I am Groot

We don't need to keep having this same discussion on this same point. The past cannot be used as a comparison to the present. Everything was different back then. Up until the 1970s immigrants had roughly the same education and came from roughly similar cultures to Canada. Ie, they mostly came from Europe, and most Western European languages have similar roots as English. The immigrants of today have different ALPHABETS, not to mention different cultures, religions, educations and skills. In many cases, their cultures and values are diametrically opposed to ours. In addition, of course, up until about the middle of the last century Canada had little or no responsibility for immigrants. They came, they found their own homes, they found their own jobs, or they starved. And we didn't much care which. There were few, if any government services available. So failed immigrants didn't cost us anything. They mostly went home (an untold story of Canadian history) Reminder, immigration was 86k when Mulroney took office. Then do so. And I'll just stick this here before I go. 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/

Yes, my stocks are shooting higher. I'm quite happy. You know which group is shooting the highest? The banks. It seems people feel Trump will be very good for big bankers - as he was the last time around. It reminds me of that brief Dave Chapelle bit on voting in the 2016 election surrounded by poor white people who thought Trump was going to Washington to fight for THEM.

And how often do you have "level zero" events where there are NO ambulances available at all? In Canada's capital that happened 1,672 times last year.

You don't think covid had a hand in that? I'm wondering, now that I look, what caused the drop in imports from $532b to $426b between 2022 and 2023.

Trump clearly won't stand up to Russia, and has all but announced he'll require Ukraine to surrender much of its eastern territory or he'll stop supplying them. China's exports to the US were higher when Trump left office than when he entered it. His so-called trade war with them was lost due to incompetence. Trump is an incompetent imbecile on virtually every subject you can bring up. And the grifters around him as well as many of his supporters are just awful people, fanatics of the worst order who wouldn't have a single issue with cheating in elections or using violence on those they disagree with. That being said, I deeply dislike Kamala Harris and I'm not fond of those around her either, or the Democratic party. And some commentators I have long respected have stated that they reluctantly support Trump for this reason only. They are hoping a Trump presidency will push back against the identitarian lunatics who disparage everything about the West and its history, culture and values. I might reluctantly support Trump myself for that reason except I don't think Trump gives a damn about any of that. As far as I can tell the sole motivation for anything Trump does is his vanity and his money.

There are three small private facilities that are grandfathered into being permitted to do operations in specific areas. One treats hernias, one does addiction. There's also a private surgical center near Toronto but it mostly does OHIP cases. It's allowed to privately treat Workman's Compensation cases, and does some ophthalmological, orthopedic and ENT stuff that may be open to the public for fees. Quebec, of course, is special.

And none of them insure you for services covered by government plans. They insure you for eyecare or dental or physiotherapy or prescription drugs. They will not insure you so that if you need an operation on your back, say, you can go to a private surgeon who will perform it. You must still wait a year or two for the government paid surgeon to take care of you.

Or refugees. A component of our immigrant system that gets bigger every year. American immigrants perform better than ours do. And they don't have a points system. Ponder that. That's a very left wing belief not echoed by such organizations as the Fraser Institute. We still have very large numbers of immigrants who will never earn enough to pay income taxes. That was what the report in 2017 that I cited earlier today and the other one I cited in this thread about Canada losing its absorptive capacity were both saying. And another study done by Immigration Canada says immigrants from certain poor countries tended to earn less than poverty wages in Canada. Places like Haiti, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Columbia, Iran, Morocco, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Iraq, etc. For a while, when we were only bringing in about 86k immigrants a year. Until Mulroney discovered or was told that new immigrants, especially from unsophisticated countries without experience in democracy would become lifelong supporters of whoever was in power when they came in. We need to diminish immigration at least to the point that immigrants do not make up three-quarters of the class in every urban school. How do they learn to integrate if there are so few Canadian born kids there? But we also need to abandon Trudeau's 'post nation' multiculturalism, for the reasons Ujjal Dosanjh says in the new topic I posted earlier.

They are NOT nonsense felonies. The man has been a shady operator his entire life. But he flew under the radar because the industry he's in is filled with shady operators anyway. But once he flung his corruption into everyone's faces naturally they looked into the growing number of charges related to his fraudulent charity, for example, or his fake university courses. He also does things no other president ever did, like withhold secret documents and lie about it. Or call government officials and try and get them to 'find' him some extra votes. Whether it's income tax fraud, or defrauding his customers, his vendors, or his suppliers, Trump has been a scumbag his whole life. We'll see if you sing the same song if he gets elected and starts doing some of the things he's said he'd do, and the 2025 project associated with him starts doing the things they've promised to do.

No, you certainly can not. Not unless you're in Quebec. There are a limited number of medical services that can be provided for fees, and they do not include anything covered by government insurance. I belong to a private clinic. It costs me $4k per year. What they provide for that is vastly better SERVICE than a public doctor. You get appointments quickly, without crowded waiting rooms, and long waits in their comfortable little waiting room. Your doctor has the time to deal with whatever your complaint is and doesn't try to rush through anything. Annual physicals take 2hrs, for example. They're pretty good at getting you in to see some specialists and getting some tests faster than a family doctor, but there can still be long waits. If you want something like a surgical consult, for example, you'll have to wait a long time or go to Montreal. Which I have done.

It isn't just our warships. Everything we build is massively more expensive and takes far longer than anyone else. Remember when the Asterix contract was let out, the one that got Admiral Norman cashiered? We had already let contracts out to build the new replenishment ships. They're still not here and they'll cost more than most nations spend on warships. Current estimate is $2.6 BILLION each. For replenishment ships!

And if we weren't wasting billions on the unarmed slushbreakers maybe we could save everyone a lot of time and trouble and just buy the Leopard 2A7+ or 2A8

Well, Trump apparently thinks so.

And it only applied to between 15%-17% of immigrants. https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/bissett-immigration-policy-is-out-of-control-and-needs-an-overhaul I don't see it this way. Things improved somewhat, but immigrants continued to earn less than Canadians. And a certain number of immigrants, depending on where in the world they came from, earned MUCH less than Canadians, or for that matter, immigrants from other regions. First, I never said no immigrants. Second, they will always build enough to meet demand, whatever that demand is. I don't care if the demand slackens and builders build fewer homes then. Those workers will go and do something else. I could get a dozen degrees within a week. Would that impress you? There are whole industries given over to faking professional credentials in places like India, Pakistan and China. They not only provide your pretty degree but a phone number for employers to call to verify it, and even a nice web site showing their wonderful campuses. And Canada does virtually nothing to check on this. How can we when we're up to half a million immigrants a year? Nor do we do any interviews with the guy who says he's got a PHD in applied science or a masters in engineering. Other countries make them do interviews via computer with professionals who can query them on what they know. Other countries make them do in-person interviews with cosular officers who will query them to see what kind of person they are, how adaptable and open-minded, what they think of various social and religious beliefs. We do no interviews. None. You wouldn't hire a guy to work in a fast food restaurant without an interview but we invite people in to become lifelong Canadians and put no effort into it. He who pays the piper calls the tune. The Trudeau government has not been shy about requiring universities to earn their grants by demonstrating how earnest they are about DEI and giving preference to nonsense studies on gender and race rather than science. The provinces have far more levers to pull to get what they want if they chose to pull them. They can force universities to cut back on the administrators, and to ditch courses that serve no useful purpose. They already do this! The traditional studies in many liberal arts courses, from History to English to Social sciences have been twisted away from 'old dead white men' to focus on African scholars and writers and 'indigenous people's ways of knowing'. Even the hard sciences are being impacted now. But you don't see it because left-wing governments have no need to step in to do what the left-wing ideologues in academia are already doing. It should also be based on how much Canada can absorb and integrate unless we want everything about the character, values, and culture of Canada to be twisted into something unrecognizable and often pretty ugly.

I don't care much about US politics. I don't want a corrupt old man deeply into dementia as leader of the free world. I don't want his finger on the nuclear button. And when I say 'corrupt' I don't mean the usual Washington corruption, but a man so riven by greed that if Putin slipped him enough money under the table, say to some Swiss bank, Trump would step aside and let Russia do whatever they wanted, not just in Ukraine but anywhere else. The same goes for China and Taiwan.

What I particularly liked about his blunt spoken message was his rejection of Trudea's belief we're a 'post nation state'. I agree with him completely, of course. It's amazing so many were under any illusion you could build a successful nation this way. “Justin (Trudeau) and I had a long debate in the lobby of the Commons when I was with him as an MP for a couple of years,” Ujjal relates. “We were MPs from 2008 to 2011 together, and I had a long chat with him about identity and religion and all that, with all of these Khalistanis sitting around the table. And he agreed with them, rather than me,” he shrugs, his irritation still obvious. “Trudeau’s most famous utterance on immigrants?” Uijal mutters: “You come here, you can be who you are.” “I was arguing that this extra special emphasis on uniqueness, exclusive identities, that it would become a deterrent to political, cultural and social integration,” Ujjal continues. “That ultimately you need shared values. It’s basic, you need shared values.” Ujjal pauses and suddenly his lawyerly delivery of arguments becomes impassioned: “Trudeau, sociologically and politically, is an idi0t,” Ujjal declares, “and you can actually quote me, I really don’t care. Because he’s an imbecile in terms of understanding how you build nations, how you build countries.” Trudeau’s vision of Canada — “a post-national state without a mainstream culture” — deeply offends Ujjal. “If we don’t have a mainstream, then we’re not really a people. We have a mainstream,” he insists. “We may not sing the same songs. You may not do the same dances. Our mainstream is in our values, how we treat each other, how we behave politically, how we behave on the street, how we vote, what we take into account when we vote.” https://nationalpost.com/news/ujjal-dosanjh-justin-trudeau-sikh-extremism

I hate the stupid Republican base for making this so close and for a situation that no matter who wins America and the world loses. They could have run away with this election by putting up almost any sane, reasonable person, be it Desantis, Romney, Haley, or whoever. The Democrats deserve to lose. But not to that retarded ass monkey Trump.

Mass immigration is when hundreds of thousands of people pour across the border every year that you know little or nothing about. As opposed to careful, precise immigration where people are selected due to their high likelihood of earning above median salaries and contribute to Canada. Mass immigration is a number plucked from the arse of a politician to sound good when he virtue signals to ethnic groups as opposed to a number chosen by demographics and employment experts. Hundreds of thousands qualify as a 'mass' in almost anyone's books. Which has been the situation for a quarter century now. Yes, it existed under Stephen Harper, too. And he did nothing about it. No. As I posted earlier, Immigration Canada was warning their political masters back in 2017 that Canada was losing its ability to absorb immigrants because of too much immigration having gone on for too long. Every single economic outcome for immigrants was going down, as was every single indication of integration. Yes, Trudeau made it so bad that even the sheep in the mainstream media had to finally break the blockade on reporting anything that wasn't pro-immigration. That is what happens when you have a liberal government that refuses to enforce the laws or deport anyone. So it's not time to keep bringing a huge number of unskilled third world laborers. How high is it then? According to this less than 1% of immigrants entered under the skilled trades program. We're bringing in roughly 4k healthcare workers a year out of about 350k immigrants. Or we could have provincial governments audit the universities, fire all kinds of useless administrative staff, and cancel dumbass humanities and 'studies' courses that are totally useless to the country's economy. I didn't say zero. I think we should specifically target high earners, high skilled people, esp healthcare workers and tradesmen. And we should target couples that are both educated and skilled rather than single earners whose wives can't speak English, don't have any job skill, and will stay home collecting child benefit cheques.

If you say it would be good for nobody then you're saying having mass immigration is helping us. Yet look at the state of Canada today vs twenty, thirty or forty years ago. We've been going downhill steadily during a time period which 'coincidentally' is when immigration has been ramped up. Absolutely. Because there's a HUGE gaping hole right now between what we can build and what we will need. Do you think builders are going to just stop building because they will only barely, perhaps, be able to almost meet demand instead? You're not making any sense here. We need to have tons of immigrants coming in despite not having nearly enough housing and not building nearly enough housing because otherwise... we wouldn't have enough housing? They have a tough time finding a job now. Certain parts of the economy would suffer, like the service industry that employs minimum wage workers. But that really contributes nothing to the economy anyway since people with disposable income will spend it elsewhere. It won't harm the productive parts of the economy, though. You realize we're in a recession NOW, right? The mass of temporary workers and immigrants is masking it and making the GDP inch upward despite that, but that's just playing statistical games. Then they will have to do what immigrants did in the past when they couldn't get established - leave. The skilled, talented ones will make it. And those are who we want. They're already huddling into their own communities, as per that government report I posted info on. And I'm sure there'll be more jobs available when we offload all those temporary foreign workers and foreign so-called students who are only here to work. Right, well, I'm willing to allow the 0.03% or so of immigrants who are tradesmen and doctors to come in anyway. Yeah, too bad. But the thing is, they're supposed to be for educating Canadians, not profit-making institutions that gorge on foreign students so they can hire legions of know-nothing administrators. All government institutions should fire all those DEI and antiracism people and let them see if they can find anyone but fast food restaurants willing to hire them in the private sector. No, they did not. Our economy was centred on the resource industry and the Liberals have spent nine years doing everything in their power to destroy it. In tandem with slashing immigration we can slash all the regulatory nonsense that restricts the resource industry and get our economy moving again.

"Even Biden"? Biden isn't exactly a stern conservative, you know. And only conservatives have pride in their country and will defend its history, values and institutions.

For whom? I bet it won't make things worse for people trying to rent an apartment or find a job. We have the fastest population growth in the Western world. That's a helluva far cry from just slowly increasing the population. And even the latter is a ponzi scheme that has to end eventually. The parts of our economy that use most of the new immigrants are the service sector and tech. The service sector contributes very little to our economy. The tech sector is a mess that relies on cheap foreign labour and is largely made up of branch plants of foreign companies. The low wages it pays drives Canadian tech employees out of the country, and trading skilled tech workers trained in Canada for the slapdash tech workers from India is a really bad idea. Even so, if most of the immigrants were highly skilled it wouldn't be so bad. At least they'd be paying taxes. But most are not.

Well, what you believe has no evidence to sustain it. If anyone was going to do what you claimed it would have been Harper, the evangelical Christian. It certainly won't be Poilievre.

The Trump party loves surrendering.

There's a piece in the Telegraph commenting on Canada's present state of self-loathing about its history and natives. Good thing it's a British paper or the Liberals would be trying to shut them down for 'denialism'. Though mistreatment of Indigenous Canadians occurred at these schools, as they did in reserve and non-native schools, records show that native people who attended Residential Schools had significantly lower mortality rates from infectious diseases than their peers who remained on reserve. Documentary evidence reveals that children were not removed from reserves without parental consent. Aspirational native parents sought to have such schools constructed and wanted their children to attend. Many who attended spoke positively of their experience. The evidence also does not back up accusations that the schools were designed to erase the culture of First Nations people. The charge that children were killed or placed in ‘mass graves’ by those who ran the schools has no basis in documentary or forensic records. Rather, it is based on selective oral testimony and ignores the considerable monetary and identity incentives shaping the narrative of plaintiffs, white progressive allies and well-paid lawyers. Recently, the Canadian government forked over a whopping $2.8 billion to atone for their claims. The notion that residential schools amounted to a form of ‘genocide’ is based on misinformation and an abuse of the English language, but this did not stop the entire political and media establishment endorsing the lie. Telling such truths is smeared as ‘denialism’ by woke elites, and zealots among them are trying to criminalize it. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/27/canada-national-identity-conservatism-trudeau-death/

We need to cut immigration by 80%, and cut foreign workers by even more.