I am Groot

You know all this would have happened under the conservative if Trump had just kept his mouth shut, right?

Agriculture tends to be where there aren't a ton of people. And planting and harvesting is not something you pick up over a weekend. Your body isn't in shape because it's extremely physically demanding work. You can't tell someone who lost their job as a retail clerk or a barista to drive out into the country (presuming they have a car) and pick apples. I'm not a farmer but I can't see how we need agricultural workers in the winter. We fly agriculture workers in from Mexico for harvest and planting, and then fly them home again.

CBSA is so desperate to have a more 'diverse' workforce, it's not just discriminating against white men, nor just against white people, but against CANADIANS. It's so desperate to hire brown people that it's willing to hire agents who aren't even Canadians, nor even permanent residents. The guy here on a foreign worker permit at Tim Hortons is welcome to apply, as are the foreign students. Funny, I haven't noticed a lack of 'diversity' among CBSA people at Canadian airports. Has anyone else gone to the airport lately and thought, "Boy, where did all these Scandinavian employees come from!?"

Note that 'equity' is simply creating equality! How can that be bad!? Equality between those who are very good at their job and those who are not very good at their job is surely a desirable thing in hiring and promotion! Employment equity means employers must eliminate barriers to various minority groups like, uhm, competence. Being able to communicate in English. Things like that...

Obtained from a 1708 page ATIP disclosure of public service DEI training. Note how it defines racists. Specifically, if a person "does not work to reduce harm to racialized persons" then that person is a RACIST. Also, if you believe in equality, but not equity, you're a RACIST. This is your government, folks.

10,000-15,000 excess deaths a year due to the overcrowding in our emergency rooms right across the country. And does anyone in our political class care? Evidently, not much. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/emergency-department-deaths

The big trouble is that when dealing with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a little “stabilizing” can slide into “normalizing” relations with a state that’s anything but normal or trustworthy. And when the costs of dependence and arbitrary political decisions are calculated, far fewer economic agreements look worthwhile. All four countries have been down that rough road before: Canada (and I) had the ordeal of the Meng-Michaels affair; India got a border war that killed 20 of its soldiers; Australia spent years in the Party’s doghouse losing billions of dollars in trade; and Japan is currently suffering its economic and diplomatic wrath after Takaichi stated publicly what has been longstanding policy on Taiwan. The uncomfortable reality is that accommodating Beijing’s demands at best yields temporary relief, and at worst incentivizes further bullying. -- When democracies like these four provide the market access that sustains China’s overproductive model, they reinforce the industrial scale, technological learning and capital accumulation that underpin the CCP’s geoeconomic leverage, geopolitical influence and military power. That’s why any benefits from doing more business with China need to be weighed against a trifecta of costs: the companies and jobs destroyed by unfair competition; higher spending on defence, security and resilience; and the risks that trade and investment contribute resources that help the CCP achieve goals — like controlling Taiwan and dominating its Asian neighbours — that also threaten Canada and its allies. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/michael-kovrig-carneys-in-big-trouble-with-even-a-little-china

Anyone want to bet we haven't reverted to buying all our PPE from China and let the local producers go out of business? Guess how much of our medicines, including prescriptions, come from China? Run a pipeline across the sacred homeland of the Kaybekers! Sacre-bleu! We are not going to build that. We are just going to spend tens of millions on Liberal connected contractors to 'study' the idea.

The reasons they're more expensive here ARE the government. While I agree we don't want to throw all the environmental rules into the garbage like China has, there has to be a way to refine these metals here while accepting 'some' degree of local, contained pollution. Subsidize them and tariff the ones from China if necessary. These are more important to be able to produce and refine locally than milk, which is HEAVILY subsidized and protected by tarriffs.

They will work in those areas when the wage rate rises. I make an exception for agriculture, as long as they're temporary and go home in the winter.

So your reply, basically, is "I don't care about the economy as long as the one man who can give me a stiffy when he s miles at me through the TV stays as prime minister."

Note that if you read that, all it really says is we look for a police clearance certificate that says they're not wanted for anything, and check to see if they're on a terrorist watch list. That is not what I mean by vetting. Plus, that only applies to immigrants. The government stopped bothering with foreign workers and foreign students. Any real vetting would require interviews with the subjects, which we do not do. I'm sure I'm not the only one who regularly hears from tradesmen about how this or that immigrant claiming to be an electrician or a bricklayer or welder or whatever turns out to know virtually nothing about them. I have heard at a distance removed stories of so-called engineers and various types of IT professionals knowing little or nothing as well. Fake documents are everywhere in our source countries. You can't even be sure the person is a professional at what he claims without an interview. First, we have to recognize that we obviously cannot grow our population indefinitely. It's not possible. Not without making life here miserable. There has to be an endpoint to the idea that simply adding people will grow our economy and make things better. I would suggest that we could cope with shrinking numbers by finally adopting the labour-saving technology that countries like Japan have long used. Add in AI and growing automation, and we could grow out economy by increasing productivity and production that way.

I know that a lot of Canadians have patted themselves on the back for years about our wonderful immigration system, but the stats have always showed immigrants do better in the US than in Canada. You need a job offer to immigrate to the US. No such requirement exists here. Also, US immigrants are mostly Hispanics. Ours are mostly Arabs, Pakistanis, North Africans, and Indians (and often the wrong kind of Indians). The reason you should question whether this is true of Canada is that the government refuses to collect such statistics. Not to mention that the immigrants and refugees going into the UK and other Euro countries are from the same sources as the ones coming here. Why would you imagine ours would be more law-abiding than theirs when we do virtually nothing to screen ours? Refugees also make up a much higher proportion of our immigrants than is the case in the US.

I've been saying for a while now that what the Trump white house really wants are not trade concessions but a change in our behaviour towards Chinese influence and towards developing our natural resources. I've been reading in multiple areas over the last weeks that the US is running out of its expensive weapons systems. For example, the US makes just 700 Patriot missiles a year. It makes less than 100 THAAD systems. Raytheon is increasing their manufacture of Sidewinder missiles and hopes to reach 2500 a year by 2028. They are increasing their production of air-to-ground cruise missiles from 115 to 550 by 2029. Similar increases are going on with all their other missiles. They will need a lot more drones. A LOT more drones to match the Russians and Chinese. They don't even have enough for Iran without leaving themselves dangerously short. And Russia and China have many more missiles and drones than the US, then the US and the entire West. China's production capacity is up to 500,000 armed drones per month. So, where does the US get the minerals, the rare earths, and metals? At the moment, a lot of it comes from China. And China could cut that off at any time. The entire West is dependent on China for rare earths and Russia for gas. Especially with the war in Iran (Trump cancelled the sanctions and restrictions on Russian oil and gas). How soon before the gulf can resume oil and gas shipments? Who knows. With all the drones Iran has it could bottleneck the gulf for a long time. Canada has enough natural gas to power the world for 200 years. It has almost every rare earth and metal the US and the West needs. Unfortunately, it has a government that despises its natural resources industries and has been working to shut them down for over a decade. It's done that with a myriad of rules and regulations, with long, complex approval processes that can easily exceed a decade and cost a mining or oil company hundreds of millions to wade through. That has to stop. If we promise to rapidly develop and ship these things, we could get a lot of trade concessions, not only from the US but from Europe. Not to mention a hell of a lot of money to help our economy. The West is currently facing a supply-chain crisis for military procurement. Even the world’s most powerful army cannot assume victory if the war lasts more than a few weeks. It may simply run out of key materiel. And the US is already running into bottlenecks. Contrary to Trump’s recent claims that the US has “a virtually unlimited supply” of munitions, Foreign Policy magazine reports that the war is already burning through the US/Israeli arsenal at such an alarming rate that the retaliatory destruction caused by Iran could take years to fix — and only then if the defense-critical minerals can be sourced. Tracing the military supply chains all the way back to their original sources, the journalists discovered that it is all but impossible to “instantly reverse decades of consolidated construction lines and atrophied mineral processing capacity”. Metals, minerals and chemicals sit at the top of every supply chain, and most have to be extracted. These raw materials are then processed to produce those essential base materials like steel, aluminum, or magnets. The material goes through a number of further processing stages and if the final product is complex, like a military radar, or even a car, there will be many additional nodes in your supply chains. Small wonder the German car industry regularly breaks into sweat whenever China restricts the supply of any single piece of equipment — such as an essential mid-range semiconductor. Without it, their engines are useless. https://archive.is/r2432

Under the direction of the Liberals, racial hiring quotas are rampant throughout the public sector and spreading into the private sector, especially in companies that have to deal with the federal government. The government doesn't care if you're competent, just so you're not white. Or worse, white and male. Interesting to note the CBC bragging that only 1.5% of the people they've hired in the last year are white. https://archive.is/r1zVk

I'm sure it doesn't. And I'm sure that wasn't the intention. It was, however, the result. And to admit one was wrong is simply not in the playbook of the Liberal party. So they soldier on, ignoring the bodies piling up, hand-waving away all the complaints. Bill C-75 (2019): This legislation codified the "principle of restraint," directing police and courts to release accused persons at the "earliest reasonable opportunity" and on the least restrictive terms. Add to this that Canadians probably don't even understand what 'bail' is because our cultural views are shaped by American television. In the US, you pay some money to be out on bail. If you violate your bail, you lose that money. In Canada, you virtually never put up any money. And if you violate your bail, there's no charge other than 'violating release conditions', and that always gets rolled in with whatever the original offense is, so that they're served concurrently. So there is essentially no punishment. Bill C-75 was aimed at reducing pre-trial detention for marginalized groups That seems more important to the Liberals than the safety of the community. Although the very term 'marginalized' is insane as it suggests a group being acted upon by society as opposed to a group being the victim of their own bad behaviour.

They always are. Until they build up their numbers. Then they make everyone else their victims.

Yes, I have noticed a distinct lack of gratitude among many of the new cadre of immigrants and refugees. And a complete lack of respect for the culture and values that created the place they decided to come to because they could have a better life here. They want that to change to be more like theirs. The idea that their culture and values are what created the shitholes they fled from never seems to occur to these people. Take everyone out of Libya (or Iran, or Pakistan, or Haiti) and replace them with Swedes or Germans or Japanese, and what kind of country do you think it would be in twenty-five years?

Do I habitually insult you? I'll make the response briefer. A small number of wealthy/highly skilled individuals can make a small, positive difference. Add in tons of poor people and the difference is negative. No, that is what I'd like, but no vetting takes place. Most people immigrate without any interviews or tests based simply on their application form and their 'stated' skills and education, which may be false. That doesn't mean they like it. Harper's level was too high, as was Chretien's. We know this from a report from Immigration Canada in 2016, which said Canada was losing its absorptive capacity, that integration was not guaranteed, that ethnic enclaves were growing, and that immigrants were no longer learning local languages as readily as before, and that their economic outcomes were deteriorating. Yes. We are An American talking about America. Most of their immigrants are better screened, and the illegal immigrants are mostly from Latin and South America. Ours are from North Africa, the Middle East, and West Asia. I have posted repeated cites from Euro governments detailing just how violent these people are. The "open and transparent" Liberal government, of course, refuses to tell us much of anything about virtually anything related to immigration or crime. My view on the problems of the economy is that it is caused by government overregulation and overtaxation, not world competition. Witness how well the US economy has done compared to ours. The white population of Toronto is between 40%-43%. In the 1971 census, 96% of Canada, including Toronto, was of European descent.

There's a trial nearing its conclusion this week in BC of three Punjabi men who murdered an elderly couple in a robbery. The brutality of the act is something we rarely see in Canada except in cases of enraged men taking vengeance for some real or imagined slight. Nor were they insane. What makes this so bad is that there was no ill will involved, no anger against the couple. The men had worked there a time or two, cleaning rain gutters, and figured they had money. So they decided to rob them. Killing them was just to ensure they could use their credit cards and write bad cheques on their accounts, and so they wouldn't be identified. As a robbery, it was pathetic. The police easily caught them and with a ton of evidence. They even kept the baseball bat they used on the woman, and considered it something of a trophy. It was an act of such casual violence that you'd think they were sociopaths. But sociopaths don't run in groups. No, these were men from a society where empathy is strictly reserved for family and friends. Empathy, care, or concern for outsiders is nonexistent when you can profit from the lack. I came across this piece on other social media, but it was incomplete, leaving me to do a Google search on Singh and murder and BC. There are, to put it mildly, a lot of cases. If it's not already, I'm guessing the name Singh will soon be by far and away the most common name listed in the federal prison system. And almost all of them are the product of our immigration/refugee/foreign worker/foreign student program. They are foreign-born and were allowed in with no vetting. No one as backward, ignorant and unsophisticated as this trio ought to have been allowed into Canada. Yet they were. And a lot more like them. https://www.lakelandtoday.ca/technology/smile-of-a-murderer-bc-double-killing-suspects-seen-posing-with-alleged-weapon-11970513

I want to stop importing poor people. I want to stop importing people with values and cultures that hate ours. The only people I want to bring in are people who will earn at least the median income and who are truly interested in integrating with our own culture and values. And I want those numbers below 100k. We could start with GDP per capita. We could add things like standard of living, disposable income, affordability of food and housing, and availability of decent jobs. If all of that is going down, then we're not being helped. If you're not arguing net overall, then what's the argument about? I'm sure some people, like the owners of oligopolies, benefit. I'm just saying the Canadian people do not. Your argument, remember, was not that certain or some Canadians benefited, but that 'working Canadians' as a group benefited. And I don't see it. No, I'm a classical liberal. Who would cut welfare and social welfare services to the bone for anyone healthy, and make them inaccessible to those not born in Canada. If you can't support yourself here without my help, then go home. That's what people used to do before social welfare programs, you know. The country going bankrupt as it is overrun by third-world men who will then get violent and turn us into South Africa I haven't seen a repairman or service person in the stores for either Bell or Rogers in ten years who was white or spoke without an accent. I'd like to kidnap you, throw you into a time machine, and send you back to Toronto in 1970 to see what it was like to walk around where everyone spoke your language flawlessly and had the same sense of shared identity. Maybe you could drop by downtown ER waiting room while you're there and gape at the empty chairs. Mind you, if I had a time machine, I could find a better use for it than putting you in. For one, going back in time and investing everything into Bitcoin when it was ten cents each. For another, go back and grab Trudeau the elder and then have him walk around downtown Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal today and see if his immigration changes were a good idea.

No, but we do need people who will say "Do it or you're fired." And we don't seem to have any of those. The medical establishment strongly resists any changes to its regulations. I really think that they look down their nose at a doctor whose only accomplishments are graduating first in his class at Harvard and heading up the ER at Johns Hopkins, and feel they should have to go through medical school again in Canada in order to qualify to practice here. Mostly, we get third-world doctors approved because they're the only ones willing to put up the dogged persistence over the years to qualify. For Western doctors, it seems not to be worth the effort. Fun fact: There are an estimated 6,700-8,000 Canadian doctors, and over 18,000 Canadian nurses working in the US.