I am Groot

I disagree. The old belief that immigration 'helps our economy' is simply based on an increased GDP. Yes, if you bring in half a million more people, your GDP gets bigger. No one disputes that. But is it helpful in the ways that matter to ordinary people? It might help the bottom line of some oligopolies with little competition. They'll get more customers. But how does that help the rest of us if it also means they get to hire very cheap employees and keep wages depressed? I guess the point I mean is it increases the size of the economy, but does it make it better for us? Does it make us richer? Does it make the government better off, especially if a substantial number of the newcomers will not be paying taxes due to a progressive tax system? Because when that happens, you're importing more people to take care of without a countervailing increase in taxes.

Would you READ an economic case? I have posted many of them by economists saying immigration is not helping our economy and is not going to help with a declining population.

The Americans will do that. We just have to catch those who evade them. The important part isn't catching, but booting them out without spending years in courts doing it. Am I? Add up all the costs for millions of people who aren't paying taxes but are using government services, from roads to healthcare. It's tens of billions a year. You could build a pretty high wall for that. Millions if not billions of decent, ordinary people in need of food, clean water, shelter and medical care are bound to constitute a form of moral blackmail. They will all have heartbreaking stories. And if we continue to confront the issue as a question of sympathy rather than existential self-interest, they will nearly all get in. Thomas Friedman has astutely characterised the West vs the rest as order vs disorder. But with overstressed welfare systems, accelerating cultural upheaval and rising right-wing militancy, the lands of order can slide to chaos themselves. If in the next few decades we’re looking at migration on the scale I think we are, we may be required to develop a hard heart, or simply surrender to forces larger than we can control. I’m not sure which is worse. Personally, I'm all for developing a hard heart. https://archive.is/blKvW

So how do we get voters to be less tolerant of lying, incompetent politicians? Trudeau was caught lying - bald-faced lies to the cameras on multiple occasions - and he still got re-elected. Carney got caught doing the same before he even ran for PM and people voted enthusiastically for him. I think it needs to start in schools. We need to start teaching kids critical thinking as a reflex action, to always question, to research, to demand honesty, and to be extremely intolerant of lies. We need more of our media, too. We need it to lay out straight, complete facts on important matters without narrative.

Which is why we need to get control of our borders and our immigration and refugee system NOW. We cannot continue with a system whereby it takes years of court battles and tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs to get rid of someone who shouldn't be here in the first place. Not when dealing with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of illegals. It is simply not possible, even if we could arrest the three million people whose visas are ending this year, and then deport them. We need to make it almost impossible for them to live and work here, including policing and stopping remittance payments to their families back home, so they'll leave on their own. Then we need to turn them back new ones at the border or detain them for quick hearings, which are not subject to court interventions, and deport the vast majority. Note. I do not see the Liberals being willing to do any of this.

This is just bad government. We have dumb leaders at all levels. And when we run what is almost an imperial type of government, where the PM or premier is a king who can do anything they want, that's trouble. We have dumb leaders at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. I wonder whether we should look into that, and why dumb people keep getting elected.

There's another part that goes with this, at least for Quebec. They get a lot of money out of their hydroelectricity system. But to keep transfer payments high, they under-charge their people, who get the benefit of extra cheap power, the lowest in Canada, PLUS higher transfer payments from Western Canadian oil and gas that they disdain. Wait, isn't it Quebec who are the most zealous in fighting CO2? Why should they want to keep power rates down? Doesn't that discourage people from conservation measures?

Quebec is the same. And I'm sure this is a part of it. But damn, did the line where it said Canada has enough natural gas reserve to power the planet for 200 years surprise anyone else? And yet we have NO LNG terminals! It's insane! Australis is getting $90 billion a year added to their GDP. We could have even more, and perhaps help countries using coal to move to natural gas. Australia has 10 LNG export terminals and we just finally opened one after costly, lengthy, and exhausting battles. And so we sit with our deteriorating economy, our rapidly growing debt, and governments in Ottawa, New Brunswick, and Quebec that seem unconcerned about either. It's insanity. All transfer payments should be stopped to Quebec and New Brunswick. If they don't want to develop their own natural gas, they should not benefit from others who did.

Australia's national debt is 30% of GDP vs Canada at 110% Australia has a functioning healthcare system. Canada does not. Australia's unemploymenr rate is 4%. Canada's is alleged to be 6.5% Australia's GDP per capita is US$69k. Canada's GDP per capita is US$58k One wonders what could account for all this. This week, an LNG tanker called the Maran Gas Hector pulled into an LNG import terminal in Saint John, N.B., after charting a 25,000 km course direct from Gladstone, Australia. The Maran Gas Hector was bringing gas into a region littered with failed or stalled proposals to send Canadian natural gas in the other direction. As far back as 2015, the Canada Energy Regulator was listing four proposed LNG export terminals on Canada’s Atlantic coast. None of these projects bore fruit, including one that would have been directly adjacent to the Saint John facility where the Maran Gas Hector ultimately docked to unload its cargo. The Maran Gas Hector is also selling gas to customers with vast reserves of natural gas located just beneath their feet. New Brunswick, in particular, is known to sit atop an estimated 77.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to Natural Resources Canada. That’s enough to fill the Maran Gas Hector at least 20,000 times. But the main reason these reserves have never been tapped is because in 2014 New Brunswick imposed an indefinite moratorium on hydraulic fracturing (fracking), the precise system that would be needed to extract the gas reserves. And New Brunswick’s gas reserves are just a small share of the Canadian total, which are about 1.4 quadrillion cubic feet. According to one analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy, that’s enough for Canada to meet all the world’s natural gas needs for 200 years. Ah, okay, I understand. It's more of that ludicrous net-zero nonsense that has captured the Left. They'd rather we be poor than develop icky fossil fuel. Even though there is zero chance this will have ANY impact on global warming. https://archive.is/2i85Z

Sorry, but no. He did make some small changes in hopes of getting more skilled immigrants, but we didn't need immigration in the numbers we got, and in fact, they came in such great numbers we were not able to absorb them, as Immigration Canada warned a year or so after he left office in a study based on statistics from the 2016 census. Why didn't he cut immigration? Because he was too scared to challenge the liberal narrative that immigration, in whatever numbers, was an unparalleled good and only racists and xenophobes would dare to want less of it. Just as Scheer was too scared to challenge it. Just as O'Toole was too scared to challenge it. I don't know that Poilievre ever WANTED to challenge it. He finally did last year, forced by his base, too little too late.

The same as all the other Canadians who want the flood of drooling, unskilled, 80 IQ migrants flooding into Canada to stop. Wait! Are you... are you operating under the belief that immigration levels are based on some kind of formula or assessment of Canada's economic needs? You can't be that dumb! Canada's immigration levels have not been based on our economic needs for at least forty years. They're based on political pandering to ethnic voting blocs, the desire to keep house prices up to please boomers, and the desire to lower wages to please corporations. The policy to strangle all natural resource industries as well as all other polluting industries so as to achieve net zero goals. Anyone who bases decisions on ideology rather than known facts is dumb. This man is alleged to be an economist, and yet takes dumb positions like saying immigration levels don't affect housing costs, and supports an absurd desire to lower our CO2 emissions at all costs despite a mathematical certainty that this will accomplish absolutely nothing while being extremely damaging to our economy and society.

Reading about fighting in the DRC at the moment, where it talks about drone strikes hitting rebel-held areas. In Africa. Africans are using drones. Azerbaijan defeated Albania years ago using drones. Armed drones are spreading out around the world. Except here. Canada has precisely ZERO armed drones and no plans to acquire any in the near future. We did put in an order for Reaper drones as I mentioned above, but with all the changes, we want it will be at least a decade before we get any. That's how far behind Canada is. Behind Africans and places like Turkey and Azerbaijan. At least 48 countries now have armed drones. Canada has none and no defenses against them. And the urgency to do anything, this seems to me to be something like a 3 or 4 on a scale of 1-100.

No. Which is why the cite you replied to but didn't read mentioned several other measures. All articles are useless when you can't be bothered reading them. And yet, all the policies that have caused our economy to lag remain in place. No, he's even dumber than Trudeau!

How about this? There is an ongoing debate over whether Canada is doing better economically than Alabama, based on their relative GDP per capita, with many on the Canadian Left arguing that our country's economic performance and quality of life look much better when other factors are taken into account. Unfortunately, this argument misses the mark. When we expand our comparisons beyond Alabama, it quickly becomes apparent that GDP per capita is, if anything, overstating the relative state of our economy and wellbeing relative to our global peers. https://archive.is/UOYsr

Where in the hell would you get any suggestion that Trump did everything right from what I wrote? I told you that my judgment is not based on partisanship. Trump's handling of the pandemic was incompetent, stupid, and mean-spirited. The only thing he did right was to make a grand gesture by throwing money at the pharmaceutical companies to develop a vaccine.

So no specifics. Just you talking out of your ass again, desperate to pump up the narrative of Carney as economic genius. So once again, dodging the points. We were in trouble in every economic area before Trump got elected. The cause? Your beloved Liberal party.

Entirely useful given the narrative from the pro-mass-immigration people is that the only ones who want immigration greatly cut are white supremacists.

Don't mistake judgment for partisanship. Was anything I wrote incorrect? I can't believe Ford got re-elected after that debacle either. People died because people like Ford and Trudeau weren't up to the job.

Even the great majority of immigrants want less immigration. Two thirds felt it should be less than 300k. Forty percent felt it should be less than 100k a year. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2025/11/24/immigration-crackdown-new-omni-poll-shows-newcomers-want-canada-to-admit-fewer-immigrants/

Federal regulations control what can and can't be exported, as well. In what area? Give me some specifics. I find it irritating how so many brainless twats on the Left use the term 'far right' for basically anyone conservative.

Trump is a handy excuse. That's why the Liberals are ragging the puck and not trying to get a deal. It's good for their popularity to have Trump mouthing off at us. All the problems that had the Liberals down in the polls before Trump arrived, are still in place. Trump didn't create our low productivity, our low and diminishing GDP per person, our industries decamping for China, our mess of homeless encampments and violence in the streets, our huge deficits, our staggering healthcare system. All of these predate Trump. And none of them are going to improve based on current government policies.

You... do realize there are other countries in Asia besides China, right?

F*ck that. This is a complete bullshit narrative. I hate how the Liberals get congratulated for not f*cking up as much as Trump. Let's remember what they actually did, and you tell me which of these major policies they should be congratulated for. 1. Let the emergency stockpile of PVE gear deteriorate. Threw it out as it got old. Didn't replace it. 2. Told us there was nothing to worry about. Told us to all go on vacation. Sent our remaining PVE gear to China 3. Said it would be racist to close the border to China, or to subject those coming from there to health checks 4. Took no actions at all until Sophie Trudeau caught Covid. Closed the borders the next day - sort of. 5. Refused to quarantine those returning from China. 6. Decided to throw in our lot with China (who hated us) to help them develop a vaccine. 7. After many weeks, finally realized China wasn't going to give us any vaccine, threw billions at every pharmaceutical company in the world in hopes of butting in line. To this day, won't tell us how much. 8. When they finally agreed to quarantine people, did so in public hotels, charging more money than the fine so that people ignored them. And made the quarantine for three days for a disease that had a ten-day incubation period. He's about a thousand times more qualified than Trudeau was.

You realize that federal environmental regulations impact all areas of the natural resources industry, right? What makes them 'further right'? Further right than who? Castro? America! Love it or leave it! Thanks for the philosophy, Archie. There's a difference between exporting oil and bringing in electronic machines full of cameras that can spy on everything around them and listen in on the conversations of whoever is riding in them. If you call people far right for complaining about government environmental regulations, what do you call those who want to exterminate Jews and gays? Aside from Muslims, that is.

From Lee Humphrey Yes, Canada signed a sole source contract to buy armed reaper drones to patrol the Arctic with first deliveries scheduled for 2025, that was good. Unfortunately, before the ink was dry the RCAF decided to Canadianize them & delivery is now heavily delayed (mid 2030’s) & the reapers will still require a complete overhaul within 5 years of delivery…let me explain. The RCAF decided that they needed a CDN IR (infrared) sensor installed. Fortunately the one they selected had already been used on other reapers so no problem right? Of course, the RCAF decided to use a variant that could talk to our new maritime patrol aircraft that will arrive (thanks to another US sole source contract, sorry team Elbows Up) in the mid 2030’s which all sounds very smart forward thinking but & here’s the crazy part. All of this tech relies on US military satellites, but since Canada now wants to have dual satellite systems (USM system for NORAD) they have given a sole source contract to Telesat (whose CEO is besties with Carney). They are hoping to get enough satellites into orbit by 2040 to allow the CAF to use both CDN & USM satellites for their communications needs - depending on whether the drone, F35 or maritime patrol aircraft are on NORAD or non NORAD missions. Of course this has never been done before & will require more tech be added to the reapers hence the complex overhaul, all based on a satellite company who despite massive subsidies from the CDN gov over the last 10 years has barely managed (thanks to SpaceX) to get a few test satellites into low earth orbit for their satellite internet service & have never built, launched or managed secure military grade satellites. Only the @liberal_party gov could turn a simple $2.5 billion dollar contract with quick delivery of a proven armed drone system into a never-ending boondoggle that will end up costing at least 400% more than the original purchase price & delay full operational capability for a decade plus!