Higher immigration without business investment lowers Canadian living standards

[CdnFox]

https://www.cdhowe.org/expert-op-eds/higher-immigration-without-business-investment-lowers-canadian-living-standards-globe

Immigration is driving a historic surge in Canada’s population. At the same time, Canadian wages and living standards are stagnant. That is a bad combination – and, worse, it is not a coincidence. And here’s the link: Business investment is so weak that the stock of productive capital per worker in Canada – the buildings, tools and software they use – is falling. More workers and less capital are putting Canada on a path to a low-productivity, low-wage economy.

Immigrants earn less than Canadian-born contemporaries when they first arrive – so, crunching the numbers, recent arrivals lower average incomes. But they tended to catch up. (Past tense). Thanks in part to a system that identified people whose economic prospects in Canada were good, immigrants, and their children and grandchildren, had a good chance of becoming productive, high earners

A key complementary force in this success was business investment that gave the average Canadian worker, recent arrival or not, more capital – newer and better tools to work with – each year. Historically, Canada’s stock of business capital – non-residential structures, machinery and equipment, and intellectual property products, adjusted for price changes – grew consistently faster than Canada’s work force.

Since 2014, however, the virtuous circle has turned vicious. Business investment in Canada plummeted in 2015 and 2016, and has been feeble ever since. Figures for 2023 to date show per-worker investment, in real terms, at least one-fifth below its late 2014 peak. For eight years now, investment per worker has been too weak even to replace capital that was wearing out or going obsolete. The capital stock per worker is at least 6 per cent below its peak. Nothing like that has happened in Canada since the depression of the 1930s and the Second World War. No wonder labour productivity is falling, and living standards are not rising.

[CdnFox]

Business investment went up during harper's time, despite a horrible recession it still did surprisingly well.

Trudeau got in and started to spend spend spend and started talking about taxing the rich.  And business investment fled. This is the worst it's been since the great depression and the second world war.

Now we face having a much lower standard of life. And that's generational, even if we turn things around it'll take decades to repair that damage and catch back up.

when someone tells you "why not tax the rich" -  THIS IS WHY.   When you try to make the rich poor - THEY GO AWAY.  And then workers dont' have the tools to be productive - and you CAN"T PAY PEOPLE MORE THAN THEY PRODUCE. 

 

The liberal and ndp mindset has made canada a poorer nation with a lower standard of living and we will continue to nose dive.   We need to slow immigration, radically adjust taxes and attract business investment BACK to canada so that we can produce high paying jobs with high productivity.

At this rate we're going to be competing with india for call centers.