Bonam

I'm not casting this as "left" vs "right". By the way, "left" and "right" in the Canadian federal politics context means Conservatives and Liberals (and NDP), we're not talking about the global spectrum. Clearly both Liberals and Conservatives support high levels of immigration. Conservatives raised it to roughly the present levels under Mulroney (for political reasons as Argus has frequently cited), and the Liberals under Trudeau want to do the same thing again, and like anyone else they want to put a veneer of an economic justification over it but just the reality is it's just another political move. Immigration is supported by many on both the left and right, for separate reasons. And both Liberals and Conservatives are hungry for immigrant votes. But the support for immigration among the general population seems to be much less universal than it is among politicians, bankers, economists, and academics.

Business leaders want more immigration to keep wages low. The "left wing" wants more immigration to ensure "diversity". But no one gives a damn what the average Canadian wants.

I'll keep tabs on it from work I'm sure.

In WA state, I've found that about half of vending machines I encounter take Canadian coins while the other half do not. Of course, more and more also take cards these days so soon it will be a non-issue.

Good riddance to signatures. The new forum format barely shows a single one sentence post per screen without them anyway.

You've provided opinion and arguments about why economic immigrants should help the economy, but no real quantitative evidence. I understand your argument that you believe economic growth relies on population growth and that immigration is the source of our population growth. I just don't agree with it. I think you can have economic growth with a constant population, and certainly the world will need to figure out how to make it happen in the coming decades. In fact, many problems that chronically face society are easier to solve in the context of a constant population. For example, consider transit and road networks, which are perpetually clogged and congested because planning and construction lags decades behind population growth. Same goes for most other infrastructure. Environmental stress and destruction is also greatly reduced once cities and land use no longer need to be constantly expanded. Japan has managed to maintain a small but non-zero rate of economic growth despite a stagnant and aging population over the last 15 years. It is also one of the world's most technologically advanced, healthiest, most peaceful, and most socially cohesive countries.

"Digital" existence still requires infrastructure that exists in the physical universe to uphold it. And that which exists in the physical universe can be "encountered". Further, any civilization advanced enough to "go digital" would clearly understand the finite timespan and risks associated with remaining in a single star system, and would thus quite possibly seek physical presence elsewhere, even if only of their "digital infrastructure". Anyway the whole idea of "going digital" may be a uniquely human fascination, for all we know. It's really hard to predict what other intelligent civilizations might or might not do. The values and premises which underlay their civilization may be very different from our own. They may place a high value on their physical individuals (if they even exist as individuals) traveling to other star systems, even if it seems illogical or inefficient to do so from our human perspective.

Because bringing in the most in-your-face Muslims possible rather than the relatively quiet and reclusive Yazidi is meat for the left wing base? It takes a lot to persuade certain people that immigration is about economics, or that the refugee system is about helping people in real danger, when certain people just want to use both systems to spite their political opponents.

In how many criminal transactions is this an issue? Above, you mentioned contractors and waiters as examples of tax evading criminals you are concerned about. In how many transactions that a waiter is involved in is the weight and size of $20 bills an issue? How about contractors? ' While criminals obviously use cash, I am gonna go out on a limb and guess that the vast majority of cash transactions, including with $100 bills, are legit.

Clearly every bill gets used hundreds of times and so it is certainly possible that at some point in their life cycle, most of them are part of a criminal transaction. But I took your statement to mean that 99% of the time a $100 bill is used, it is used in a criminal transaction, which I found to be a very surprising claim. I would be surprised if it was 50%, or even 10%.

99% used in criminal activity? Cite?

Russia offers to monitor the US election: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/21/politics/russia-us-election-monitors/

I think this is only barely true, and likely to change soon to not really be true. In the US, ~61% of millenials have attended college, and the % is only growing with the years. And while of course not all college attendees take a stats course, the reality is most of these people (as well as most non-college attendees, if I had to guess) have the brainpower to understand that an aggregate of hundreds of different polls is a more reliable indicator than a single outlier poll (especially if they cared to google about it). The problem isn't lack of intelligence or education, it's that people never stop to think rationally about their beliefs to begin with. I think this problem is fundamentally related to the prevalence of religiosity... people are conditioned from an early age to accept things on faith without any rational basis, and by the time they get to adulthood they are used to simply believing things, not examining them. So when their same family member that taught them to be religious tells them they believe what the guy on the radio said about the polls, why would they question it? Why would they pause to apply their knowledge of statistics to their political beliefs, when they don't pause to apply their knowledge about the world to their religious beliefs? How many people, however well educated, regularly stop and contemplate "Is what I believe right? Is it supported by evidence? Why do I hold these beliefs?" Maybe a graduate level education in hard sciences would increase the tendency for people to think this way in their daily life but other than that I think people can be very intelligent and educated and still have no tendency at all to ask themselves such questions.

On the contrary, all the polling going up to Brexit clearly showed it was a toss up, well within the margins of error. Now, some people look at an individual outlier poll and convince themselves to believe that, but an unbiased look at aggregates of all available data clearly showed it was too close to call. Incidentally, this same thing happened in the 2012 US election... many Republicans convinced themselves Romney would win based on 1 or 2 outlier polls, while overall polling data clearly showed he had almost no chance. Biased people believe what they want to believe, but real data is out there for those who want to find it and understand it.

Here's another graph showing how abysmally Canada is doing in terms of productivity compared to other jurisdictions:

That graph is for the US. I believe Argus was talking about Canada. While many trends between the US and Canada are comparable, this cannot always be assumed to be the case. In fact, productivity in Canada has almost flatlined over the last 16 years (US productivity has grown by ~26% since 2001 while Canadian productivity has grown by ~7%). Do you want to live in a Canada where all of our current pristine wilderness has been eradicated to make room for cities, sprawl, and farmland? 3 times the population means 3 times the land use. Which first nations are we going to exterminate this time to get this land so we can settle the tens of millions of immigrants on it?

Economic growth per capita is what matters. If your economy is growing slower than the population, people are getting poorer. Just raising population and saying the absolute size of the economy grew is not relevant. And indeed, for the last few years, the population growth rate has exceeded the GDP growth rate, meaning we are getting poorer. Next, population will stop growing whether politicians like it or not. Birth rates are falling all around the world and many of our source countries of immigrants now have (or will soon have) falling or stagnant populations themselves and increasing rates of people returning to them or immigrating to them. We need to have an economy that can deal with a stable or declining population, and we might as well start figuring it out now rather than waiting until we're trapped in a cycle like Japan. Further, your argument that we need immigration to grow the economy might hold more water if we were actually actively recruiting skilled workers, but these comprise only 20% of our immigrants.

Businesses like immigration because it creates downward pressure on wages as there are always more people looking for jobs. The "money created" to build houses for more people isn't a benefit to the economy, in fact, it creates part of the affordability crisis that is plaguing many Canadian cities (you call it "not imploding", I call it pricing Canadians out of a house). Your thinking is along the same lines as the "broken window" fallacy (where one argues that if you break a window, that will create work for someone to fix it and is therefore a net economic benefit - it ignores that the money spent to repair the window could instead have been spent on something more productive).

The discussion of PTSD here is interesting but I think the other aspect of the OP here that's being a bit ignored is jury duty. Jury duty sucks. You miss days, weeks, or maybe even months of work during which you are unpaid or are burning through vacation days if you have them, and receive very minimal compensation (if any, depending on jurisdiction) for your time as a juror. Further, you are exposed to the details of all kinds of crimes which may be just distasteful or unpleasant in some cases all the way up to traumatizing in others. Additionally, there are relatively few ways to get out of jury duty if you're being honest in your interview (of course, you can always try to be an actor and pretend to be a racist or whatever but that's not something an upstanding citizen should be required to do if facing the prospect of massive financial loss for being a juror). So really, we need to properly compensate people for their time on the jury and for the inconvenience and unpleasantness of being a juror. The government shouldn't be allowed to non-voluntarily take people away from their daily lives and cause them to suffer financial loss (and possibly other types of loss/trauma) without providing proper compensation.

Flooding Canada with almost a half million new people every year would destroy our pristine wilderness environments, cause social and economic stresses, and cause major livability issues in the cities where most newcomers settle (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal), where infrastructure and housing are already unable to keep up with the rapidly growing population at current immigration levels let alone higher ones. I see no hard quantitative evidence that shows that Canada would benefit from a higher immigration rate. Until this can be provided with a high level of certainty, I see no rational reason to increase immigration levels. Of course, increases may be rational from the point of view of political parties if they think they can get more votes, but that doesn't mean it's rational from the point of view of citizens. I think a reduction from 300,000 to 200,000 would be more appropriate.

On the Unread Content page, there's a list of 7 menu options along the top (Show me, Content Types, Read Status, etc...). Under "Show me", change the setting from "content items, comments, and reviews" to "content items only".

It's simple. Those who believe in religion are accustomed to magical thinking. What I mean by that is they are used to accepting ideas without evidence and ignoring the obvious reality in front of them in favor of blindly believing what other people tell them. When someone's critical thinking abilities and rational thought patterns have been short-circuited by a lifelong adherence to supernatural beliefs, it is hardly surprising that their political ideas will not be logically self-consistent.

I agree it's not completely aligned with the topic here but I would not underestimate the degree to which such rhetoric puts off a lot of blue collar types (and a lot of other people too). While it doesn't necessarily explain enthusiastic support for Trump, the presence of such rhetoric and the extent to which this demographic finds it offensive largely explains the antipathy that these people feel for liberals, liberal causes, and the Democratic party. As for anger towards corporations... why? These people love their self sufficiency, which comes from working jobs in factories, mills, mines, etc (where they still exist). That means they see their livelihood as coming from the success of these industries. And when these industries disappear they don't blame the people that ran them, they blame the people that they perceive to have caused the environment (taxes, regulations, international trade, etc) that caused this disappearance.

Ok quoting is totally broken with the new forum upgrade, sigh. Took like 5 mins of work to get the quote to work. Anyway, I think the point is that the demographic we're talking about doesn't want all this government aid you mention. They don't want food aid and social services and employment insurance. These are the things they feel their tax dollars (when they have jobs to pay taxes with) are being wasted on for the favorite pet victim classes of the liberal elite. They take pride in self sufficiency and just want there to be jobs. A message that promises them more welfare programs and social services will completely not resonate, ever, it's completely the wrong message. A message that promises them good solid manly jobs again (which is Trump's message even if he has no plan for making it happen), on the other hand, is exactly what they want to hear.

Not only ignored and overlooked but the targets of active contempt by the "urban elite". These people's life experience of working hard and not getting ahead is diametrically opposed to everything they constantly hear in the liberal media about "white privilege" and "patriarchy". A blue collar worker will rightly ask where the heck they're supposed privilege is and distrust anyone who claims such privilege exists. While the reaction to vote for Trump is obviously counter-productive, the cultural dislocation that makes these people want to do something (anything) to rebel against the liberal elite is a very real and understandable thing. Part of the solution will be for people like yourself and those who agree with you to stop framing discussions in terms of "institutional racism" and "white privilege", which inherently enrages and alienates this demographic, and instead to frame things in much more real economic terms.