I am Groot

So you think lying to people is the thing to admire in a politician? Are you also a fan of Donald Trump?

This is technically correct, but given the political cowardice of the federal liberals, they would never push through a pipeline without buy-in from everyone else. In fact, Carney's cowardice is very typical of someone who was a senior executive in the public service, where cowardice is rewarded with promotion. In the public service, you never make a decision on your own. You want lots of buy-in from everyone else so that if anything goes wrong, you can step back and put the blame on others. If it works, then you can step forward and brag about it being your doing. This is how the public service works.

Why don't you just come out and admit it? You don't want us to build pipelines to the coast because that would not be in the economic interests of the United States of America.

Maybe you can tell me why the Left has been so absolutely determined to bring in as many of these 'conservative' people as possible.

I'll chip in and buy you a ticket to Pakistan, if you like. See how you like the place.

One of the stupidest things about immigration is the determined ignorance of those in charge - namely Liberals, but certainly shared by the rest of the Left - to insist that all people everywhere are the same. This insistence, in part, powered by cultural relativism, says that no matter where in the world people come from, they'll share pretty much the same wants, needs, and desires as we do. Or that, even if they have minor variations, they'll change them once they alight on the sacred ground of Canuckistan. This flies oddly in the face of the Left's delight in the many variations of foreign cultures (while refusing to judge any of them). How can cultures be different but still the same? The fact is, people coming from foreign cultures don't abandon them when they arrive here. Using previous immigrants from Europe as a guide is absurd. The cultures now are vastly more different from ours than most of our previous generations' immigrants possessed. And they're reinforced by religions which are often inimical to our own. And as their numbers grow, that influence grows. Stop insisting they'll integrate on their own, especially when we've assured them they don't have to. And most especially when we've also said there's no culture here to integrate into anyway. Or as someone on X from another country said the other day: "The nation is required to apologise for its existence at every public event yet simultaneously expects arriving migrants to find loyalty and respect for a system, and its history, that its own leaders appear to despise." So that's not going to happen as long as we're guilt-riddled and refuse to stand up for either ourselves or our culture and values.

You make it sound like Venezuela will flood the world with oil so it won't be worth anything. Which is patently silly. But it will, if the US actually does eventually gain control of it, bring a lot of oil to the US. Which just means we should have more pipelines so we can export more oil to the world outside the US instead of taking whatever price the Americans give us. All you lefties who hate the Americans still seem determined to ensure we can only export our oil to the US at cut-rate prices instead of exporting it to Japan, Asia, and Europe at higher world prices. It's almost like you really don't have a clue about what you're doing.

There's quite a distance between believing a poor economy is worse than persecution and thinking the Left's brainless economic policies AND hopelessly naive social policies are destroying Canada. Most of the damage the Left has done can be curtailed, if not reversed, if we had a strong, intelligent, capable leader with vision and integrity (yes, I do tend to fantasize sometimes). I admit I've never seen such a person among our politicians at any level over the past half-century, but I can dream. Get rid of the corporate welfare, get rid of the protection for oligopolies, get rid of all the bribe money sent to all those activist groups so they'll support government policy, get rid of foreign interference and influence, free up the economy from massive overregulation, close or nearly close the borders, and bring back law and order to our societies. It's doable. But we'd need a government willing to go for it, and willing to risk the political trouble all of that would bring.

If you have a family of four and one 10lb turkey for dinner, and invite another family of 5 in who bring their own 10lb turkey, you have a lot more turkey to eat, but your table is more crowded, and there's actually less turkey for each of you. GDP rising is not a measure of success if it's going up less than the population.

No. The Left embraced empathy without rationality and welcomed many people into this country who really aren't equipped to be successful in our society, much to our detriment. And it's continuing to do so. But the rising numbers are what have been driving support to the Right for the last decade all across the West. It's a slow drive because we're all raised to elevate selfless empathy for others as our highest calling. But the Right never has always been more hard-hearted. No. Most of the West's problems could be dealt with simply by changing the laws that encourage illegal migration and then simply sending migrants back immediately after they land. It would be that easy. Canada needs to do the same, but also massively curtail its immigration program, only allowing in those who can contribute meaningfully to our society. A couple of things wrong with this stand out. The West has sent about $2 trillion in aid to Africa since it ended colonialism. And Africa is in worse shape now than it was back then. Giving them help evidently has not helped at all. It's possible, in fact, that all that aid has simply allowed terrible, incompetent, corrupt governments to flourish instead of being violently removed by their own furious people. We've presumed there is only one type of governmental system that is valid: ours. But democracy clearly has no place in the Muslim world, nor in Africa. These are tribal societies with little loyalty to the state compared to their tribes/clans. Instead of trying to push that on them, often tying it to aid, maybe we should have let them find their own way. And that includes letting the artificial borders we created by our colonization collapse Well, that's a matter of who we've been voting for, which is people not being willing to implement tax changes that will properly tax people on what they're making, from whatever source. Given that the politicians are no longer fishing for campaign donations, I'm going to assume there's corruption in there somewhere. It would be nice to see how the decision makers in politics get rewarded, probably after they leave office. But as we have no independent policing organization, I doubt we will. Oh, more likely it's because the authoritarians live in poor societies where they're still having lots of children. Their populations are rising naturally, not artificially, like ours. They WILL swamp the boats. There's absolutely no question about that. We can already see how the migrants/immigrants we've taken in are pushing us lower in the water by their refusal to sit still or row. One of them is busy trying to grope the women. Another is angrily pushing everyone away so he can put his rug down on the bottom of the boat and pray. A third is stealing from people, while two more are insisting on eating our food and drinking our water while refusing to row - or rowing backwards. Again, these are people not equipped to be in our boat. And the more of them we take in, the lower in the water it will go.

The selection of the age of 18 as the separation point between adult/child does not really hold much scientific weight if we're discussing emotional and psychological maturity. Yes, by eighteen, pretty much all are physically mature, but not much moreso than at seventeen. As far as responsibility, if we accord that by mental/emotional maturity, we know that the human brain is still developing at eighteen. For the most part, full development doesn't happen until the early twenties, often not until 23 or 24. And the last part of the brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex, which governs decision-making and impulse control. So we could scientifically say people below, say 25, are less responsible for the things they do. The problem with that is obvious. The 17-25 age group, particularly among males, is the most violent, the most murderous, the most criminally oriented. This group commits an enormously disproportionate amount of murder, rape, and assaults. And the state has to maintain order and provide a measure of safety for its citizenry, or the citizenry will start doing it themselves.

Out of self-interest, of course. Thomas Friedman has astutely characterised the West vs the rest as order vs disorder. But with over-stressed 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. - Lionel Shriver in The Spectator 2018

Nobody thinks that. But we do know what misery it leads to in terms of higher unemployment, unaffordable housing, rising crime and suicide rates, and government unable to afford basic services like healthcare. And we'd like to avoid that, thanks. And both countries have become destabilized due to that. In fact, all of Western Europe is becoming destabilized. Which one again reminds me of an article from years ago in The Spectator by Lionel Shriver. 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 into 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.

The only thing I would add then is that given the massive increase in the levels, more than tenfold in the last ten years, and given that if global warming has any actual effect to the south, these numbers will certainly continue to grow, we have to put a stop to it. Because yes, we take them in for humanitarian purposes, but the cost to our systems is enormous now and continues to grow. Like the spending on climate change (Did Trudeau ever tell you he'd spent $200 billion on it, or did that number surprise you when Carney said it?), nobody really puts together the cost of refugees. That cost is not just the cost of their initial entry, legal and bureaucratic processing, and paying their room and board during this period. The cost continues during their lifetimes, and each year, another large number of people is added to that burden. It is the cost of supporting poor people and paying for their services and benefits in a progressive state. And according to economists, we are no richer than we were in a previous generation. In some ways, given stagnating wages, stagnating productivity, and rising prices, we are worse off. So I would dispute that would can afford them at a higher level than a generation ago.

I will quote here from an email I got from the Kellie Lietch campaign in 2017 Points of Entry (Canada’s newest book on the Canadian Immigration System): Dr. Satzewich’s book, “Points of Entry”, is about how Canadian visa officers make decisions about potential immigrants on a day-to-day basis. Canada has one of the most open immigration policies in the world, and immigration is one of the most researched subjects in Canada today, yet what goes on in visa offices is clouded in secrecy” (page 7). In writing this book, Dr. Satzewich has provided a valuable service in casting light on what he describes as a government department that “could have written the manual on how to design a truly nameless and faceless bureaucracy” (page 8). That Dr. Satzewich, through perseverance and tenacity managed to get inside the “black box” of the immigration system, something very few could do before him, is a testament to his commitment to his research. One of Dr. Satzewich’s key findings is that far fewer interviews are conducted today than were conducted before the introduction of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in 2002. The result is that immigration officers meet “only a handful” (page 240) of the people whose applications they process and lose “opportunities to assess credibility and risk” (page 216). The two most important facts about refugees don't really need a cite, though I'm sure I can find one. First, refugees are the worst performing group among newcomers by a large percentage. And only the principal applicant in the economic group actually earns above the Canadian average. Their spouses and sponsored family never earn that much. And refugees are quite a bit lower than them. We currently accept 87% of applicants, the highest in the Western world. We have gone well beyond the treaties we signed, which specifically did NOT include causes like fleeing war, for example (because the signatories knew the numbers could overwhelm them), much less being LGBT or a woman. We no longer require a well-founded fear of persecution, either. As I mentioned earlier, in another topic, we granted refugee status to a lesbian couple from Japan because they said they faced discrimination in Japan. With a standard like that, almost any claim is accepted. We also know refugee employment earnings as a whole are around $30k, which is less than what you'd get on minimum wage if working full time. We are essentially importing tens of thousands of poor people every year. We can't afford to continue like this.

Which isn't helping us. In fact, it's hurting our birthrate. There are lots of bright economists. The current head of the Bank of Canada has one similar to Carney. Don Wright, whose blog is one of those I cited, has a PHD in economics and has spent the last twenty years in government, the last ten or so running the public service in BC. The problem isn't finding educated guys. The problem is finding guys motivated to do it. And Carney seems to be a corporatist through and through. The fact that the first people he added to his council of advisors were two of the founders of the Century Initiative, and that he's resisted all efforts to cut immigration in any meaningful way, gives me no confidence that he is interested in changing anything.

By bureaucratic inertia and laziness. These people are, for the most part, not fleeing persecution. They are economic migrants. They know we're suckers. That's why they bypass Europe and the US to come here.

There is no reason to sustain the current population. Nor can immigration do so without completely eliminating everything about Canada that is good. If the population declines housing becomes cheaper, wages rise, especially for younger people since there are fewer of them. In 2001, I attended some sessions at a demographic conference in Ottawa. I was astonished when a speaker from Statistics Canada said that immigration had essentially no impact on the Canadian age structure. Even back then, following a decade of high annual immigration initiated in 1990 as a government policy by Brian Mulroney’s immigration minister Barbara McDougall, immigration was being touted as a solution to an aging population. Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government fell in 1993, but every government, Liberal or Conservative, that succeeded it continued McDougall’s policy of high immigration regardless of economic conditions. And the “aging population” shibboleth became an integral part of the narrative used to justify this policy as being in the interest of Canadians. But the argument that high immigration could be a “solution” to a low birth rate (based on the Ponzi-scheme economic paradigm of continuous growth) was never supported by any actual data. Unfortunately, reality does not stand in the way of those profiting from mass migration. https://dominionreview.ca/the-lie-that-wont-die-immigration-is-the-solution-for-canadas-aging-population/ https://donwright.substack.com/p/the-bogus-idea-that-will-not-die https://dominionreview.ca/the-sheer-idiocy-of-fighting-ageing-with-mass-immigration/

The failings of our immigration system are many. There is no economic case that says bringing in 500,000 people a year improves life for Canadians. Backing it down to well under 100,000 would allow us to be a lot more choosy about who we let in. We could even, you know, interview them, like you would if you were managing a fast food restaurant and wanted to hire someone. We could set our standards higher. We could aim for young couples who were both well-educated and either came from similar cultures or had flexible, adaptable minds. We could even check out their credentials to see if they were being truthful. We could tighten up family class immigration to make sure large numbers weren't ending up on welfare as soon as their sponsorship time was done - or before. The refugees should simply be ended. It started out as a noble idea, to give asylum to the occasional person fleeing political or religious persecution. Now it's pretty much an open door for everyone who wants a better life but doesn't qualify as an immigrant. It's gone from 15-200k a year in the last ten years. And almost none of them will ever be paying income tax. The cost is in the hundreds of billions. Sponsor refugees in countries next to their homes to wait there. Accept very limited claims from specific individuals who are fleeing direct persecution from their governments. Immigrants need responsibilities, not just rights. They can't demonstrate criminal behaviour or disloyalty to Canada, or they're out. They're not eligible for welfare. Work or go home. Ten year period before they can apply for citizenship, and the citizenship test has to include an interview where they demonstrate both their facility in our language and their efforts at integration.

Can anyone imagine what Canada would be like now if we'd never liberalized immigration and allowed people to come here from the third world? https://www.tps.ca/organizational-chart/specialized-operations-command/detective-operations/investigative-services/homicide/most-wanted/ https://boloprogram.org/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23102290963&gbraid=0AAAAADCiKKwgNaYCODjazFQMutlUWpxfS&gclid=CjwKCAiA09jKBhB9EiwAgB8l-DBKde0ZVsEa-FcCVnbVm0zlGD_3F4EZtcuOTbK8Re1BHAWHjnCE8BoCc7AQAvD_BwE

People get tired of our funeral director in chief flying all over the world and making grandiose promises as the economy deteriorates, food costs skyrocket, foreign investment continues to diminish, ethnic mobs take over the streets, crime makes people fearful of leaving their homes, and nothing whatsoever seems to be getting done to change any of that other than massive deficits for Canada and massive profits for Brookfield.

We don't get such data in Canada because the government doesn't want us to know.

You're a grownup. You know how easily these paywalls can be removed. https://archive.is/

This is the top 50 most wanted killers by the Toronto Police Service. How many white guys do you see? https://www.tps.ca/organizational-chart/specialized-operations-command/detective-operations/investigative-services/homicide/most-wanted/

And if anyone thinks there isn't massive immigration and social assistance fraud among the Somalis in Canada, they are indeed fools. It's been 20 years since I lived in a Minto apartment building that amid high vacancy rates (believe it or not) rented out scores of apartments to Somalis via Ottawa Public Housing corp. Soon, 40% of the building had Somalis in it, and it was absolutely common knowledge throughout that they loaned children back and forth to convince the government they had more than they did in order to qualify for higher benefits. By now, they know the system better than anyone. This is the AI overview from a quick google question about the UK. While precise, up-to-date UK-wide benefit statistics for Somalis aren't readily available, data from around 2021-2024 indicates a significant reliance on state support, with figures showing over 70% of Somali households in social housing, high proportions on free school meals, and reports of high unemployment, suggesting a large percentage of the community depends on benefits, though official benefit claimant numbers broken down by specific nationality are scarce.