I am Groot

This is why we got a black hairdresser put on the ten-dollar bill. The Liberals were determined to replace MacDonald and had already announced they wanted to put a woman on the bill. Problem is all the known women lived in past times and thus weren't politically correct. They had things to say and beliefs that would be, er, troublesome to the great woke pretender. So they selected a woman who had never been quoted about anything. Of course, that was because she was basically a nobody with no influence on Canada's culture and history. And, rather embarrassingly, she decided to emigrate to the US. WHich is a difficult blend with the Liberals' attempt to portray her as the noble victim and combatant against racism. I mean, she preferred to move to the US in the 1950s... But on the upside, hey, she was black! And whatever her opinions were nobody knew them! The perfect person for Trudeau's style over substance government. "Look everyone! I put a woman on the ten-dollar bill! And a BLACK woman at that! See how sensitive and anti-racist and feministic I am! What did she do? Uh, she got a ticket once for sitting in the wrong place in a movie theater. More than enough to make her a national hero! Did I mention she was black!?"

Oh, good to know. Then I guess they'll stop demanding billions in payment for the land they never owned!

So you're saying the ones who were here first own the land? So how come we pay tribute to the Algonquin locally, for owning the land? They weren't the first. They murdered the people who were here before them, the Huron, and drove the survivors far away. Yet we still say the Algonquin have all the rights, not the Huron. Why is that? Shouldn't we be spitting on the Algonquin as murdering colonizers and paying tribute to the Huron? Or, if being bigger and strong is what matters, then the land is ours and it doesn't matter who was here earlier. Which is it? The funny thing about white people is in the long and broad history of world slavery, which goes back as far as recorded writing and existed in every corner of the globe, no one ever voluntarily got rid of slavery until the white men did it. Then they used their imperialist power to force all the other people who didn't want to ban slavery to do so anyway. Facts like we let them vote without any need to do so? We just voluntarily extended the vote to non-whites. How about that! And we generously let others come and live here for a small fee! So then we should say there's no such thing as indigenous heritage or pride, nor black pride or uh black history? No black history month? No gay pride either. After all, there's lots of different kinds of gay people. And no one uses the term 'Aryan' but crazies of the Left and Right. Whites are the only group that aren't permitted to say they have any kind of sense of history or unity or pride. For some reason no one can quite explain without being entirely hypocritical.

Wonder how much of the funding for the "Indigenous games" comes from the government. I'm guessing approximately 100%.

Trudeau was at a Somali barbeque in Calgary last week looking for votes. The news covered it thusly: Trudeau said Ismailis still approach him to express their gratitude for the work his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, did in bringing members of the community to Canada in large numbers. “It is much more true that my father and I and Canada owe you a debt of gratitude. Not just for what you’ve contributed to this country but for being a shining example of what welcoming people who are fleeing violence, persecution, fear can do,” he said. I doubt anyone who isn't a Somali would have done more than snort and laugh. If there is one immigrant group in all of Canada's history of immigration who can be fairly reliably placed as the worst to ever come to Canada it is Somalis. I still have a Statistics Canada study somewhere that showed how well refugees from various areas performed after coming to Canada. Somali men were the only group that actually (somehow) had lower employment after ten years in Canada then they did after five. Someone explain that to me as anything but them figuring out how to screw the system. And I'm actually surprised when I hear about a murder around here and see a black face that isn't accompanied by a name like Muhammed or Yusof or Omar or something similar. Somali are notorious for street crime and violence throughout Canada. Even more than Jamaicans. And I'm given to understand it's the same in Calgary and Edmonton as here. Somalis were notorious for swarming, too, groups of them attacking single people to beat and rob them. That was in the old days, before they graduated to drive-by shootings and drug deals. One of the aspects of the media that provokes distrust is their deliberate efforts at hiding things like this from their viewers and readers. That independent news organizations ALL decide, individually, that they need to hide information from Canadians so as to not perhaps provoke feelings that run counter to their own ideological narrative has made a lot of people understand over the years that news runs secondary to pushing their own social messages. The cynicism whenever a violent criminal is not described or identified seems almost universal now in its belief the media is hiding their ethnic identity. So in a sense, Trudeau is correct. Us welcoming Somalis without conditions and without any threat of expulsion for poor behaviour is indeed a shining example of what can happen. And before anyone whines I know there are good Somali citizens. I'm sure there were good Incans and Haida despite those nations being murdering slavers. I'm sure there were good members of the Nazi party in Germany, and good Communists in the Soviet Union. That's not the point. There are far, far, far too many bad ones.

Because I've known people who were reasonably capable, if lazy, until they decided drugs were more fun than life.

I never ignore problems. I look to the future to see problems most people on the Left aren't interested in. At the same time, I'm not going to decide on a solution to something that is immensely expensive yet will accomplish nothing. For example. What happens when we have Indo-Canadians and climate change starts making India a worse and worse place to live and they demand we let their extended families in? Well, you might say, then we should get serious about climate change. To which I reply "Why? India isn't?" And nothing we do other than perhaps becoming a large LNG exporter to lessen demand for coal, will have any noticeable impact on climate change.

Absolutely. It's impossible given the glacial slowness of our refugee determination system. Last time I heard it was a minimum of three years before an applicant even got their first hearing. Then there are more years of waiting through hearings, then appeals, then more appeals. We can't put someone in a camp for six or seven years when they might actually be a legitimate refugee. Well, we can, but we should not. The only way to do this is to write a new law on refugee determination and put it under the notwithstanding clause to keep the lawyers away. Give them a quick hearing, ie, within weeks, then an appeal if they make one, again within weeks. Then back they go to whatever jurisdiction they arrived from. IF that is even possible. A lot of them destroy their documents before applying, then give phony names. If we can't prove who they are it's much harder to send them back to their own country. What we need to be able to do is send them back to whatever country they arrived from, be it the US or France or wherever. If they caught a plane there for here we send them back. Unfortunately, a lot of countries aren't willing to accept that because then the migrant becomes their problem. And laugh at...

How come every single time some career criminal type causes troubles everyone assumes it's about mental health and not simply that they are a shit person who chooses to live their lives on drugs?

A billion migrants want to come here already. The problem isn't how many want to come. The problem is a legal system that is calcified and takes forever to decide cases. Ideally, asylum applicants should be detained, given a hearing within a week or two, then deported if they fail. Which most should. Instead, it takes years before they even begin their first hearing. Then years more for their case to make its way through the maze of legalities and appeals before we can hope to deport them. And by then, they know the place well enough to simply hide.

1) Given we used to have a higher GDP per capita than most other advanced economies I think it's patently obvious what this says about growth rates. 2) You choose not to. If immigration brought higher GDP per capita, ie, better productivity and wealth, then Ontario would be at the top of that chart, not near the bottom. But immigration doesn't. What brings higher growth is low taxes, low regulation, and encouraging investment in research and development. Immigration has become a crutch for Canadian business, though. Why invest in labour saving devices or technology to increase productivity when you can just import cheap foreign labor or cheap immigrants?

Here is another lovely chart showing the GDP per capita growth of our powerfully charged economies under heavy immigration with uh, a ton of other people who don't have that population growth but are waaaay ahead of us in terms of growth.

Lots of lefties were in love with at least the idea of communism back then. And some were perhaps more easily deceived about the reality than others.

He reminds me of a Poli Scie professor I had in college who had immigrated from Finland. He had nothing but good things to say about the Soviets and nothing but bad things to say about the Americans. Needless to say, we had a lot of arguments in class. But give him credit, he gave me an A anyway.

GDP per capita is BY FAR the most important because it measures the growth of wealth. All GDP does is here reflect the growing size of the population. And it's not going to help us pay off debt if a major chunk of the immigrants aren't paying taxes. And as we know given the well-known argument that immigrants take the 'jobs Canadians won't' a major chunk of them are indeed in minimum wage jobs. They're not only NOT paying taxes but the rest of us have to be taxed extra to pay their share for things like healthcare. If our immigration made sense it might help, but it's not designed to help our economy. It's designed to help the Liberal party. You think Trudeau has promised (and kept that promise) to increase the number of elderly immigrants who can be sponsored here during every election because it will help Canada? The Tories pinned that number back and froze it at 5,000 a year due to the healthcare costs and because a quarter of them were winding up on welfare. Trudeau doubled that after his first election, then doubled it again after his second. It's now 30,000. And I bet he promises to increase it again next election.

So the point you're making is we need to virtue signal from the safety of the sidelines. I think the world already knows how sanctimonious Canada is.

The US won't sign a landmine treaty because of North Korea. And it won't ban cluster bombs because Russia won't. And also because of North Korea. And both Russia and China are militarizing space. So it's not like the US has much choice. The US is being practical and realistic. Yes, I think we should emulate them, though having no practicality or realism I can see where you wouldn't. What escalation? Russia has been using cluster bombs from the start.

They probably do in Quebec. Quebec's media doesn't seem to be nearly as ferociously 'progressive' as English Canada's. In English Canada, the media are a united attack dog, all with the same social views (no others are permitted). Any politician who suggests less immigration, or being pickier with immigrants to bring in those whose values are more like ours, will get pilloried as a racist and anti-immigrant. Any politician who dares wonder why so many people are willing to come from around the world to start again in a new land far from home where they don't even speak the language - but natives just stay on reserves where there are no jobs and hold out their hands for money, would get destroyed. The media, with the help of academia, have created the victim mentality, where it's actually considered brave and noble to be a 'victim'. And politicians like Trudeau fan the flames as eagerly and often as they can. So you're not allowed to wonder about the high crime rate among natives - or blacks. You're not even supposed to notice that damn near every murderer we hear mentioned is either an immigrant or a native. Much less wonder if something might be done about that. Get tough with lazy, criminal, polluting natives? Get real. The police are hesitant to even wag their fingers lest the media and various activist groups go berserk. Because then the politicians will move into full apologetic mode, while lecturing the cops on restraint. Natives are always shown by the media to be great protectors of the land - as long as they're protesting against some natural resource project. But when they're carelessly overfishing, clearcutting the forest, or dumping pollution the media politely looks the other way. Mustn't judge, after all!

Healthcare is a self-inflicted wound. The federal and provincial governments froze the number of medical school and nursing school positions. The population grew and aged. Presto. We have a terrible shortage of doctors and nurses. Nothing to do with the economy. The solution is to increase the positions, which some, at least (Ontario) of the provinces are now doing. Stagnating living standard. The solution is slash immigration, especially of unskilled people, and fine-tune the 'skilled' category. No more people with fake degrees. No more people whose skills can't be fairly easily integrated into the workplace. No more people without decent language skills. Cut foreign workers back to mostly just agriculture and a few key areas. Slash the stultifying level of bureaucracy business has to cope with, especially the decades-long process for developing natural resources. Cut the number of public servants, and then cut taxes (after balancing the budget) And bring in free trade between the provinces.

Remind me which of these places has the higher immigration rate?

No one ever suggested NO immigrants assimilate, genius. And no one brought race into it but you. Maybe you'd like to explain why 600,000 prefer to live apart from native-born Canadians and with 'their own kind' in Brampton.

What do you know, bigger countries have more foreign-born people. Duh. This is an irrelevant list. Canada has a higher PERCENTAGE of foreign-born than all of them except the UAE and the Saudis, and their foreign-born have no rights. And that percentage is growing fast. Immigrants make up 13.6% of the US population, btw, and 23% of ours

Not in these numbers. The long, sustained high level of immigration is turning whole cities - like Richmond - into foreign lands and pushing Canadians out. What other country in the world would tolerate that?

You pay whatever the job needs to pay to get decent employees. You don't get to judge what it's 'worth'. The market does that. That's the nature of Capitalism. It's the same as a business charging whatever the market will bear for their product or service. The only purpose most employers serve is to employ people. We don't need more employers than we have Canadians to employ. The surplus will have to make their jobs seem more attractive to the population or close. This is basic business. You say why should you be required to pay more to that Canadian when you want to bring in a foreigner who can work for less? Why should we pay more for your service or product when we can get it cheaper from Bangladesh? Just cut all tariffs on imports. So this is basically unskilled labour. So it's likely something that will be replaced within the next decade or two by automation. Why should bring in hordes of unskilled immigrants who are likely to soon lose their ability to work? Will you pay for their upkeep afterward? Perhaps for the rest of their lives? No.

Immigration has not improved our quality of life. So... fail there. Borrowing more than half a trillion dollars to spread around would be a more likely cause. But what happens when we have to pay it back? What happens when the payments rise so high, especially with the aid of inflation the borrowing has caused that we can't afford social programs anymore?