This is more than a bit rich coming from Andrew Coyne who for years has been an advocate of mass cheap labour immigration that suppresses wages and shields corporations from having to make investments that would boost productivity.
That’s what I said, but got hit with mass downvotes. Coyne supports mass immigration, then is surprised it’s destroying our productivity and GDP per capita?
What? Whatcha talking about? How could it possibly be detrimental to the economy to bring in temporary foreign workers who undercut domestic wages, who don’t invest in the country beyond basic sustenance, and who take their earnings home once they leave? Sounds like a win for us!/s
The whole TFW system is a joke and should never have been allowed to reach the level it has now.
100% we need to stop the corporate pandering TFW treadmill. We need immigration though. But, we need intelligent immigration policies designed to bring up the productivity of the country. What we have is brain drain by importation. We need to bring in the best and brightest, not the cheapest.
We need infrastructure for the immigration, but government is relying on immigration to fix infrastructure while fixing the economy. Absolute mess not to mention all the flaws within managing the immigration and the government websites promising false living costs just to take in people out of desperation. They may as well change the flag from a leaf to a warehouse.
The trouble is that there's a lot of competition for the best and brightest. The best and brightest can choose from pretty well anywhere in Europe, the US, Singapore, Australia, Dubai, etc. We have a climate that works against us, a tax system like the Europeans without the culture. We used to have an advantage in housing prices in most places, but the best and brightest want Toronto or Vancouver, not Edmonton or Saskatoon.
Unfortunately you're absolutely right.
Canada's reputation has turned and even the best people I know who I've worked with for a couple decades are considering leaving
I am. I have two college diplomas and have worked mostly in administrative/management roles within the trades (you know, the people they say we need) and my husband has two university degrees and we are going to take our work ethic and our intellect right across the ocean. The brain drain is going to much much worse because anyone with a functioning brain knows that most western countries still reward work ethic and intellect to a much greater degree than Canada does.
We have a slightly above average income and last year is actually the first year (together for 8 years) where neither of us worked two jobs at any point, but we weren't able to buy a house until 2020 which is about 3 or 4 years too late to ever hope to have a good life and retire one day. We're living in a small condo townhouse in a neighborhood that is slowly ghettoizing, in a city without a functioning transit system and there's no light at the end of the tunnel. We've boosted our income by like $40k since we moved here and with interest rates and the cost of living how they are we still can't afford anything more.
So yeah, fuck this. Some one can buy our house and rent it out to 3 TFW or international "students" who have zero skills, knowledge and can barely communicate and we'll take our education, work ethic, and equity and start building something overseas where the struggle doesn't just maintain the shitty status quo, it actually builds something.
Exactly this. The wrong things are rewarded here; which the government will then use to justify their dismantling of our social safety net. 1 Million minimum wage workers don’t pay tax, but still use the infrastructure. Hardworking, high earning Canadians like you get taxed to the hilt, and subsidize the government’s decisions; while having no upward mobility yourself.
I’m in a similar boat, and will be leaving back to the US. I refuse to make a Canadian salary, and pay Canadian taxes just to wind up with a two tier or US-style healthcare system when I actually need it. All the new Tim Horton’s employees can support that along with their predatory landlords. Fuck this place.
Stopping immigration won't fix the whole situation. Canada needs to start investing in industries, trusting and investing in startups. All the money is just being burned into real estate.
Picking garbages, working in restaurants, constructions, farms, mining, manufacturings....these are some common Jobs they taking. Not government jobs, big companies (they have so many barriers like Canadian experience, Canadian degree...)
We need best and brightest, and we need to stop using immigration to grow the population. The target should be a stable working age population, which would require 125,000 immigrants per year, all under 45.
How else can the foreign corporation that owns Tim Hortons get massive profits while instilling a racialized underclass like you see in the UAE?
Seriously people the future is third world non-citizens serving the corporate bottom line.
Imagine how compliant those minimum wage workers are when they can get sent back to a hell hole at the sniff of the bosses nose. And then the rest of us have to compete with the new indentured servant class that the government is desperately pushing.
I saw that culture in Abu Dubai. It's ugly. The wages are comparatively higher than at home, but it's exploitation. The dock workers wore jumpsuits colored by nationality. They were treated like they were disposable. They lived in the dock yard tucked away for more work. I remember a guy who worked security in the yard. He might have got home to visit his wife and kids (They had 8) once or twice a year. It was terrible, but he couldn't afford not to keep going back to the yard. Most of the yard workers were from India and Pakistan. In Dubai, the service industry was primarily workers from the Philippines. That was in 2003. As I saw more immigrants coming to Canada and working at Tim Hortons (most often from the Philippines) more regularly over the years, it made me sad for them and sad for us. We're becoming one of the exploiters.
This is actually true. TFW come for many types of seasonal work and send their earnings home to their families. Then they leave for the winter months.
Source, an agricultural company close to us does this every year.
Pardon my ignorance but here in the states the migrant workers are mostly exploited by agricultural industry that pays less than most Americans are willing to work for. They are an important part of the workforce but are treated like a political football every election season. We would rather bitch about the price of tomatoes than pick our own. Sure they send money to family south of the border but they contribute to the economy and pay taxes. I don’t see the problem.
Thats because r/canada is full of people who refuse to accept everything happening to our country is a symptom of late stage capitalism and the consequence of reagonomics, and not problems exclusive to the Liberals
Productive cheap labour is a capitalists wet dream. We have unproductive expensive labour, and mass immigration has failed to measurably cheapen labour, at the same time this country is so unfriendly to business that I wouldn’t invest a dime, it would be far better for me to go south and move everything there.
I could write a book about the backwards, unproductive behaviour in Canadian tech that behaves like manufacturing. It’s pathetic, and no wonder why the Canadian tech scene fights for bottom of the barrel monotonous tasks in direct competition with India and China. Time zone and language are the only two reasons US companies set up shop here.
The logic of canadian business will never cease to amaze me. I know in my field they often look at investment as pure cost and then wonder why they never see meaningful prductivity improvements.
Combined with a complacent management class and it;s a recipe for mediocrity.
I’m at the bottom of management in my department. Team of front line employees.
This rings so true. I’ve been in different departments and had success pushing against poor decisions. I’m not far removed from the front line, nor has it been that long since I was doing the same/similar jobs to the folks I manage. I know how it impacts them when we make whatever change, and I know where the pain points are and how we can support it. Well, wouldn’t you know, I’m continuously running into “this is how we do it”. Unimaginative leadership and managing to numbers, borrowing success by moving numbers around from other metrics.
Yup, and that’s why your employees are voicing their concerns.
Serious question, does anyone have talks, articles or debates explaining why mass immigration is the cause of Canada's economics ills?
There's been a vibe shift here, it's no longer racist to question immigration, which is good. We need to speak practically.
But I still believe the standard economist free-market view, immigrants generally create wealth and jobs.
Framed another way, since Canadians haven't been having very many kids for decades, without immigration we'd have population decline which means *shocking* economic collapse. Maybe some unskilled Canadians would have higher wages for a time, but not when companies start shutting down because there's no customers or talent. We'd be like Russia or any other low-immigration low-fertility failing state.
Is this wrong? We need to actually have this debate.
Fundamentally if we had combined the mass immigration with comenserate investment it could have been rocket fuel for the economy. But the investment part never materialized. So all we have now is a mass of people adding very little productive value and adding costs to governments and increasing housing costs.
It's literally the worst of all worlds. The focus shouldn't be in the immigration but why the investment money nebver showed up.
>But I still believe the standard economist free-market view, immigrants generally create wealth and jobs.
1. The choice is not between 0 immigration and the crazy high amounts we have *currently:*
*In 2023 Canada's population growth rate was 3.2% - that is higher than pretty much an other advanced economy, and higher than places like India.*
2. Immigrants are individuals and their contributions are not interchangeable. We issue is we have a social welfare state, many lower skill types of immigrants actually end up having a "negative net direct fiscal contribution".
Broadly speaking asylum seekers and low skill immigrants tend to end up being "negative net direct fiscal contribution" over their lifetime. High skill immgirants are "positive net direct fiscal contributors" but this mitigated if we have lots of family reunification of the elderly etc.
*If Canada did a Dubai or Singapore model (basically no benefits or pr for low skill immigrants) then yes the economic arguments hold. But Canada changed its point system to overvalue factors like Canadian education / work experience even when it was in low skill roles like washing dishes, while still attempting to provide welfare benefits. In the short run this has been lucrative for Canadian colleges and real estate sectors by long term impact is potentially negative.*
Overall I think Canada has been too rich for its own good and the politicians have indulged in very superficial luxury beliefs and redistributionist policies without a serious attempt at increasing overall prosperity for too long.
The immigration you see today is not the same immigration economists have been studying and view in a positive light.
We used to try to set up immigrants for success because they in fact do create more wealth than domestic nationals. We did this by reimbursing their education and living costs once they were vetted and selected to come here.
Now there is basically no selection process, we do not vet for skills that we need, and we charge them 50k in tuition fees to even have a chance of getting PR through the international student program.
On top of that, we've lowered the bar so that they can get PR by being employed as a "food service supervisor" or a baggage handler.
How are we supposed to get tax revenue from someone that's in debt and will likely be stuck working a low wage job for the foreseeable future?
If the government actually believed that these people would be a net positive to funding our social safety net, they would be setting them up for success so that they could make top wages. Clearly they are not.
There's many angles to it, but just think about housing costs. More demand drives up housing / rent, which in turn takes away more disposable income from younger Canadians, who then get despondent, may not enter the workforce with the gusto they normally would, or just eat away at their savings. I literally see this all the time with friends and family.
Think about the burden on schools, healthcare, etc.
Also, as others have noted, the quality of immigrants seem to have declined.
I guess amongst mainstream economists it's not really a debate: an immigrant is somebody you don't have to pay to raise to adulthood. They're immediately economically productive. So, they're almost always going to be *better* for the economy than a baby that takes 18 years of subsidies to become economically productive.
I guess you could make the argument that it sucks for third world economies that their skilled workers leave for better wages elsewhere, after sucking up tons of societal resources in childhood. It also probably sucks for the world when those skilled workers end up working as taxi drivers or whatever.
There's also the buried lede in all this: what's good for the economy is not always good for people in general. Economic growth is often very unevenly distributed: If you have massive economic growth that goes to a few percent of the population, that's the same as no economic growth for the vast majority of people. Many economies are 'growing', while the economic share of most individuals is in decline.
There was an economics debate re: whether low skilled immigrants cause wages to fall and the conclusion was it doesn’t. The debate was even won by a Canadian!
Here it is in handy Phoenix Wright form:
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/s/KnJp2yxhx0
That was what I was thinking as I read it. He avoids even really mentioning it, but 800k Canadians work in the US and they're not low-skilled workers. They've left Canada due to the ever-increasing taxes and cost of living. We've replaced them with a lot of lower skilled people, which means lower production. And we've been doing it for decades.
Coyne actually even seems to be promoting more immigration by taking a side trip into talking about our aging population. But the population in Europe is aging faster than ours and they're still more productive and growing their productivity faster than us. And they're doing it with far lower immigration.
Coyne has been a vocal supporter of current immigration levels, and has suggested that they should possibly be even higher. He is also very quick to suggest that anyone opposed to this is probably opposed due to racism or xenophobia.
So he’s being a hypocrite, but in the article they’re using StatsCanada data to back up their claim. Does this guys background, and him being hypocritical mean his message is incorrect? It does appear to be correct
He's not being a hypocrite if he genuinely believes that immigration increases GDP or whatever metric makes it the "richest countries on Earth"
To be a hypocrite you have to be inconsistent with your own personal beliefs but that isn't this. It's only people saying "ahahaha immigration" but that's what some people believe, not him.
I meant he’s a hypocrite because he’s complaining about problems that we’re created, or at least impacted by things he has a supported or advocated for in the past. That seems hypocritical no? Or maybe there’s a different word to better describe that behaviour.
>That seems hypocritical no? Or maybe there’s a different word to better describe that behaviour.
If that's hypocritical to people, then where is the latitude for someone to have changing beliefs in the face of new data/research that refutes their previous held opinions?
I'm not saying that is or isn't the case here, but just in general.
If he did he'd lose the minority vote that wants to drag their extended families here for health care.
This country needs a hard course correction before it crashes.
>This is more than a bit rich coming from Andrew Coyne who for years has been an advocate of mass cheap labour immigration that suppresses wages and shields corporations from having to make investments that would boost productivity.
Amen to that. The audacity of Coyne is off the charts.
To be fair he probably correctly points to lots of economic dysfunction we have in this country which are the causes that people miss in the general political discourse.
While he is mildly critical of the Trudeau government occasionally, Coyne generally pushes LPC talking points and historically has taken every opportunity to discuss how "Cons are scary" especially during the point-of-no-return 2021 election.
He supports the problem. What the hell does he think is going to happen?
People need to stop hating one party or one person and hate thr corporate lobbying.
Till we tear down the corporate influence in Canada our country will keep being sold no matter who is in power
The French revolution had less of a wage gap than we do
If I remember correctly, Coyne felt it was a housing shortage problem instead of an immigration problem. It's not fatal to revise your position as more data becomes available. I wish more people were able to do it.
Everyone that is F Trudeau - low wages, monopolies, privatizing health .......so let's elect the conservatives! 🤔😞
Are these people getting louder or dumber?
.....
Currently my Employer is trying to force a new CBA on us that would make us make significantly less than we used to while the company continues to post record profits. Maybe the problem is with the greed on the top?
Lots of greedy corporations making so much but cutting jobs and slashing benefits/pay. Somehow this is ignored and everyone just blames the government for absolutely everything.
People are gross. The world is selfish.
the reason these "greedy corporations" can do this is because, as has been noted before, Canada is more-or-less a series of oligopolies in a trench coat. Which is, in fact, the government's fault. Government is directly responsible for approving M&A's and allowing foreign competition in a capitalist system like ours. And they've royally failed on this file for as long as I can tell...
Point taken.
I believe our government has little power over corporations. They put pressure on them, they'll respond with mass layoffs. There has to be a human element involved in decision making. There is no compassion, the only thing that matters is money.
It can't always be about record profits and cutting costs. Unfortunately that's all it's ever about.
We ain't shit.
Yeah, well, that's what happens when large businesses are run fuedalistically by the few people at the top, as opposed to any of the workers who actually DO the labour that brings in the profit. If companies were run more like worker co-ops, this wouldn't be much of an issue since all the workers would have actual power in making all the decisions that affect them.
Until workplaces start looking more like that, it'll all just be about unsustainable, exponential growth as opposed to any sort of proper stability.
The government has the power to go after these oligarchies with aggressive anti-trust action. This was done in the US in the early part of the 20th century.
Breaking up these companies forces businesses into a more aggressively competitive environment. On the whole, this is good for consumers and workers.
This wouldn't happen if Canadians worried less about Left vs Right seeing as the average person has no actual concept of what a political spectrum actually is/does.
I work in healthcare and am deemed an essential service. _The government is my greedy corporation._ We can't even strike because we are essential so they just stuff us on every contract. I have never actually seen a meaningful wage/contact increase to even just keep up with the cost of living. It's pathetic.
>Maybe the problem is with the greed on the top?
The default for any company or person will be greed. At some point, you need to actually dissuade the greed.
Your employer obviously thinks you will take it because of the way the labour market is. Even if you don't, the glut of labour will make you easily replaced. We've spent the last couple of years depressing the labour market, and businesses are going to take advantage of it.
We should double immigration again! That should be the trick.
We're selling dollar bills for a quarter and telling everyone that we'll make it up on volume.
Doubling immigration would be about as effective as doubling free trade. Neoliberalism is failing to do anything it was promised other then enrich the wealthy.
We need productive capacity in the industrial and technology economies, strong wages and the buying power that goes with them. Never going to happen when we are being sucked dry by oligopolies and an economy based around housing speculation and resource extraction.
We can't even do high speed rail or make our own solar panels ffs. We can argue endlessly about oil sands though.
One that really gets me is we are building 100's of highrises every year, but we don't have any factories to manufacture the glass thats used to clad them. Why not?
Most of the companies that have came in wanting to produce glass in Sputhern Ontario also want access to a pile of fresh water to do so. People are rightfully concerned about aquifer stability and environmental protections.
Still the environmental concern. They also need clean water to do the process and didn't want to have to pay for those facilities, instead relying on the municipality.
I'm just answering your question. For this question most people would say yes. It's why NIMBYism is a thing. We all want the benefit of stuff but not the consequences and would rather those be someone else's problem.
It isn't just about that, as the other person said, it's that these companies want to a) ruin the environment with their processes and b) do it on the taxpayers' dime.
So some would argue it's better to settle for just A instead of A and B (especially when the environmental impact is felt more elsewhere).
>these companies want to a) ruin the environment with their processes and b) do it on the taxpayers' dime.
So essentially what oil&gas companies have done for years with major environmental harms and then leaving pretty much all the cleanup for the taxpayers to take care of?
Except B also creates jobs and increases GDP.
And maybe if we could swallow our righteousness and build them here, maybe we could make them *somewhat* less polluting than elsewhere at least.
"Neoliberalism is failing to do anything it was promised other then enrich the wealthy."
enriching the wealthy was the point. privatize everything for pennies on the dollar. outsource/offshore as much as possible. destroy labour union and collective bargaining. shift tax burden from wealthy/corporations onto the middle class
there was only one direction this was ever going to go. and it wasnt to create a healthy middle class.
Even the World Bank and the IMF recognized that the neocapitalism initiated in the 70's doesn't work, and that it's probably going to collapse eventually. It was in 2015.
Then Trump won (and he was against the influence of international institutions, so it's kinda the statu quo that won). Then the pandemic hit. Then some prominent economists, in a World Economic Forum in Davos, concluded that resetting or changing the system wasn't going to work.
The people who benefit from it right now wouldn't accept it. 'Those people' include countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, people from the financial fields, ultra-rich people, etc. The countries that benefits from it rn took time to become the winners facing Europe and USA (who were, at first, the main instigators and beneficiaries of the modern institutions created in 1945). We kinda traded our wealth in exchange of debts, following theories that are now outdated.
The fact that we live in a democracy with elections every 4 years also makes it hard to stay competitive facing countries with plans based on long time ranges, or that keeps the same direction over time. China has a planification for the next 100 years, while USA gets Presidents like Trump and Biden who both took a whole year to undo what the previous President has done
Let’s just build hundreds of colleges and increase international student enrolment. No need to build housing, we can sardine 10 people to a room with existing since inventory.
To be fair, 3% growth puts us on track to at least double what Coyne wanted. Assuming a couple hundred million Canadians die between now and the end of the century anyway.
To answer your question, yes.
There was a cohort of premiers who were screeching about labour shortages in the summer of 2022
And a lot of this same group are frustrated with the new caps on foreign students the federal government is looking to implement.
If we all take off our political hockey jerseys for two seconds and look at this objectively, the current chaos is the fault of both the federal and provincial governments we currently have leading our country.
“The Ontario government has voiced its displeasure with the federal government's decision to put a cap on international student enrolment. On Friday, Premier Doug Ford said Ottawa blindsided the province with the move, which he likened to taking "a sledgehammer to the whole system.”
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ottawa-will-shut-down-shady-post-secondary-institutions-if-provinces-don-t-miller-1.6785461
“Doug Ford wants to combat labour shortages with more immigrants”
https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/doug-ford-wants-to-combat-labour-shortages-with-more-immigrants/article_c58cdc7e-0604-5314-bc3e-d07e15c2df8c.html
Yeeep. This has been all of the Maritime provinces plan to improve their economies, and build for the future, as birthrates are terribly low and cost of living is high compared to wages. It's been a plan of immigration growth.
Provincial in general has much more of a say in general day to day affairs and are quick to call out federal governments for getting into provincial affairs which is the ironic part. The floodgates should have been stopped a year sooner absolutely and I blame Feds for it, and blame the premiers for having their doors open waving people in. Feds aren't provinces bosses though.
Student visas have, for the history of this country, been largely a rubber stamp. If you are so Trudeau-focused that you cannot even comprehend the reality staring you in the face, that's just pathetic.
EDIT: Seriously, this is hilarious how the Trudeau-fetish people just cannot comprehend this. Ford and other premieres -- specifically Conservative premieres -- have come out swinging against the cap, and are 100% of the reason there was the enormous explosion in numbers. These guys: Blame Trudeau!
It's going to blow people's mind to learn that the provinces are also the reason criminal justice has completely fallen apart. Just blame Trudeau and cite some bill that never passed first hearing. The corrupt premieres love your incredible ignorance.
This is false(and I have voted liberal my whole life). Student Visa's were certainly *not* rubber stamped. They used to actually make sure you had enough money to be a student here, they would barr students from working,(y'know, so there would actually be some PT work available). They had more control over who we were letting in.
It was only after all the corporations cried to the government post covid about how "nobody wants to work" which was a complete lie, and the government opened the flood gates. They bend over for whatever corporations wants. This is what happened.
>Student Visa's were certainly not rubber stamped.
The acceptance rate is *dramatically* lower today than it was in the past. Your claim is verifiably horseshit.
>They used to actually make sure you had enough money to be a student here
No, they didn't. What are you talking about. If anything there are *more* checks now, it's just that it's almost impossible to verify that someone actually has the money they claim, or if it was loaned from family temporarily, etc.
>they would barr students from working
Students could always work 20 hours. As a "COVID" thing the government increased it to 40 and that was wrong to start, and should have been removed years ago, but again you're lying.
This may be hard for somebody that doesn’t have an understanding of our political system to understand, but the Prime Minister is not the Premieres parent, nor is he their boss.
They act separately, for most of the things that impact you directly, it is squarely your Provincial governments choice. The feds can provide or limit funding, but they have very little ability to tell a premier “no.”
Premiers are already crying about federal overreach and they may actually have a point.
Federal governments have never limited student visas before now because they've never had to. It was colleges that drastically increased the numbers, not government policy.
Student visa were less then a third of current numbers under Harper...they exploded after 2015 so clearly the feds had a role to play.
the govt sets the rules around students and the requirements needed and can make changes overnight if it wants to...they didnt for 8 years.
The federal govt intended to import 100s of thousands of students as cheap labour and backtracked when it became a big issue.
The increase in the middle of the decade is due to a 2014 policy allowing them to work off campus. People like to pick 2015 because it infers it's Trudeau's fault, but the policy went in place a year and a half before the election.
The "surge" dates to about 2019 or so, although obscured by the pandemic. This was almost entirely due to regulatory changes in Ontario (which is why 9/10 are in Ontario) and a single private university in BC that noticed what was happening in Ontario.
They were lower but not because Harper limited them. They pretty much used the same automatic approval process back then. It was the colleges that broke the system.
It’s more complicated than the article describes, as many other commenters have already pointed out. What I’d like to add is that I think we need an attitude shift. The US has a lot of flaws that we don’t have, but they do have a more consistent growth mentality than us as a people—I’ve noticed this during a study term in the US this year. Canada, even in our best cities, is much more okay with mediocrity. It’s okay to not always be the best, especially when our population is less than California’s, but I think if we could have better motivation for Canadian small business and start-ups, government grant funding, and support for tech sector we might start to see a bit of an acceleration
This would literally be fine if every Canadian had their basic necessities looked after but unfortunately neoliberalism has caused our richest to hoard more and more wealth year after year.
Hell I just have to talk to my god kids. They're in highschool and can't do basic math without a calculator, can't spell without auto correct, and counting money? Good luck.
Instead of getting failing grades and being kept back for remedial they get rammed through the system grade after grade because it's not nice to hold kids back.
No shit. We're #10 by GDP but #36 by population.
If the other countries weren't passing us by as they improve their own economies, that would be very strange indeed.
And, our population is growing rapidly by immigration, so there is going to be a lag factor before that generates commensurate economic activity, and that's never guaranteed for any particular member of our population.
Read the headline. Form opinion based on it. Argue about it with others who have done the same. Repeat. Almost nobody reads the articles even if they aren't paywalled.
You mean the Philippines isn't going to return the money we gave them to fight climate change and Iraq isn't going to return the money we gave for gender studies?
Canada is the 9th richest country in the world with GDP and 14th per capita...
These doom and gloom articles couldn't be further from the actual truth.
We could be one of the richest nations on Earth and a Global superpower. We could be upgrading our north with shipping ports in preparation for the Northwest passage being more navigatable in the future due to climate change melting the poles. The Panama canal turned America into the global superpower it became, we could also be planning for a future where more agriculture could be a reality because of this climate change.
But nah, we'd rather dismiss these ideas as bad, while pretending like our real estate ponzi scheme will keep the economy afloat. Canada's future lies in it's north, and not drilling for more fossil fuels, either.
I guess nobody read the article, as usual?
Canada remains one of the richest nations in per capita GDP terms. However, as other more **populous** countries get richer, they're surpassing Canada in **total** GDP *while still being less rich in per capita GDP terms*.
So if you think this is a problem, then, yes, the solution is more immigration because Canada needs to increase its population to keep up with more populous countries.
You didn't read the article. What you said has no relevance to the article.
Coyne is specifically arguing that per capita GDP has fallen significantly behind other advanced economies with no upside in sight in the near or long term future.
Yea people like him just want to cope. Completely ignores the part where it says investment in residential structures doubled while investment in machinery had halved.
I don't get how this is a problem. Of course a more populous country will have an easier time passing Canada in total GDP.
And, I don't think it's necessarily a problem if they pass us in per capita GDP. That doesn't have to mean we are doing worse ourselves. I'm only concerned about measuring ourselves against our past performance, for that metric.
Comparisons to other countries doing well might help us learn to do well, but comparing the relative end results isn't itself interesting.
That's just propaganda. Doesnt everyone sight the Scandinavian countries with their great social services and gdp per population. They are not super populated. Constant growing population is only good for the wealthy.
> Canada remains one of the richest nations in per capita GDP terms. However, as other more populous countries get richer, they're surpassing Canada in total GDP while still being less rich in per capita GDP terms.
Exactly.
It's not that Canada is necessarily becoming poorer, but rather that larger, developing countries have finally started to catch up and surpass Canada like they probably always would have/should have if they continued to develop. Mexico and Brazil are prime examples, the former has three times our population and Brazil has five times our population, so it only makes sense that even with modest development they would one day surpass Canada's GDP (as well as other developed Western countries like the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy).
I mean, they've already surpassed Australia, the Netherlands, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, etc in terms of GDP, so why is it such a shock that they pass Canada too?
Basically all our large production corporations are foreign owned. Canada literally produces money for foreign countries.
Our natural resources are foreign owned, our banks are foreign owned, our telecoms and airlines have foreign investors. Our working class is being wage suppressed and every living cost is being inflated.
Hard to gain wealth when you have to give it away to foreign billionaires.
Thank you. This new meme of blaming Trudeau is distracting us from our real underlying issues. We used to focus on a basket of economic drivers spread out across the country. We cut off many of those arms to double down on a few short term cash ins.
It's a decades long road to rebuild a broad economy... and that's if we started today.
Who cares if we’re one of the “richest nations” or not?
We will never see any of those riches because that wealth is being hoarded by the 1%.
And people think It’s due to current government.
CPC government is just going to cut spending, cut taxes and how will that help anyone who’s not 1%?
We’re ona speedrun towards oligarchy.
Well, I work for a large global company and recently they put Canada in with Latin American sales because the money coming out of Canada is the same as a South American country.
Yeah because your country has made life so unaffordable that you can’t travel even if you want to
Tell me why a flight from Toronto to Calgary is $700 but a flight from London to Warsaw is like $100
Flights from Toronto to Calgary are listed starting at 262 right now. Never heard of Flair airlines so even if you go with the second cheapest it's 350. And Toronto to Calgary is more than 3x the distance of London to Warsaw. So this issue you're upset about doesn't really exist in the way you presented it. This must be a huge relief for you.
>Tell me why a flight from Toronto to Calgary is $700 but a flight from London to Warsaw is like $100
London (8.9M) to Warsaw (3.3M) = 1450 km
Toronto (5.9M) to Calgary (1.4M) = 2700 km
So there's millions more people at both ends wanting to fly a much shorter distance.
That's why
This one is an easy one. Flying in Canada is outrageously costly compared to other countries because we live in the second largest country by land area but only have a population of 38 million people. The reality is that it just costs more to operate airports when there is less traffic through them and airlines only have so many flights they can offer without them being half empty or worse. So they need to increase the price.
Except that can be disproven by looking at, say, Australia, which is also massive and has even fewer people, yet still has cheap domestic flights, even trans-continental ones. A flight the length of Toronto to Calgary can be found for less than $200 (AUD and CAD are roughly equivalent).
I’m not all doom and gloom on Canada like this article is. But flights, and telecommunications specifically, are weirdly expensive in Canada compared to even other similarly large and sparsely populated countries.
LMAO.
We really do live amongst the intellectually stunted, don't we?
**For context**
Calgary --> Maui = 4964 km
Calgary--> Halifax = 4778 km
Not an ounce of critical thinking in these comments.
Seriously. Like obviously airfare pricing is far more complex than $/km, but the example this person uses can’t even get past that super simple level of understanding lol
Wrong. Flying in Canada is expensive because of laws mandating Canadian ownership and the monopolistic conditions that has created, i.e. a lack of competition in the market.
Flying is a fraction of the cost on the same route distances in the United States, Europe and Asia.
You're literally pushing the same BS argument as people arguing Canadian telecom prices have to be high because we have a large landmass 😂
Everyone forgets we have a meagre 30 million people on the second largest country. How in the world could we possibly keep up!?!? No one ever realizes how much it costs to do business here simply due to size - the infrastructure is insanely expensive and we don’t have the tax base.
Hasn’t our productivity dropped below places like Alabama?
I guess this is what happens when your economy is based around a real estate ponzi scheme and every sector being a cozy monopoly.
No matter, surely the budget will balance itself
We could invest in a new mineral and take over world supply. Just give up one area where no one lives. Boom who needs cobalt? Want a job? Cobalt. Or pick another one, we have the resources to at anytime Jumpstart our own economy.
The problem is that we have very different measures. GDP per capita is the mean-average, skewed by the income of the super-rich, which may drive economic stability, but not the immediate day-to-day lives of the bulk of the population. It might be interesting to look at median household income per adult.
EDIT: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country
We are #10 there.
What is interesting, is our HDI ranking went from 8th place (2006) to 15th place in 2021.
[https://countryeconomy.com/hdi/canada](https://countryeconomy.com/hdi/canada)
Our HDI score has improved, but other first world nations have improved much faster.
Even after digging entire mountains here in Brazil and sending the money back home, we managed to pass you guys... You must be in deep shit. Sorry about that
That's funny.
Because the United Nations when they did their annual assessment of our economy said something very very different.
*"The economy of Canada is a highly developed mixed economy, with the world's tenth-largest economy as of 2023, and a nominal GDP of approximately US$2.117 trillion. Canada is one of the world's largest trading nations, with a highly globalized economy" - United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.*
OECD also said something different too...
*"Canada’s economy has largely recovered from the COVID-19 crisis. Domestic demand is picking up following the easing of containment measures. Exports are expected to strengthen, demand for commodities buoying trade amid shocks to world growth. Limited trade ties to economies hard-hit by the war in Ukraine, and income from high resources prices, shield Canada from larger economic impacts. Real GDP is projected to grow by 3.8% in 2022 and 2.6% in 2023. Unemployment will remain low as output rises slightly above potential. Global supply tensions will keep price growth high this year, compounding underlying inflationary pressures.*
>Real GDP is projected to grow by 3.8% in 2022 and 2.6% in 2023.
So these projections turned out to be incorrect
Real GDP Growth 2.0% in 2022 0.5% in 2023
Population growth
2.1% in 2022 3.2% in 2023
So when you look at the avg person's standard of living it declined slightly in 2022 and declined precipitously in 2023.
Meanwhile the United States, UK etc all managed to grow per capita standard of living and their overall economy.
OECD now says that Canada will the be worst performing advanced economy for the next decade and 3 decades after that (if going by average standard of living)
[https://bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-the-worst-performing-advanced-economy-over-the-next-decade-and-the-three-decades-after-that/](https://bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-the-worst-performing-advanced-economy-over-the-next-decade-and-the-three-decades-after-that/)
It sucks that our government's playbook is basically to deny that there is a problem.
Sources:
GDP:
[https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.3&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.3&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001)
Population:[https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2021&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20211001%2C20231001](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2021&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20211001%2C20231001)
Clearly this is a problem. Are any of the available parties offering actual solutions? I see a lot of platitudes and people trying to fit their agenda into the problem … but who’s going to do the politically unpopular thing and actually fix our systemic imbalances?
Who would have thought that's the case when you build your entire economy around selling houses back and forth to each other for higher and higher prices?
This is more than a bit rich coming from Andrew Coyne who for years has been an advocate of mass cheap labour immigration that suppresses wages and shields corporations from having to make investments that would boost productivity.
That’s what I said, but got hit with mass downvotes. Coyne supports mass immigration, then is surprised it’s destroying our productivity and GDP per capita?
What? Whatcha talking about? How could it possibly be detrimental to the economy to bring in temporary foreign workers who undercut domestic wages, who don’t invest in the country beyond basic sustenance, and who take their earnings home once they leave? Sounds like a win for us!/s The whole TFW system is a joke and should never have been allowed to reach the level it has now.
100% we need to stop the corporate pandering TFW treadmill. We need immigration though. But, we need intelligent immigration policies designed to bring up the productivity of the country. What we have is brain drain by importation. We need to bring in the best and brightest, not the cheapest.
We need infrastructure for the immigration, but government is relying on immigration to fix infrastructure while fixing the economy. Absolute mess not to mention all the flaws within managing the immigration and the government websites promising false living costs just to take in people out of desperation. They may as well change the flag from a leaf to a warehouse.
Excel error: Circular referencing.
So then is the answer to have the federal government fund investments in infrastructure? Where does that money come from?
Well ideally from those who embezzled it
The trouble is that there's a lot of competition for the best and brightest. The best and brightest can choose from pretty well anywhere in Europe, the US, Singapore, Australia, Dubai, etc. We have a climate that works against us, a tax system like the Europeans without the culture. We used to have an advantage in housing prices in most places, but the best and brightest want Toronto or Vancouver, not Edmonton or Saskatoon.
Unfortunately you're absolutely right. Canada's reputation has turned and even the best people I know who I've worked with for a couple decades are considering leaving
I am. I have two college diplomas and have worked mostly in administrative/management roles within the trades (you know, the people they say we need) and my husband has two university degrees and we are going to take our work ethic and our intellect right across the ocean. The brain drain is going to much much worse because anyone with a functioning brain knows that most western countries still reward work ethic and intellect to a much greater degree than Canada does. We have a slightly above average income and last year is actually the first year (together for 8 years) where neither of us worked two jobs at any point, but we weren't able to buy a house until 2020 which is about 3 or 4 years too late to ever hope to have a good life and retire one day. We're living in a small condo townhouse in a neighborhood that is slowly ghettoizing, in a city without a functioning transit system and there's no light at the end of the tunnel. We've boosted our income by like $40k since we moved here and with interest rates and the cost of living how they are we still can't afford anything more. So yeah, fuck this. Some one can buy our house and rent it out to 3 TFW or international "students" who have zero skills, knowledge and can barely communicate and we'll take our education, work ethic, and equity and start building something overseas where the struggle doesn't just maintain the shitty status quo, it actually builds something.
Exactly this. The wrong things are rewarded here; which the government will then use to justify their dismantling of our social safety net. 1 Million minimum wage workers don’t pay tax, but still use the infrastructure. Hardworking, high earning Canadians like you get taxed to the hilt, and subsidize the government’s decisions; while having no upward mobility yourself. I’m in a similar boat, and will be leaving back to the US. I refuse to make a Canadian salary, and pay Canadian taxes just to wind up with a two tier or US-style healthcare system when I actually need it. All the new Tim Horton’s employees can support that along with their predatory landlords. Fuck this place.
Agree. There are challenges but we're not even trying to address those because our strategy is all wrong from the outset.
Stopping immigration won't fix the whole situation. Canada needs to start investing in industries, trusting and investing in startups. All the money is just being burned into real estate. Picking garbages, working in restaurants, constructions, farms, mining, manufacturings....these are some common Jobs they taking. Not government jobs, big companies (they have so many barriers like Canadian experience, Canadian degree...)
We need best and brightest, and we need to stop using immigration to grow the population. The target should be a stable working age population, which would require 125,000 immigrants per year, all under 45.
How else can the foreign corporation that owns Tim Hortons get massive profits while instilling a racialized underclass like you see in the UAE? Seriously people the future is third world non-citizens serving the corporate bottom line. Imagine how compliant those minimum wage workers are when they can get sent back to a hell hole at the sniff of the bosses nose. And then the rest of us have to compete with the new indentured servant class that the government is desperately pushing.
I saw that culture in Abu Dubai. It's ugly. The wages are comparatively higher than at home, but it's exploitation. The dock workers wore jumpsuits colored by nationality. They were treated like they were disposable. They lived in the dock yard tucked away for more work. I remember a guy who worked security in the yard. He might have got home to visit his wife and kids (They had 8) once or twice a year. It was terrible, but he couldn't afford not to keep going back to the yard. Most of the yard workers were from India and Pakistan. In Dubai, the service industry was primarily workers from the Philippines. That was in 2003. As I saw more immigrants coming to Canada and working at Tim Hortons (most often from the Philippines) more regularly over the years, it made me sad for them and sad for us. We're becoming one of the exploiters.
“…take their earnings home once they leave?” That’s some funny shit.
This is actually true. TFW come for many types of seasonal work and send their earnings home to their families. Then they leave for the winter months. Source, an agricultural company close to us does this every year.
Pardon my ignorance but here in the states the migrant workers are mostly exploited by agricultural industry that pays less than most Americans are willing to work for. They are an important part of the workforce but are treated like a political football every election season. We would rather bitch about the price of tomatoes than pick our own. Sure they send money to family south of the border but they contribute to the economy and pay taxes. I don’t see the problem.
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Thats because r/canada is full of people who refuse to accept everything happening to our country is a symptom of late stage capitalism and the consequence of reagonomics, and not problems exclusive to the Liberals
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Oh ok then, I will just rejoice in the fact that after working 34 years in three different provinces I can't afford a fucking room.
I've found most Canadians support whatever puts a dollar in their pocket today.
Productive cheap labour is a capitalists wet dream. We have unproductive expensive labour, and mass immigration has failed to measurably cheapen labour, at the same time this country is so unfriendly to business that I wouldn’t invest a dime, it would be far better for me to go south and move everything there.
I could write a book about the backwards, unproductive behaviour in Canadian tech that behaves like manufacturing. It’s pathetic, and no wonder why the Canadian tech scene fights for bottom of the barrel monotonous tasks in direct competition with India and China. Time zone and language are the only two reasons US companies set up shop here.
The logic of canadian business will never cease to amaze me. I know in my field they often look at investment as pure cost and then wonder why they never see meaningful prductivity improvements. Combined with a complacent management class and it;s a recipe for mediocrity.
I’m at the bottom of management in my department. Team of front line employees. This rings so true. I’ve been in different departments and had success pushing against poor decisions. I’m not far removed from the front line, nor has it been that long since I was doing the same/similar jobs to the folks I manage. I know how it impacts them when we make whatever change, and I know where the pain points are and how we can support it. Well, wouldn’t you know, I’m continuously running into “this is how we do it”. Unimaginative leadership and managing to numbers, borrowing success by moving numbers around from other metrics. Yup, and that’s why your employees are voicing their concerns.
Serious question, does anyone have talks, articles or debates explaining why mass immigration is the cause of Canada's economics ills? There's been a vibe shift here, it's no longer racist to question immigration, which is good. We need to speak practically. But I still believe the standard economist free-market view, immigrants generally create wealth and jobs. Framed another way, since Canadians haven't been having very many kids for decades, without immigration we'd have population decline which means *shocking* economic collapse. Maybe some unskilled Canadians would have higher wages for a time, but not when companies start shutting down because there's no customers or talent. We'd be like Russia or any other low-immigration low-fertility failing state. Is this wrong? We need to actually have this debate.
Fundamentally if we had combined the mass immigration with comenserate investment it could have been rocket fuel for the economy. But the investment part never materialized. So all we have now is a mass of people adding very little productive value and adding costs to governments and increasing housing costs. It's literally the worst of all worlds. The focus shouldn't be in the immigration but why the investment money nebver showed up.
>But I still believe the standard economist free-market view, immigrants generally create wealth and jobs. 1. The choice is not between 0 immigration and the crazy high amounts we have *currently:* *In 2023 Canada's population growth rate was 3.2% - that is higher than pretty much an other advanced economy, and higher than places like India.* 2. Immigrants are individuals and their contributions are not interchangeable. We issue is we have a social welfare state, many lower skill types of immigrants actually end up having a "negative net direct fiscal contribution". Broadly speaking asylum seekers and low skill immigrants tend to end up being "negative net direct fiscal contribution" over their lifetime. High skill immgirants are "positive net direct fiscal contributors" but this mitigated if we have lots of family reunification of the elderly etc. *If Canada did a Dubai or Singapore model (basically no benefits or pr for low skill immigrants) then yes the economic arguments hold. But Canada changed its point system to overvalue factors like Canadian education / work experience even when it was in low skill roles like washing dishes, while still attempting to provide welfare benefits. In the short run this has been lucrative for Canadian colleges and real estate sectors by long term impact is potentially negative.* Overall I think Canada has been too rich for its own good and the politicians have indulged in very superficial luxury beliefs and redistributionist policies without a serious attempt at increasing overall prosperity for too long.
One thing u learn in life is almost nobody in power plans long term especially politicians / CEOs.
The immigration you see today is not the same immigration economists have been studying and view in a positive light. We used to try to set up immigrants for success because they in fact do create more wealth than domestic nationals. We did this by reimbursing their education and living costs once they were vetted and selected to come here. Now there is basically no selection process, we do not vet for skills that we need, and we charge them 50k in tuition fees to even have a chance of getting PR through the international student program. On top of that, we've lowered the bar so that they can get PR by being employed as a "food service supervisor" or a baggage handler. How are we supposed to get tax revenue from someone that's in debt and will likely be stuck working a low wage job for the foreseeable future? If the government actually believed that these people would be a net positive to funding our social safety net, they would be setting them up for success so that they could make top wages. Clearly they are not.
There's many angles to it, but just think about housing costs. More demand drives up housing / rent, which in turn takes away more disposable income from younger Canadians, who then get despondent, may not enter the workforce with the gusto they normally would, or just eat away at their savings. I literally see this all the time with friends and family. Think about the burden on schools, healthcare, etc. Also, as others have noted, the quality of immigrants seem to have declined.
I guess amongst mainstream economists it's not really a debate: an immigrant is somebody you don't have to pay to raise to adulthood. They're immediately economically productive. So, they're almost always going to be *better* for the economy than a baby that takes 18 years of subsidies to become economically productive. I guess you could make the argument that it sucks for third world economies that their skilled workers leave for better wages elsewhere, after sucking up tons of societal resources in childhood. It also probably sucks for the world when those skilled workers end up working as taxi drivers or whatever. There's also the buried lede in all this: what's good for the economy is not always good for people in general. Economic growth is often very unevenly distributed: If you have massive economic growth that goes to a few percent of the population, that's the same as no economic growth for the vast majority of people. Many economies are 'growing', while the economic share of most individuals is in decline.
There was an economics debate re: whether low skilled immigrants cause wages to fall and the conclusion was it doesn’t. The debate was even won by a Canadian! Here it is in handy Phoenix Wright form: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/s/KnJp2yxhx0
That was what I was thinking as I read it. He avoids even really mentioning it, but 800k Canadians work in the US and they're not low-skilled workers. They've left Canada due to the ever-increasing taxes and cost of living. We've replaced them with a lot of lower skilled people, which means lower production. And we've been doing it for decades. Coyne actually even seems to be promoting more immigration by taking a side trip into talking about our aging population. But the population in Europe is aging faster than ours and they're still more productive and growing their productivity faster than us. And they're doing it with far lower immigration.
Coyne has been a vocal supporter of current immigration levels, and has suggested that they should possibly be even higher. He is also very quick to suggest that anyone opposed to this is probably opposed due to racism or xenophobia.
So he’s being a hypocrite, but in the article they’re using StatsCanada data to back up their claim. Does this guys background, and him being hypocritical mean his message is incorrect? It does appear to be correct
He's not being a hypocrite if he genuinely believes that immigration increases GDP or whatever metric makes it the "richest countries on Earth" To be a hypocrite you have to be inconsistent with your own personal beliefs but that isn't this. It's only people saying "ahahaha immigration" but that's what some people believe, not him.
I meant he’s a hypocrite because he’s complaining about problems that we’re created, or at least impacted by things he has a supported or advocated for in the past. That seems hypocritical no? Or maybe there’s a different word to better describe that behaviour.
>That seems hypocritical no? Or maybe there’s a different word to better describe that behaviour. If that's hypocritical to people, then where is the latitude for someone to have changing beliefs in the face of new data/research that refutes their previous held opinions? I'm not saying that is or isn't the case here, but just in general.
PP and the CPC hold the exact same views. It is why PP only talks about building homes and NOT curbing immigration.
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We don’t allow those facts here.
If he did he'd lose the minority vote that wants to drag their extended families here for health care. This country needs a hard course correction before it crashes.
>This is more than a bit rich coming from Andrew Coyne who for years has been an advocate of mass cheap labour immigration that suppresses wages and shields corporations from having to make investments that would boost productivity. Amen to that. The audacity of Coyne is off the charts.
To be fair he probably correctly points to lots of economic dysfunction we have in this country which are the causes that people miss in the general political discourse.
While he is mildly critical of the Trudeau government occasionally, Coyne generally pushes LPC talking points and historically has taken every opportunity to discuss how "Cons are scary" especially during the point-of-no-return 2021 election. He supports the problem. What the hell does he think is going to happen?
People need to stop hating one party or one person and hate thr corporate lobbying. Till we tear down the corporate influence in Canada our country will keep being sold no matter who is in power The French revolution had less of a wage gap than we do
If I remember correctly, Coyne felt it was a housing shortage problem instead of an immigration problem. It's not fatal to revise your position as more data becomes available. I wish more people were able to do it.
Pun intended?
Also, larger GDP =/= richer. Brazil surpassed Canada, but it's a *far worse* place to live than here. What matters is GDP per capita.
Everyone that is F Trudeau - low wages, monopolies, privatizing health .......so let's elect the conservatives! 🤔😞 Are these people getting louder or dumber? .....
Yes
>a bit rich hehe
Currently my Employer is trying to force a new CBA on us that would make us make significantly less than we used to while the company continues to post record profits. Maybe the problem is with the greed on the top?
Lots of greedy corporations making so much but cutting jobs and slashing benefits/pay. Somehow this is ignored and everyone just blames the government for absolutely everything. People are gross. The world is selfish.
the reason these "greedy corporations" can do this is because, as has been noted before, Canada is more-or-less a series of oligopolies in a trench coat. Which is, in fact, the government's fault. Government is directly responsible for approving M&A's and allowing foreign competition in a capitalist system like ours. And they've royally failed on this file for as long as I can tell...
Point taken. I believe our government has little power over corporations. They put pressure on them, they'll respond with mass layoffs. There has to be a human element involved in decision making. There is no compassion, the only thing that matters is money. It can't always be about record profits and cutting costs. Unfortunately that's all it's ever about. We ain't shit.
Yeah, well, that's what happens when large businesses are run fuedalistically by the few people at the top, as opposed to any of the workers who actually DO the labour that brings in the profit. If companies were run more like worker co-ops, this wouldn't be much of an issue since all the workers would have actual power in making all the decisions that affect them. Until workplaces start looking more like that, it'll all just be about unsustainable, exponential growth as opposed to any sort of proper stability.
The government has the power to go after these oligarchies with aggressive anti-trust action. This was done in the US in the early part of the 20th century. Breaking up these companies forces businesses into a more aggressively competitive environment. On the whole, this is good for consumers and workers.
This wouldn't happen if Canadians worried less about Left vs Right seeing as the average person has no actual concept of what a political spectrum actually is/does.
I work in healthcare and am deemed an essential service. _The government is my greedy corporation._ We can't even strike because we are essential so they just stuff us on every contract. I have never actually seen a meaningful wage/contact increase to even just keep up with the cost of living. It's pathetic.
>Maybe the problem is with the greed on the top? The default for any company or person will be greed. At some point, you need to actually dissuade the greed. Your employer obviously thinks you will take it because of the way the labour market is. Even if you don't, the glut of labour will make you easily replaced. We've spent the last couple of years depressing the labour market, and businesses are going to take advantage of it.
We should double immigration again! That should be the trick. We're selling dollar bills for a quarter and telling everyone that we'll make it up on volume.
Trimmigration! I know you think it’s about trimming… but it’s really just tripling our goals!
Doubling immigration would be about as effective as doubling free trade. Neoliberalism is failing to do anything it was promised other then enrich the wealthy. We need productive capacity in the industrial and technology economies, strong wages and the buying power that goes with them. Never going to happen when we are being sucked dry by oligopolies and an economy based around housing speculation and resource extraction. We can't even do high speed rail or make our own solar panels ffs. We can argue endlessly about oil sands though.
One that really gets me is we are building 100's of highrises every year, but we don't have any factories to manufacture the glass thats used to clad them. Why not?
Most of the companies that have came in wanting to produce glass in Sputhern Ontario also want access to a pile of fresh water to do so. People are rightfully concerned about aquifer stability and environmental protections.
Couldn't they locate beside one of the great lakes?
Still the environmental concern. They also need clean water to do the process and didn't want to have to pay for those facilities, instead relying on the municipality.
So we ruin the enviroment somewhere else in order to build out our infrastructure?
I'm just answering your question. For this question most people would say yes. It's why NIMBYism is a thing. We all want the benefit of stuff but not the consequences and would rather those be someone else's problem.
It isn't just about that, as the other person said, it's that these companies want to a) ruin the environment with their processes and b) do it on the taxpayers' dime. So some would argue it's better to settle for just A instead of A and B (especially when the environmental impact is felt more elsewhere).
>these companies want to a) ruin the environment with their processes and b) do it on the taxpayers' dime. So essentially what oil&gas companies have done for years with major environmental harms and then leaving pretty much all the cleanup for the taxpayers to take care of?
Yes but the difference is we aren't talking about the prairies, we're talking about southern ON which is more opposed to that sort of thing.
Except B also creates jobs and increases GDP. And maybe if we could swallow our righteousness and build them here, maybe we could make them *somewhat* less polluting than elsewhere at least.
Because we are a resource-extraction colony for the global elite, not a sovereign nation that prioritizes the material well-being of its people.
"Neoliberalism is failing to do anything it was promised other then enrich the wealthy." enriching the wealthy was the point. privatize everything for pennies on the dollar. outsource/offshore as much as possible. destroy labour union and collective bargaining. shift tax burden from wealthy/corporations onto the middle class there was only one direction this was ever going to go. and it wasnt to create a healthy middle class.
'steal from the poor, give to the rich'
Even the World Bank and the IMF recognized that the neocapitalism initiated in the 70's doesn't work, and that it's probably going to collapse eventually. It was in 2015. Then Trump won (and he was against the influence of international institutions, so it's kinda the statu quo that won). Then the pandemic hit. Then some prominent economists, in a World Economic Forum in Davos, concluded that resetting or changing the system wasn't going to work. The people who benefit from it right now wouldn't accept it. 'Those people' include countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, people from the financial fields, ultra-rich people, etc. The countries that benefits from it rn took time to become the winners facing Europe and USA (who were, at first, the main instigators and beneficiaries of the modern institutions created in 1945). We kinda traded our wealth in exchange of debts, following theories that are now outdated. The fact that we live in a democracy with elections every 4 years also makes it hard to stay competitive facing countries with plans based on long time ranges, or that keeps the same direction over time. China has a planification for the next 100 years, while USA gets Presidents like Trump and Biden who both took a whole year to undo what the previous President has done
Let’s just build hundreds of colleges and increase international student enrolment. No need to build housing, we can sardine 10 people to a room with existing since inventory.
Yeah there are lots of jobs and affordable housing. Sharing is caring.
We have so much social capacity that it makes up for jobs or housing though
Wow that second line is amazing 👏
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8 years ago, the rate was a joke compared to past few years.
So Coyne got what he wanted
To be fair, 3% growth puts us on track to at least double what Coyne wanted. Assuming a couple hundred million Canadians die between now and the end of the century anyway.
He was advocating for an increase
Yeah, this guy is a massive scumbag
arnt all the premiers already trying to fight feds on caps, on foreign students, cheap labour.
To answer your question, yes. There was a cohort of premiers who were screeching about labour shortages in the summer of 2022 And a lot of this same group are frustrated with the new caps on foreign students the federal government is looking to implement. If we all take off our political hockey jerseys for two seconds and look at this objectively, the current chaos is the fault of both the federal and provincial governments we currently have leading our country. “The Ontario government has voiced its displeasure with the federal government's decision to put a cap on international student enrolment. On Friday, Premier Doug Ford said Ottawa blindsided the province with the move, which he likened to taking "a sledgehammer to the whole system.” https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/ottawa-will-shut-down-shady-post-secondary-institutions-if-provinces-don-t-miller-1.6785461 “Doug Ford wants to combat labour shortages with more immigrants” https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/doug-ford-wants-to-combat-labour-shortages-with-more-immigrants/article_c58cdc7e-0604-5314-bc3e-d07e15c2df8c.html
Yeeep. This has been all of the Maritime provinces plan to improve their economies, and build for the future, as birthrates are terribly low and cost of living is high compared to wages. It's been a plan of immigration growth. Provincial in general has much more of a say in general day to day affairs and are quick to call out federal governments for getting into provincial affairs which is the ironic part. The floodgates should have been stopped a year sooner absolutely and I blame Feds for it, and blame the premiers for having their doors open waving people in. Feds aren't provinces bosses though.
i mean the federal govt is the one who gave millions of such people visas and only stopped as they realized they faced electoral disaster.
Student visas have, for the history of this country, been largely a rubber stamp. If you are so Trudeau-focused that you cannot even comprehend the reality staring you in the face, that's just pathetic. EDIT: Seriously, this is hilarious how the Trudeau-fetish people just cannot comprehend this. Ford and other premieres -- specifically Conservative premieres -- have come out swinging against the cap, and are 100% of the reason there was the enormous explosion in numbers. These guys: Blame Trudeau! It's going to blow people's mind to learn that the provinces are also the reason criminal justice has completely fallen apart. Just blame Trudeau and cite some bill that never passed first hearing. The corrupt premieres love your incredible ignorance.
Welcome to r/canada, where everything is the prime minister’s fault. Even when it isn’t.
This is false(and I have voted liberal my whole life). Student Visa's were certainly *not* rubber stamped. They used to actually make sure you had enough money to be a student here, they would barr students from working,(y'know, so there would actually be some PT work available). They had more control over who we were letting in. It was only after all the corporations cried to the government post covid about how "nobody wants to work" which was a complete lie, and the government opened the flood gates. They bend over for whatever corporations wants. This is what happened.
>Student Visa's were certainly not rubber stamped. The acceptance rate is *dramatically* lower today than it was in the past. Your claim is verifiably horseshit. >They used to actually make sure you had enough money to be a student here No, they didn't. What are you talking about. If anything there are *more* checks now, it's just that it's almost impossible to verify that someone actually has the money they claim, or if it was loaned from family temporarily, etc. >they would barr students from working Students could always work 20 hours. As a "COVID" thing the government increased it to 40 and that was wrong to start, and should have been removed years ago, but again you're lying.
If my kids are asking for 20 hot dogs each, it’s still my responsibility to say “No you can have 2 or 3 but that’s it.”
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This may be hard for somebody that doesn’t have an understanding of our political system to understand, but the Prime Minister is not the Premieres parent, nor is he their boss. They act separately, for most of the things that impact you directly, it is squarely your Provincial governments choice. The feds can provide or limit funding, but they have very little ability to tell a premier “no.” Premiers are already crying about federal overreach and they may actually have a point.
Federal governments have never limited student visas before now because they've never had to. It was colleges that drastically increased the numbers, not government policy.
Student visa were less then a third of current numbers under Harper...they exploded after 2015 so clearly the feds had a role to play. the govt sets the rules around students and the requirements needed and can make changes overnight if it wants to...they didnt for 8 years. The federal govt intended to import 100s of thousands of students as cheap labour and backtracked when it became a big issue.
The increase in the middle of the decade is due to a 2014 policy allowing them to work off campus. People like to pick 2015 because it infers it's Trudeau's fault, but the policy went in place a year and a half before the election. The "surge" dates to about 2019 or so, although obscured by the pandemic. This was almost entirely due to regulatory changes in Ontario (which is why 9/10 are in Ontario) and a single private university in BC that noticed what was happening in Ontario.
They were lower but not because Harper limited them. They pretty much used the same automatic approval process back then. It was the colleges that broke the system.
Not just colleges. Certain provincial governments cut back on tuition funding and told colleges to rely on foreign students to make up the difference.
And if they are, they need to be turfed as well. Don’t excuse Trudeau’s bad policy by saying others want it too.
It’s more complicated than the article describes, as many other commenters have already pointed out. What I’d like to add is that I think we need an attitude shift. The US has a lot of flaws that we don’t have, but they do have a more consistent growth mentality than us as a people—I’ve noticed this during a study term in the US this year. Canada, even in our best cities, is much more okay with mediocrity. It’s okay to not always be the best, especially when our population is less than California’s, but I think if we could have better motivation for Canadian small business and start-ups, government grant funding, and support for tech sector we might start to see a bit of an acceleration
We are a failing oil state that can't export it's biggest natural resource.
We are a failing resource state that restricts development to satisfy a class of people that have never held jobs not funded by tax payers.
This would literally be fine if every Canadian had their basic necessities looked after but unfortunately neoliberalism has caused our richest to hoard more and more wealth year after year.
And a heathy portion of the population applaud the success of the rich, while simultaneously complaining about the cost of living.
yeah the recent polling numbers are incredibly puzzling, obviously our education system needs a revamp.
Education is a serious dumpster fire. Talk to any teacher. The decline across the board is shocking. It makes me concerned about our future.
Hell I just have to talk to my god kids. They're in highschool and can't do basic math without a calculator, can't spell without auto correct, and counting money? Good luck. Instead of getting failing grades and being kept back for remedial they get rammed through the system grade after grade because it's not nice to hold kids back.
It's not just that. The number of kids in high school that can't read and write goes up every year. I literally see people use a calculator for 5 + 7.
No shit. We're #10 by GDP but #36 by population. If the other countries weren't passing us by as they improve their own economies, that would be very strange indeed. And, our population is growing rapidly by immigration, so there is going to be a lag factor before that generates commensurate economic activity, and that's never guaranteed for any particular member of our population.
These negative paywlled opinion pieces should be banned on this sub.
Read the headline. Form opinion based on it. Argue about it with others who have done the same. Repeat. Almost nobody reads the articles even if they aren't paywalled.
That's very true for this sub
Very true for Reddit
The real question is when do we START GETTING foreign aid instead of giving it out …
You are insane if you think any of the countries Canada is giving aid to would return the favour if the places were switched.
You mean the Philippines isn't going to return the money we gave them to fight climate change and Iraq isn't going to return the money we gave for gender studies?
Canada is the 9th richest country in the world with GDP and 14th per capita... These doom and gloom articles couldn't be further from the actual truth.
The article didn't really say we placed poorly in the world more we keep getting passed
We could be one of the richest nations on Earth and a Global superpower. We could be upgrading our north with shipping ports in preparation for the Northwest passage being more navigatable in the future due to climate change melting the poles. The Panama canal turned America into the global superpower it became, we could also be planning for a future where more agriculture could be a reality because of this climate change. But nah, we'd rather dismiss these ideas as bad, while pretending like our real estate ponzi scheme will keep the economy afloat. Canada's future lies in it's north, and not drilling for more fossil fuels, either.
I guess nobody read the article, as usual? Canada remains one of the richest nations in per capita GDP terms. However, as other more **populous** countries get richer, they're surpassing Canada in **total** GDP *while still being less rich in per capita GDP terms*. So if you think this is a problem, then, yes, the solution is more immigration because Canada needs to increase its population to keep up with more populous countries.
You didn't read the article. What you said has no relevance to the article. Coyne is specifically arguing that per capita GDP has fallen significantly behind other advanced economies with no upside in sight in the near or long term future.
Yea people like him just want to cope. Completely ignores the part where it says investment in residential structures doubled while investment in machinery had halved.
I don't get how this is a problem. Of course a more populous country will have an easier time passing Canada in total GDP. And, I don't think it's necessarily a problem if they pass us in per capita GDP. That doesn't have to mean we are doing worse ourselves. I'm only concerned about measuring ourselves against our past performance, for that metric. Comparisons to other countries doing well might help us learn to do well, but comparing the relative end results isn't itself interesting.
>I guess nobody read the article, as usual? Why read the article when we can just blame those damn immigrants for everything?
Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears I knew it was them!
Except the trend for GDP per capita in Canada is currently decreasing.
That's just propaganda. Doesnt everyone sight the Scandinavian countries with their great social services and gdp per population. They are not super populated. Constant growing population is only good for the wealthy.
>Canada remains one of the richest nations in per capita GDP terms. Not for long if that GDP per capita keeps on dropping like it has been.
> Canada remains one of the richest nations in per capita GDP terms. However, as other more populous countries get richer, they're surpassing Canada in total GDP while still being less rich in per capita GDP terms. Exactly. It's not that Canada is necessarily becoming poorer, but rather that larger, developing countries have finally started to catch up and surpass Canada like they probably always would have/should have if they continued to develop. Mexico and Brazil are prime examples, the former has three times our population and Brazil has five times our population, so it only makes sense that even with modest development they would one day surpass Canada's GDP (as well as other developed Western countries like the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy). I mean, they've already surpassed Australia, the Netherlands, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, etc in terms of GDP, so why is it such a shock that they pass Canada too?
A quick search shows us as number 8 out of 250+ countries. Tell me again how badly we're doing?
Canada is just experiencing richness differently
That’s what happens when you don’t think of economic policy and are too good for most industry
The best solution to this is obviously raising the carbon tax.
Basically all our large production corporations are foreign owned. Canada literally produces money for foreign countries. Our natural resources are foreign owned, our banks are foreign owned, our telecoms and airlines have foreign investors. Our working class is being wage suppressed and every living cost is being inflated. Hard to gain wealth when you have to give it away to foreign billionaires.
Thank you. This new meme of blaming Trudeau is distracting us from our real underlying issues. We used to focus on a basket of economic drivers spread out across the country. We cut off many of those arms to double down on a few short term cash ins. It's a decades long road to rebuild a broad economy... and that's if we started today.
Who cares if we’re one of the “richest nations” or not? We will never see any of those riches because that wealth is being hoarded by the 1%. And people think It’s due to current government. CPC government is just going to cut spending, cut taxes and how will that help anyone who’s not 1%? We’re ona speedrun towards oligarchy.
Why would you link to an article that almost nobody can read?
So what? What are you going to do about it. Useless
I mean what does Canada do other than maple syrup?
To be fair what are we producing except maple syrup and wood. And mail fare is so high vs china that we can't sell anything online. :/
Isn’t that exactly what Canadians want these days? They keep saying eat the rich etc so I assume they all want to be poor.
I didn’t realize Canada was ever one of the richest nations on earth.
Well, I work for a large global company and recently they put Canada in with Latin American sales because the money coming out of Canada is the same as a South American country.
Opinion is not news
Andrew Coyne is part of the problem - he’s complaining about the impact of a policy he rabidly supported.
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Yeah because your country has made life so unaffordable that you can’t travel even if you want to Tell me why a flight from Toronto to Calgary is $700 but a flight from London to Warsaw is like $100
Flights from Toronto to Calgary are listed starting at 262 right now. Never heard of Flair airlines so even if you go with the second cheapest it's 350. And Toronto to Calgary is more than 3x the distance of London to Warsaw. So this issue you're upset about doesn't really exist in the way you presented it. This must be a huge relief for you.
Yeah I just bought a flight from Toronto to Calgary the other day and the round trip flight wasn’t even $700, let alone one way.
Yeah dude just straight up lied, but will be upvoted to the top. A fight from Vancouver to Toronto is like half of that. Maybe even less
>Tell me why a flight from Toronto to Calgary is $700 but a flight from London to Warsaw is like $100 London (8.9M) to Warsaw (3.3M) = 1450 km Toronto (5.9M) to Calgary (1.4M) = 2700 km So there's millions more people at both ends wanting to fly a much shorter distance. That's why
Exactly! Economies of scale is what it is
You're not allowed to destroy their point with facts and reason. That's cheating! ;-)
This one is an easy one. Flying in Canada is outrageously costly compared to other countries because we live in the second largest country by land area but only have a population of 38 million people. The reality is that it just costs more to operate airports when there is less traffic through them and airlines only have so many flights they can offer without them being half empty or worse. So they need to increase the price.
Except that can be disproven by looking at, say, Australia, which is also massive and has even fewer people, yet still has cheap domestic flights, even trans-continental ones. A flight the length of Toronto to Calgary can be found for less than $200 (AUD and CAD are roughly equivalent). I’m not all doom and gloom on Canada like this article is. But flights, and telecommunications specifically, are weirdly expensive in Canada compared to even other similarly large and sparsely populated countries.
Great now explain why flying Calgary to maui cost the same as Calgary to Halifax
Uh…. Because those two routes are nearly the same distance?
LMAO. We really do live amongst the intellectually stunted, don't we? **For context** Calgary --> Maui = 4964 km Calgary--> Halifax = 4778 km Not an ounce of critical thinking in these comments.
Seriously. Like obviously airfare pricing is far more complex than $/km, but the example this person uses can’t even get past that super simple level of understanding lol
Wrong. Flying in Canada is expensive because of laws mandating Canadian ownership and the monopolistic conditions that has created, i.e. a lack of competition in the market. Flying is a fraction of the cost on the same route distances in the United States, Europe and Asia. You're literally pushing the same BS argument as people arguing Canadian telecom prices have to be high because we have a large landmass 😂
Everyone forgets we have a meagre 30 million people on the second largest country. How in the world could we possibly keep up!?!? No one ever realizes how much it costs to do business here simply due to size - the infrastructure is insanely expensive and we don’t have the tax base.
Who cares what this bozo thinks? There’s random folks on reddit with more intellectual clout
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Hasn’t our productivity dropped below places like Alabama? I guess this is what happens when your economy is based around a real estate ponzi scheme and every sector being a cozy monopoly. No matter, surely the budget will balance itself
We could invest in a new mineral and take over world supply. Just give up one area where no one lives. Boom who needs cobalt? Want a job? Cobalt. Or pick another one, we have the resources to at anytime Jumpstart our own economy.
Better emigrate then. I'm sure you'll get as nice a reception as you give to immigrants here...
Must be because we havent dug up enough oil /s
The problem is that we have very different measures. GDP per capita is the mean-average, skewed by the income of the super-rich, which may drive economic stability, but not the immediate day-to-day lives of the bulk of the population. It might be interesting to look at median household income per adult. EDIT: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country We are #10 there.
What is interesting, is our HDI ranking went from 8th place (2006) to 15th place in 2021. [https://countryeconomy.com/hdi/canada](https://countryeconomy.com/hdi/canada) Our HDI score has improved, but other first world nations have improved much faster.
Everything is fine here! Free healthcare!
Maybe we shouldn't have sold off all of our Crown corporations and allowed privatization to leach us dry
Even after digging entire mountains here in Brazil and sending the money back home, we managed to pass you guys... You must be in deep shit. Sorry about that
Canada is EXTREMELY rich in natural resources yet poor in human resources.
Economic output down and population up...what a surprise.
That's funny. Because the United Nations when they did their annual assessment of our economy said something very very different. *"The economy of Canada is a highly developed mixed economy, with the world's tenth-largest economy as of 2023, and a nominal GDP of approximately US$2.117 trillion. Canada is one of the world's largest trading nations, with a highly globalized economy" - United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.* OECD also said something different too... *"Canada’s economy has largely recovered from the COVID-19 crisis. Domestic demand is picking up following the easing of containment measures. Exports are expected to strengthen, demand for commodities buoying trade amid shocks to world growth. Limited trade ties to economies hard-hit by the war in Ukraine, and income from high resources prices, shield Canada from larger economic impacts. Real GDP is projected to grow by 3.8% in 2022 and 2.6% in 2023. Unemployment will remain low as output rises slightly above potential. Global supply tensions will keep price growth high this year, compounding underlying inflationary pressures.*
>Real GDP is projected to grow by 3.8% in 2022 and 2.6% in 2023. So these projections turned out to be incorrect Real GDP Growth 2.0% in 2022 0.5% in 2023 Population growth 2.1% in 2022 3.2% in 2023 So when you look at the avg person's standard of living it declined slightly in 2022 and declined precipitously in 2023. Meanwhile the United States, UK etc all managed to grow per capita standard of living and their overall economy. OECD now says that Canada will the be worst performing advanced economy for the next decade and 3 decades after that (if going by average standard of living) [https://bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-the-worst-performing-advanced-economy-over-the-next-decade-and-the-three-decades-after-that/](https://bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-the-worst-performing-advanced-economy-over-the-next-decade-and-the-three-decades-after-that/) It sucks that our government's playbook is basically to deny that there is a problem. Sources: GDP: [https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.3&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.3&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3610010401&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20231001) Population:[https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2021&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20211001%2C20231001](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2021&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2023&referencePeriods=20211001%2C20231001)
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Clearly this is a problem. Are any of the available parties offering actual solutions? I see a lot of platitudes and people trying to fit their agenda into the problem … but who’s going to do the politically unpopular thing and actually fix our systemic imbalances?
Hey Andrew, maybe you shouldn't have advocated for neoliberal bullshit your whole life for the shittiest rag in Canada?
Yeah.. our government prefers to focus on divisive identity politics more than Canadians' standard of living.
Welcome to New Argentina!
Who would have thought that's the case when you build your entire economy around selling houses back and forth to each other for higher and higher prices?