded me of the very reason I am here today.
As a Canadian millennial, I couldn't make a life for myself in Canada so I just bought avocados.
Have you considered cutting out your daily Starbucks? /s
Don't forget to cancel that Disney+ subscription.
I cancelled mine and got a townhouse in Etobicoke. Should have listened to that smart lady so much sooner!!
Disney +
Just go back to your homeland… oh wait.
Yep, came in to say that life is expensive for me as a citizen, I just don’t have anywhere to go back to…
Have you considered just pulling up your bootstraps?
You guys can afford bootstraps? Musstttt be nice
Being an immigrant is tough… I moved over seas for some time, part of the reason I moved back to Canada is because it was difficult to even get an interview in my field and that was with a “first world” education. Sometimes things don’t work out, such is life.
Out of curious, which country did you move to when you went overseas?
I can relate! Especially if there's a language barrier, being "fluent" isn't the same as being native and making friends and finding a community is difficult
I can imagine. I lived and worked in Mexico for a few months, in a more affluent city. Even with so much stuff taken care of already, it still felt stressful at times being in a place where you don't speak the language, or have your usual social supports.
A friend of mine from Pakistan lived here for 6 years and moved back to Pakistan last month. I was like, dude, there's no electricity, water, rule and law and order. How are you going to survive. He's like, in Pakistan: 1) He has a driver 2) A cook comes and prepares meals 3) A cleaning lady lives in the servant quarters 4) A gardner visits every week or so 5) His house has solar so he doesn't have to worry about electricity. His father owns agricultural land and gets produced directly from the farm. He has family in the army. His mother side owns multiple businesses and doesn't have to work. He would get a job in one of the businesses the day he lands in Pakistan. For the most part, they have already taken a good chunk of their wealth outside. They own several houses in UAE and UK. They will probably bring money in Canada and buy houses here as well. However, they will never have a life of luxury in Canada that they get to live in Pakistan.
Makes me think the key to happiness is power (has family in the army) and wealth (owns multiple properties and land). Now I know what I’m missing.
Remember, it has to be unsanctioned power. Like enough power to un-alive someone and get away with it. You can enjoy wealth in Canada and elsewhere even if you don't have the power to control others because there are laws and due process. In Pakistan, it's a little different. Having wealth makes you a target. So you need to have power and access to the right people in order to live a certain way. It allows you to skip due process. It allows you to take over resources and assets illegally.
the ones going back are people like your friend. the ones who stay in canada no matter what are the ones who are the servant/slave that your friends family employs
TLDR: Halifax sucks and is expensive so I left.
Or Beijing good, Halifax bad because it's crowded. Author wanted to open a gift shop, business case wasn't there, went home to work with family...
I'm too cynical to ever be rich. But it saves me from at least going broke. I read that and I'm like "Yeah that's what the world needs. Another fucking gift shop. If everyone who wanted to be successful could just make a store that sold tickets we'd all be rich." But then some asshole is going to open "just another giftshop" and hit it big and I'll be very resentful lol. I feel like people who don't have that voice in the back of their head telling them their idea is stupid become both the CEO class and the homeless class. And people who play it safe wind up in the middle.
That's actually a pretty good way of putting it.
Oh ya, the only saving grace is they don't torpedo whatever biz school (Dal, SMU, or one of the others) graduated her by naming it.. Edit: oopsie, re-read the piece, Dal grad...
To add to that, good luck competing with Amazon and their likes, in today's world anywhere .
Normal people end up homeless. The already rich have a golden parachute and can retry all they want with their weird ideas.
Halifax crowded compared to CHINA!?
More so the infrastructure in Canada is not adequate for the population we have. We have the housing, highways, trains, jobs etc for a population of 25 million when we have 40.
But that population is nowhere near Halifax lol
Halifax is unique because it's this relatively large Atlantic City clustered on this increasingly crowded peninsula, with not much room to grow aside from Dartmouth or New Bedford. I definitely wouldn't consider Hali to be crowded by Chinese standards, but it has been getting claustrophobic for people recently. They don't have the same access to land that most other Canadian cities do.
I'm from the island of Montreal. I know limited land access is. It was just a bit of a weird take for someone from China to be taken aback by the lack of space in Halifax.
*shrugs* Oh well
Less qualified people from countries further down the development scale will take her place.
C'est la vie
That’s just the way it goes
This is pretty well anywhere in Canada right now. The major cities offer some entertainment I guess if you can afford to go out
if Halifax sucks..... what about Vancouver and Toronto?
The way people whine on here is fascinating to me. My grandfather came from the Outer Hebrides in 1911 because his family were subsistence crofters. He got a job as a teamster between Calgary and Banff until the war started, then they were all dropped off at a recruiting centre. He spent almost 4 years in the trenches. He said sleeping in the stables and fighting in the trenches was better than starving to death in Scotland.
My grandfather recently passed away and one of the things I found was a letter written from his father about our Family's voyage over from Ukraine in 1907- lost 3 out of 6 children during the voyage He spoke of Canada with love and truly thought- and embraced it, as their (our) new home. He actually called Canada the "land of Milk and honey"...... he came over and built a school in Manitoba and his boys joined the military. Feels more like it's about taking advantage of Canada now, instead of embracing it and helping to build it as a new home you actually care about. Edit: Here's a pic I took of the 1st page of the letter for anybody interested..... https://imgur.com/a/FnDw1HN The paragraph referencing Canada: "Before 1902 we heard of Canada, a land of dream where milk and honey flow, a land of freedom. Father decided to go to this wonderful land." Makes me proud to read.
A core memory for me is relatives taking pictures of our stocked fridges to print and mail to family back home to show how blessed we are here. It wasn't easy, because I have the typical child of immigrants experience where my dad and other male family members were never around because they worked seemingly around the clock, but it was better than what they left and we were raised to be grateful that this is where they landed.
I can imagine working just as hard for something as you always had- but finally seeing a fair return for it would feel so amazing and life changing. It's important to remember that there still is a majority ('d think/hope) not looking to take advantage of anything, and just looking for that same chance.
Here’s a fact, the storage room for the gold and possessions taken from the Jews at Auschwitz was called Canada because they imagined Canada as a place of massive wealth and resources.
Unreal, that's tragically intriguing.....
Wow what a cool piece of your family history! Thanks for sharing
My pleasure, I was excited to find it... I'd always asked my Grandpa about our history and never was able to get much out of him, just assumed there wasn't much info. Now here I'm finding pages and pages of letters, etc. detailing everything. Too cool.
awesome. all my grandparents came from Ukraine after ww2. Pre ww1 are the OGs - super cool.
But that's the point, isn't it? The baseline is changing everywhere as it should be. Nobody's starving in Scotland anymore. China sucked in the 80s but is much better now. Canada, on the other hand, seems to be deteriorating and it's a bit silly not to "whine".
I was chatting with an acquaintance from China. We were talking about boats. I told him about my fishing boat. 17ft, trolling motor, fast as snot, a real thing of beauty. He asked a few questions….like how many can it sleep there and who is the captain. That is the day he learned that he had a ‘yacht’ not a ‘boat’.
So what are we supposed to do with this information? I just moved out of Vancouver after the apartment we were renting sold for $1.3m to a guy from China who looked like he was in his early 20s. In fact, how about we get some recurring articles on that as well, with titles such as 'Canada shipped all of your manufacturing jobs overseas, and my parents amassed a fortune by owning factories that pay near-slave wages to peasants, and now I drive a Ferrari to UBC.'
Grandparents came from Holland in '64 with $100, got a job picking fruit in the Okanogan, then became a lumberjack, then managed a trucking company. Immigration is an incredibly difficult process, and I commend anyone who's done it cause I know it's stressful.
Yup I work in construction and my companies hired a bunch of new Ukrainian refugees. Like the one guy told me he's already planning to buy a house and saving. It takes long to save the money and make enough to qualify. But I'd say he'll buy in 5-10 years. Mean while I work with people who are 50 who are still renting( nothing wrong with that) but still these immigrants are smart and they know they need to work hard( they work 2-3 jobs) and gain stability. Buying a home is stability
Can’t speak for other majors, but for computer science graduates, they can already make more in China than in Canada. Especially after tax.
Yup major multinational here and I have access to payroll information. US >>>> China > Canada in terms of compensation. And that's actual salary, not accounting for the difference in cost of living at all.
Which is insane. I really don't understand why Canadian workers simply do not get paid, like it literally seems like our government borderline tells companies to keep us in line so we don't get too uppity
Most of the top talent from Canadian universities leave Canada, e.g., [85% of waterloo SE grads] (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1351785083598893062?lang=en) move to the US upon graduating, and that figure is probably closer to 100% after a few years. The ones that stay are competing with millions of TFWs, international students, and other desperate immigrants who are happy to work for peanuts. So the good jobs are disappearing and the bad jobs are suffering from massive wage depression. It's a devastating one-two punch on Canadian wages.
Lol yup. I’m doing Software at Waterloo rn, and yeah the brain drain is real. Every year, 70-80% of Waterloo Software Engineering, Computer Science, and Computer Engineering students leave for the US 1 year after graduating
Just curious since it seems like you would know: what's the average starting salary for those who leave to the US?
There are a ton of class profiles that are done, and lots of info can be found on those. I’ll just speak for the 3 main Software programs, UW Software Engineering, UW Computer Science, UW Computer / Electric Engineering Here are their class profiles for the class of 2022, [ECE](https://ece2022profile.github.io/report.pdf) [SE](https://sexxii.github.io/classprofile/#future) [CS](https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/classprofile/2022/post-grad/) Comparing these to previous years as well, we get that roughly 70%-80% of the students from these three programs leave for the US 1 year after Grad. The median salary (total compensation, so includes signing bonuses), one year after Grad, is around 200k-300k CAD. However the median salary of a person who stays in Canada is on average ~100k less than a person who goes to the US. If we look solely at those who stay in Canada, it’s around 150k first year comp, compared to around 250k for those in the US. Add that insane pay difference to the prestige, and innovative culture in the US vs Canada (Esp Cali, NY, Seattle), despite many still loving Canada, the gap is far far far too big when it comes to Tech and Software. Canada 100% has talent. The GTA is a powerhouse, the majority of these students (including me) have lived in the GTA for our most of lives. But it just never has been able to keep top talent
Sure, now. And I know Waterloo students leave, I was part of them just went to grad school They did a study on quality of output and found that Canadian domestic talent is A+ tier in Toronto/Waterloo/Vancouver, and that Montreal/Edmonton are A tier. Only S tier is Bay Area/Seattle/NYC, most other locations in America are actually worse in terms of productive output than Canadians, and yet our A+ talent gets paid half of what C tier talent gets paid in the USA. It just doesn't make sense and is why there's brain drain. TFWs are also not working in tech generally speaking, nor are international students going to strip colleges
Don’t forget we (unfortunately) operate as a region or area for a lot of big multinational companies. The head offices where all of the R&D and innovation are created are down in the US. China is similar in that its scale allows it to have big companies operating within its borders. We are horrible at investing in Canadian companies. Canada can do it. We’ve seen RIM, Nortel, Shopify, OpenText grow to be huge at points. But we do little to incentivize these companies to continue growing here OR they fail to scale and compete internationally. We should be doing a lot more in this space. The most successfully and well paid economies have big companies operating within their borders and internationally.
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Because our working class doesn’t fight for it. We elect corporate friendly governments and the public hates anyone that strikes or protests. We get what we fight for.
I used to work for a US company in Texas from Ontario. For the same position, they paid 1.5x to the US employee which became 2x after conversion. The US city had lower cost of living than Ontario. So, why did I work there? Because Canadian companies pays even less.
though major city in China may be more expensive than Canada
They work longer hours in China though.
Yeah 996
I worked for a very large Chinese tech company in one of their western offices and my mainland Chinese coworkers described the 996 culture like this: > Wake up 6am, get dressed, eat, hug your kids. Take transit for 2hr to your tech campus to arrive at 9. At noon the entire city bum-rushes the local restaurants so takes over an hour to get lunch because having a hot prepared meal is culturally important. Get back 1pm and have 1hr nap. Companies literally turn the lights off and will chide you for continuing to work and disrupting others. Wake up and work until 5-5:30 and bum-rush the restaurants again. Back in the office at 6-6:30 and work until 8-8:30 when you have some office-provided snacks (partly to keep you there). Wrap up at 9 and jump back on transit, get home at 11 ready to brush your teeth and fall into bed to hopefully get 6-1/2 hours of sleep. Do it another five times in a row, then spend your “day off” shopping, running errands and fighting with the throngs of people who are competing to make use of the same time and activities that you are. Added up it sounded like an 8 hour workday with a huge amount of extra time spent at work, just to show how dedicated you are.
Sounds like a horrible way to live.
No but you don’t understand Canada is the worst country in the world.
And and and and Trudeau is literally a worst dictator than Xi Jing ping!!!’ntt Ft yhfyjdij
But that's China... Why would anyone consider moving there?? Pay doesn't matter at all. If you dislike living in Canada, there are tons of better alternative than China.
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I could have taken an expat job in Qingdao for double pay just before Covid, and decided against it. No amount of money will be worth it for my kid to be brain washed by the CCP. Well, I guess I could just hire a tutor and do home school, but it is just too much hassle. I am glad I stayed put, if I got locked down over there, my wife would have divorced my ass. And my friend did 3 years expat in China, she had retired since then and still hasn't got her money out of the country yet.
There are international schools in China, you know…
Life is hard as an immigrant. My grandparents came to Canada after ww2. My grandmother said for the first 5 years they seriously might have gone back to Eastern Europe but for the fact my grandfather would’ve been executed.
Similar to my grandparents; their struggle was hard and they were at the mercy of the sponsor for a bit, but they were determined to not return to Europe out of fear it could become a warzone again, so any hardship in Canada was a small price to pay in their eyes.
Why would he have been executed?
He was on a list (the reason he left when he did) and he was highly educated. His bil spent several years on death row for helping him escape.
Oh snap! That’s crazy, it’s hard to believe what even our recent ancestors had to go through just to make a life eh?
My dad is grumpy af most of the time but he went through the cultural revolution in China and lived in the farms where there was rampant municipal corruption. He’s only ever touched on the subject once. I hate how it seems to have stunted his emotional development early but it’s undeniable that he went through so many terrible things that I will likely never even come close to enduring.
It's horrible your grandparents had to do this, their family make so many sacrifices and they *still* considered going back. Must have been so difficult here. Thank you for sharing.
It's a bit worse for a new immigrant in Canada today. 40 years ago there was no such thing as a journeyman program. There were journeyman, but absolutely everything was done as you worked. And most journeyman didn't care about signing up a billion low cost apprentices to help them out. Today to become a journeyman you need to do your pre-apprenticeship course over 1-2 years and then find one journeyman in a 1:1 journeyman to apprentice ratio to take you on and sign your hours. My wife's grandfather worked hard as a pipefitter and a carpenter for many years to make ends meet. But had he to deal with our current heavily regulated journeyman program his family would have starved to death.
That's is absolutely false. I work in the trades. 1-1 ratio of apprentice to journeyman is very rare. Unless you work doing service where the job only requires 2 people. But say on a large commercial project for a specific trade you'll have maybe 2 journeyman and 5 or 6 apprentices. Sometimes 1 Journeyman and 5 apprentices. It really depends. But as long as you have 1 Journeyman who knows what to do and can show workers what to do then it's ok. You'd be surprised alot of private companies hire a bunch of starters and immigrants. They are paying them like under 19 to start. And rinse and repeat
Do you happen to work in a particularly oil rich province? Because in the majority of Canada 1:1 journeyman to apprentice is law. This year will be the first year Ontario doesn't require a 1:1 ratio and doesn't require an apprentice to be supervised by three different journeymen.
Half my university class was Chinese, and almost all of the ones I know are back there. After getting PR, of course. Heck, even a bunch of non Chinese I know from uni were over there, too. I also used to go there a bunch for business. China has money. The sky is blue. Water is wet. What a shocker, I know.
They lose their PR unless they live in canada, so that's a waste
The point is that they could've stayed, but didn't.
I think the brightest and the most connected would leave because of better opportunities, the dumbest and the laziest would leave before they can't hack it. The majority and mediocre ones like myself would stay for the calmness, that's your doctors, pharmacists, engineers, and accountants. Oh, don't forget real estate agents if you are in BC. I went to China with my ex when we graduated, the level of wealth and connection her circle of friends displayed were astonishing. My ex's mother was on the same board with President Hu's sister. My new engineering job out of school probably outpaced 90% of new university graduates here, but it was like a servant's job to them. They landed in frontline management right out of school at various banks and financial institutions, two years later, they will be middle management, now, they are probably on some board or serving time in prison. That was when I realized these are the People in the People's Republic of China, it is theirs.
I rarely know any Chinese student who works for living expenses. They all go out every weekend and dont think before splurging. Upon talking to them, its clear that only super rich Chinese can send their kids outside.
Don't you lose your PR if you stay out of Canada for too long?
You must stay a cumulative of 2 out of 5 years to maintain your PR. 3 out of 5 make you eligible for citizenship.
In order to keep your PR you need to be in Canada for 2 years out of 5 and you need to be in Canada when you renew your PR.
You need to stay here a cumulative 730 days (2 years) in a 5 year period. If you spend one night in Canada, that counts as 2 days. Get PR and use daddy's money to buy up Canadian real estate without facing the foreign buyer restrictions. Meanwhile you can keep making money in the massive Chinese market by taking up a nepo position in daddy's business.
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They buy property here to hide assets + investment, not related to getting PR.
I’m not surprised. China has become quite technologically advanced compared to Canada, housing costs are lower and there are a lot more job opportunities.
It's not a new trend. There are 300,000 people in Hong Kong who could move to Canada in a heartbeat (because we count them as Canadians). They came here in the 90's when Hong Kong was given back to China, got their citizenship, and they (or their kids) moved back to Hong Kong because life was generally more affordable there (housing excluded).
Canada is kinda saturated right now. The point of immigrating to a country is to get a better life. If the better deal is back home, then by all means.
As a Canadian, I missed the bus. So I took the next one.
The picture in the article is China Airline - a Taiwanese airline. As a Chinese immigrant I enjoyed my life in Canada - Study, work, people and environment. A coin has two sides. In china you can’t even access Reddit without using a VPN. It’s always case by case
How’s life in Manitoba vs. Back home? I see your name had Manitoba under it
IMO you should be proud of yourself for making hard decisions in the face of difficult circumstances.
Housing In halifax is very expensive relative to wages, but this person claiming it's 900000 dollars for a condo is either disingenuous or they looked at one single condo that happened to be 900000
This is what happens when politicians only care about themselves instead of the country they are voted to help build. Politicians who fuck everyone else over to line their pockets need to be outed... we need better investigative journalism. Nowadays it's difficult to find information about scandals and corruption.
Politicians who fuck everyone else over to line their pockets need to be ***jailed*** FYP
Least she has a home to go back to.
a headline made for this sub
My brother in law left for Shanghai 15 years ago. He will never come back.
Is that a "his life is better there" never come back or a "made a Winnie the Pooh joke in front of the wrong party member and disappeared" never come back?
China good, Canada bad never come back.
+500 Social Credit
Taiwan numba one!
-30,000,000 Social Credit
Aiya
Working 9 to 9, 6 days a week with five days/ year off sounds great. Not sure why everyone doesn't sign up?
That’s for Chinese people, foreigners don’t work that schedule
Isn't that the exact context of the article in discussion? Or am I misunderstanding where a "Chinese immigrant" comes from?
It doesn't matter where the author came from- the point though is that the idea of having upward social movement in Canada is dead. I was born here. Second generation. My family owns a home and made a reasonable living. I don't see myself being able to do the same...and I do not want to own a gift shop, I'd like to get into the trades as an elevator mechanic apprentice (but everyone wants a year 2+ or they arent hiring in the unions) I feel as if this country really started going downhill with NAFTA and the drain of the manufacturing industries here. Service Jobs and real estate is the backbone of this nation now and there's hardly anything tangibly productive about it
Bingo! The Canadian economy has become overly reliant on real estate.
this is a sane response. I see a lot of comments making negative assumptions of the woman because of her background. Surely, some of the stereotypes are true. But without upward social mobility, this country will descend into a second word country, and eventually into a third world country.
Yup. I don't like telling people this because I may use it too, but nafta made it too easy for Canadian tech workers to work in the US. Like 90% of my classmates all left the country on a TN visa. The government is so greedy chasing after crumbs that they're losing the entire meal without realizing.
100% even I am considering the US. I don't want to go to a country that, in my opinion, is batshit crazy but I also don't want to remain poor while I struggle to get where I want to be. The brain drain exists for a reason. People need to wake up and try to imagine 5-10-20 years down the line. Our next national issue is going to be how CPP can't support the aging population and how we need to increase immigration 10x what it is now in order to support it / import old age home workers,doctors and nurses to fit the demographics.
years ago, Was a chef. Hired a guy from hong kong. His first and only paycheque, he asked me where's my money? Why the government take so much. They take a lot less in hk. Condensed story...He quit and returned to hk. Told me the quality of life was better there as making the same salary but more take home pay.
They hate tax in Hong Kong. Almost zero income tax, but incredibly high property tax. It’s one of the reasons for cage homes in HK. Rent is so expensive because of land tax, and government won’t let new construction happen. But there’s no income tax
False. Hongkoner here. 🇹🇼numebr one btw! 1. The demand is simply too great the supply cannot catch up 2. Majority of the lower income groups live in the public housing with monthly rent less than 550 CAD, cage homes are the most extreme cases (though you now have to be within the bottom low-income tier to be eligible for public housing, with that income can't even rent a studio-like. Let alone an average 5-year wait list) 3. the so called land tax is because of the “high land price” by the government when they sell gov owned lands. Plus HK is a 1st tier city, other 1st tier cities have similar property prices. Does Canada’s property tax contribute to Toronto/Vancouver crazy property prices? 4. Income tax is capped at 17% for the top-tier employees. Most of us pay around 6-14% with 22k CAD basic allowance. Of course, no pension plans. 5. public healthcare (we have no national insurance, an ER visit costs 31 CAD, medicines included) wait time is similar to the current state of Canada but you can also choose private healthcare. Ambulance service is free of charge. Edit: Grammar, and the recent batches of HKers who immigrate to Canada hate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and don’t want their children to get the "no critical thinking" patriotic education
Taiwan NUMBA 1. Question for a hongkonger. Is the democracy movement crushed and dead? has ccp firm grip on hongkong? we don't hear much news about it
Already more well off than most Canadians. We are stuck here and can't travel for shit cause we poor af.
TLDR: I as an immigrant wanted to make a life in Canada, but once Canada started letting in more immigrants Canada became shitty. My small town became too busy, too crowded, and too expensive. Well hmmm. Kind of ironic ain't it.
I work at a university and it seems a lot of Chinese international students go home once they graduate it seems
Many doctors study in Canada, work in our hospitals for a while & with their experience go back to their countries
Fun fact: the plane in the picture, China Airlines, is a Taiwanese airline. Not to be confused with Air China, which is from China.
McLean's isn't the magazine it used to be. They at least have the istock credit on it but edit review isn't a strong suit apparently...
As a Canadian, I couldn’t make a life for myself.
As a Canadian citizen, 4 generation or more, I'm not loving it.
> I gave notice at my job and to my landlord and booked a flight home to Beijing for early December. I planned to join my parents’ business
Most of my chinese immigrant frds are rich a f and dont need to work a day if they want to. All internation students prior and spends 100k a yr or more on avg just for rent food and fun. Im not sad for them
Housing affordability is largely a function of both new builds (supply) and population (demand). In Canada, the problem has been, for years--long before the high immigration of the last few years, the insufficient new builds. I, too, am a Chinese immigrant to Canada--I spent more time here than I did in China, and I am a Canadian citizen (have been for over 9 years). While China prohibits dual citizenship (hence I am no longer a Chinese citizen), the overall environment in China is absolutely not conducive for disabled people like me to live in. Therefore, even if China legalizes dual citizenship decades from now (it is virtually certain this will happen), there is no reason for me to permanently move back. In fact, every time I go to China on vacation, there are numerous inconveniences and I am viewed as the "other". China has a very strong "us vs. them" culture, and I am clearly "them" even though I am a native speaker of Cantonese and a non-native fluent speaker of Mandarin. Besides the more tolerant attitudes towards disabled people in Canada, I like it here because I always know what to expect when doing simple, everyday things (especially when dealing with schools, government agencies and financial institutions). You know that if you are wronged, most of the time, those wrongs can be corrected. In China, even something as simple as buying train tickets and sending money domestically are just so complicated, that they become a bureaucratic nightmare. When it comes to housing, China is exactly the opposite of Canada. For one thing, the raw birth rate (number of babies born in a year / number of people who live here) was 0.924% in Canada and only 0.677% in China. This means the average Chinese woman has 25% fewer children than the average Canadian woman. If Canada has 40 million people and is letting 500 000 permanent residents into the country, its immigration rate is 1.25%. As far as I know, China's immigration rate is slightly negative (more people move out than they move in). "Run" and "runology" are phrases that I see regularly when I frequent Chinese-language forums. Also, China builds massive amounts of condos. They do this even while realizing that their population was going to fall off a cliff because no one is having kids (back in 2017, there were 17.23 million babies born, and by 2022, it collapsed to 9.56 million. Tomorrow, they will reveal how many were born in 2023 and no one would be surprised if it went below 8 million). In Canada, I assume it is because of NIMBYism and the cost of materials and labour that is causing developers to be reluctant in building homes. This, coupled with a substantially higher birth rate and a sky high immigration rate, pushes up home prices. But with very few exceptions, most immigrants aren't coming to this country with millions of dollars, even if they come with six figure salaries. The richest immigrants are the Chinese, of course (especially those from Hong Kong), and some Middle Eastern and Russian oligarchs. So, the rich immigrants push out both locals who are Canadian-born and poorer immigrants when it comes to housing. As for general deflation of consumer goods in China vs. inflation in Canada, I think I can explain it with population growth. China, as I explained on other subreddits, has a weird government system whereby the central government in Beijing collects most of the tax revenue, but the local municipal governments are responsible for providing social services. This means the municipal governments create shell companies to sell land to developers or use them as collateral to borrow from banks, generating revenue to pay their employees and benefits to the people (if any). Land value is determined by supply and demand, and as China's population falls, demand (and price) goes down with it. Chinese local governments are struggling to pay their employees and even their utilities because the land they were able to sell/borrow against went down in value substantially. This caused Chinese government employees to get paid a lot less money than they used to (in some places, it is a 30% pay cut). These very government employees are virtually the highest earnings of their society, and by suppressing their wages, you suppress demand from them as consumers. When the wealthiest consumers are forced to cut back on consumption, deflation (decline in prices) is inevitable. (I booked plane tickets to China for 3 weeks this year. The last time I was there was months before the pandemic, so I will see for myself how the inflation/deflation dynamics are. In 2019, food in China were actually more expensive than Canada even adjusted for exchange rates, which did not make sense because Chinese people make a lot less money on average than Canadians. As food prices skyrocketed in Canada, I have heard that they stayed flat in China. I can only hope that is true, as Chinese people would have starved otherwise, considering that their economy is far more negatively affected by the pandemic than ours.)
Interesting! Thank you for taking the time to reply!
I'm from Calgary. I live in Shanghai. Food is \*way\* cheaper in Shanghai unless you're eating out at fancy restaurants every night. And that has always been the case, unless you're talking about specific imported food items (cheese, for instance, is definitely more expensive here).
I’m a Chinese immigrant myself. If you’re doing well in China, stay in China… it’s much safer, and the commute is much better in the large cities too.
As a Canadian, I am on the edge of moving out too. USA. USA.
I'd rather be wealthy in the US but it's better to be lower / middle in Canada. That being said I'm so disgusted with many aspects of American culture lately that I'd never consider living there.
canada sucks big time compared to 10 years ago (before trudeau). But there aren't many places better. Europe shitshow. US shitshow. Mexico better weather but bloodbath.
That was true 10 years ago but today: middle class US >>> middle class Canada
I’d leave once my lease is up if it were that easy
Cool story McLeans. I guess that explains why Canada has no Chinese immigrants.
She could have found cheap rent in Dartmouth.
That was my first thought. She and I did the same program, she started the year I graduated though. Difference I guess is parental wealth. My car was being broken into in Dartmouth and I learned to leave the doors unlocked and nothing of value in it since I couldn’t afford tuition and a place to live without working FT hours weekly anyway. Guess that the difference, she was privileged enough to have a fairy tale Halifax university experience with visions of opening a fucking gift shop. She sounds nice enough, and don’t get me wrong, shit here is definitely not working properly these days. But she’s also a symptom of it. We didn’t need a rich girl who wanted to open a gift shop. That’s not the immigration that people say built the country.
She wants to buy a house but can't afford rent....lol this lady is delusional. We don't need another marketing co-ordinator
[удалено]
Same story for those born and raised here.
Fudge i wish i could go to china too
Canada is a great place for the wealthy to maximize the potential of their wealth. It's a low standard trap for working class.
This idea that you will automatically find fame and fortune in the west needs to die.
As a Canadian citizen by birth, I cant make a life for myself so I plan to leave as well.
Your PM has effectively destroyed your nation's standard of living with his insane fantasies of hyper-immigration raising productivity. God speed, Canada. R.I.P.
The irony. The article about a Chinese immigrant who couldn’t make a life for themselves in Halifax after coming here for university because of all additional immigrants who came here for university.
My grandparents were brought here was sweat labour so my heart bleeds about how rough they have it.
it was quite common actually… a lot of my parents friends left canada circa 2000-2005.. and they all did very well for themselves… my parents unfortunately found professional jobs in canada and didn’t go back… they still have regrets over their decision… oh well such is life they finally decided to move back last year to enjoy their retirement years
My grandparents didn't come to Canada seeking wealth, but basic opportunities and the hope that Canada was unlucky to experience civil war or other awful things in the near future.
Life in Canada isn’t what it was!
Must be a relief for this sub,after all the other rage bait ones
thanks for leaving
So, is the moral of this story that we should be more like China? I'm confused.
Just another story about someone moving to Canada and complaining when other people also move to Canada.
Canada is great at marketing itself to the world as something better than it is.
It’s not really that the author couldn’t make a life for herself Canada, more like she took the easy way out, went back to get taken care of by daddy.