> Canada’s inclusive treatment of its indigenous peoples, at least in recent decades, could be emulated by Europeans (though First Nations Canadians might fairly object to closer ties with ex-colonists)
I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most populations in Europe have created their own states. And the few tribal populations in Northern Europe generally were and certainly are today treated at least as fairly as anything in Canada. So who are they talking about? Would the Basques feel that they would be treated better as First Nations people in Canada than they are today in Spain?
Note that the treatment of immigrants is a completely separate topic in the article, so I don't think they could be referring to, say, the treatment of Syrian refugees with that sentence above.
Most peoples in Europe do not have their own nation state. In fact, pretending that those peoples with their distinct languages (often called “dialects” despite lack of mutual intelligibility) and cultures do not exist is a key part of the establishment of nation states in the 19th century. In most of Europe, the nation state project was so successful that this hardly matters today (but of course there are exceptions).
Still comparison to First Nations seems off. Maybe it's about this: Disadvantaged ethnic groups such as Romani or Jews (particularly post-Soviet Jews in recent times) are often denied a connection to the nation state or (what you might call) the shared European cultural heritage. In contrast, I don't think anyone argues that First Nations aren't true Canadians.
Not sure how you can lump Romani and Jews together like that. Jews have a nation state, with "right of return"; a much better deal than the Romani get.
I had not thought about it that way. It's not such a great deal if you feel you belong wherever you are living now in Europe, and view yourself a quasi-citizen and European (even in case if there's no realistic path to citizenship due to your personal circumstances).
Starting in the early 90s, Germany invited Jews from the Soviet Union to settle in Germany, but their ancestry was not considered German. Germany did not strip them of their citizenship during the Third Reich, so that type of right-of-return law did not apply, either. Some would have been hesitant to accept citizenship any way. (This was the time when refugee homes were burning in Germany, and the unconditional right to political asylum was abolished.) The effect at the time was hat professional qualifications weren't recognized, which meant that many did not have access to high-paying jobs. Previous pension contributions or equivalent in the CIS states are not recognized, either. The end effect today is that many among the older generation are dependent on non-pension welfare payments because the German state pension they receive is so low. This makes it impossible for them to obtain citizenship because of the self-sufficiency requirement.
Other persons whose ancestors emigrated from the Holy Roman Empire (long before Germany existed as a modern nation state) are considered Germans by blood, so it's not about the time of emigration from Germany. These decisions are arbitrary, and it's puzzling why Ashkenazi Jews are still not treated as having German ancestry.
Someone with pretty much all the rights of citizenship (including that deportation is only a very distant possibility), except for voting rights and the formal recognition of citizenship status. Kind of what you get if you move within the Schengen area, maybe except for the deportation part.
European nations still have plenty of overseas colonies.. err.. territories. As somebody from an ethnic minority that was eradicated through educational and cultural policies that sounds like a good idea even without the former.
This is the best point that I hadn't considered by far. I was only thinking of the actual territory of Europe, but you're absolutely right that things look very different in overseas colonies.
Western European countries do. The list of European countries that never had colonies is much longer than the ones that did. You take away 4 England, France, Spain, Italy, and Belgium and you have almost no colonies and there are roughly 50 countries in Europe.
They certainly reflect history better than they do for the First Nations in Canada.
I also have no idea whatsoever what 1500 year old history has to do with anything. None of the cultures of that time exist today in any meaningful sense. Even the Italians or Greeks of today are not the Romans and Greeks of 300 CE, they are vastly different cultures and speak unintelligibly different languages.
Lots of Europe has ethnic strife and tensions. Bosnian / Serbian. Czech / Slovak (until recently). Spain has its breakaway ethnic movements. Ireland like others mentioned is a close analogue.
Bosnia, Serbia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are all separate countries today. Of course, not all Bosnians, Serbs, Slovak, and Czechs live in the respective nation states, and there is still strife. But I still fail to grasp what, say, the Czech Republic could learn about how to treat its Slovak minority from how Canada trays its First Nations minorities.
Should different Slovak communities in the Czech Republic have their own lands and make their own laws? What if they're living in the same village as Czechs, how will they split the territory there?
There is simply no valid comparison between how populations in Europe live and have developed up to today, and how things sit in Canada with the First Nations.
And note, the Basque country in Spain is already an autonomous region with significant ability to do its own governance. The Basques there have been practicing their own traditions and using their own language since the fascist dictatorship fell. The Catalans of Catalunya (one of the richest regions of Spain, mind you) also speak their own language and are not in any other way culturally suppressed, again, since the fascist dictatorship fell. The reason for their struggle for independence is mostly their perception that they are being dragged down economically by the poorer parts of Spain (i.e. the strictly Spanish-speaking South).
From reading the article, it is about reconciliation. Canada makes a lot of public official gestures to the people who suffered at the hands of the government. Such overtures could help in European countries where ethnic strife still exists.
That would make sense, indeed. It's true that a lot of European countries have a great deal of difficulty in admitting to their past crimes very loudly, even if they technically do recognize them officially.
And about 100 years ago, the Irish rebelled and won their independence from England. And those that didn't are no longer being treated this way, and haven't been for more than 50 years.
So what exactly should the English learn from Canadians today? Even the Irish in Northern Ireland have more freedom and autonomy than the First Nations have in Canada, not less.
That doesn't make any sense to me (as an Irish person). A hundred years ago, sure. But modern Ireland is one of the richest and most privileged places on earth. The problems we have in modern Ireland - wealth inequality, housing crisis etc. - are decidedly problems of our own causing, and do not in any way equate to or reflect the struggle for rights and recognition of indigenous peoples around the world.
We do have our own indigenous minority who are treated badly by society - Irish travellers. There's a lot of racism in Irish society towards them, and we could do with looking at how other countries treat minorities, indigenous or not, and recognize for all that we like to harp on about our own poor treatment in history, we are doing exactly the same here towards travellers.
It’s odd to call Travelers “indigenous” because they don’t predate the settlement of Ireland by the current majority group. They’re Irish people who culturally diverged around 1600. It’s like calling Appalachian Americans Indigenous.
I don't think the semantics of the word indigenous are the important thing here, although I will say that officially, according to the Irish government, Irish travellers are an indigenous minority and attempts to discredit this are usually a thinly disguised attempt to discredit the credibility of the Irish travellers as a distinct ethnic minority - or, to put it another way, it's one of the more common ways that Irish people are racist towards travellers.
Instead, it's the racism and discrimination against an ethnic minority that we should focus on.
Calling them “indigenous” is a tactic to give greater moral weight to their political positions. While those positions may be meritorious, that doesn’t justify false characterizations in their service. Irish Travelers are ethnically no different than other Irish, nor does their presence in the country predate that of other Irish.
You have to shoehorn the Sami into this comparison because they really only colonized the Nordic countries contemporary with the majority "European" populations. They weren't, in the same sense, indigenous, just... less western.
No. What you are refering to might be in regards to Uralification, while 50% of Saami undeniably have been indigenous population and were there before Uralics arrived there. And Nordics encroached on lands where even partly Uralized Saami were first. No one is arguing that Saami are indigenous to Oslo, but they were first in 80% of Scandinavia.
I don't think that 80% is true in either the geographic [1] or more practical sense. It's maybe 50% by landmass.
But more significantly, it's not the arable or densely inhabited parts; the vast majority of Scandinavians do not live on land where Sami ever lived. This is just a vastly different than Canada where every square inch was native land at one point. For example, Vancouver has Squamish-owned and developed land right in the middle of downtown, it's a big controversy!
I'm not trying to dispossess or trivialize the Sami or the injustices they did suffer, it's just a very different relationship.
Sami are part of the uralic people although they arrived to Fennoscandia some centuries before the Finnic. There were people in the area before the uralic people came but very little is known about them.
Eh... I think that position is largely derived from treaties guaranteeing that, and a local history of severe mistreatment. I don't know much at all about how the Sami have been treated in the nordic countries, but I doubt it's a particularly similar situation.
Oh it very much has been. Things like forced assimilation were very much employed against Sami, as well as (in the UK) Celtic peoples, (Ireland) the Irish, France (Bretons) and others, seemingly mostly in Eastern Europe. And, while not indigenous, Jews and Romani have faced centuries of on-and-off slaughter, forced assimilation/conversion, expulsion, etc., culminating in the Holocaust. And that's just off the top of my head.
Looking at history is not that relevant to the discussion at hand. As far as I know, the Saami today are no longer being forcibly assimilated or otherwise genocided. Is there anything related to how the First Nations are treated that the Finns should apply to the Saami? Perhaps some regional autonomy could be better, if that's not really happening.
The other examples (Irish, Bretons, Welsh etc) I would argue live significantly better and have significantly more practical rights today than First Nations people do in Canada.
As for the Jewish people and Romani, the fact that they are not indigenous people makes it impossible to apply any lessons from Canada. It's not possible, or even desirable in any way, to create any autonomous Jewish/Romani regions, because that would imply forcibly displacing people. These people generally live intermingled with others in the states they inhabit, at most living in concentrated neighborhoods part of larger cities. And otherwise, their languages and cultural practices are already legally protected in the EU (with some major tensions around one particular Romani cultural practice, child marriages). This is not to say that there isn't anti-Roma and anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, unfortunately there is plenty, but the situation is so significantly different from the First Nations of Canada that there are few, if any, lessons to learn.
In Finland as well, although it's not really sovereign like national or municipal parliaments. The constitution does grant Sami and Roma people sovereign rights on their languages and culture.
They got some sovereignty in Sweden with their own parliament etc (but its jurisdiction etc is limited). Can't really say if better or worse than Canada because I don't know enough about the laws in Canada.
They are talking about what the EU countries of today can learn from the Canadians' treatment of First Nations people today. Canada's treatment of the First Nations people was also appaling up into the 20th century.
The irish. The scots. Basically everyone who wasnt related to the vikings after 1066. The welsh trying to protect thier language are basically quebec. The scots talking about leaving, but never actually doing it, are basically alberta. And thats just similarities in the british isles. Then there are all the little counties bordering giant countries (finland) that see parallels to the canada-us relationship.
Your assertion is that the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh are treated less fairly in the UK today than the First Nations people are in Canada? Because the article was claiming that EU countries have a lot to learn from Canada today.
I personally very much disagree with the concept that First Nations people in Canada are afforded more rights and are freer to practice their cultural identity than the Scots, Welsh, and Irish in the UK in 2024.
Whether they are or they aren't treated fairly today is beside the point. They were treated badly in the past and now their descendants want recompense for those past wrongs. The wounds in Canada are likely a little more fresh, but many peoples in Europe still remember wrongs done to grandparents.
At least the Scots and Welsh still exist (e.g. unlike the Occitan people or the Bretons) and were actually allowed to have a referendum (unlike the Catalans).
Does the economist know what time it is? Nationalism is resurgent: nationalist parties now control the U.S. and Italy. Canada seems poised to Poilievre, who has made impassioned appeals to Canadian nationalism. And in Germany, France, and the U.K., nationalist parties have effectively rendered the governing coalitions impotent, even if they cannot yet command a majority. What a time to suggest that Canadians cede their sovereignty to bureaucrats in far-away Brussels!
This could be seen as a EU-nationalist framing. Just like the United States has shifted from being a federation of states toward being a singular entity.
You need a common culture to govern a country, and that culture needs to be deeper than watching the same movies and consuming the same flow of cheap Chinese products. If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves.
The U.S. suffers greatly from the demise of federalism and it’s insane that anybody would want to copy it. People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.
Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.
The EU is decidedly not that, however. Perhaps this article was published 10-20 years too soon, and one day in the future an Imperial American (or French) bureaucracy decides that it's time to bring the friends across the pond closer into the orbit of the Imperial State.
Joking, of course. The problems within the United States today (where I am made to care about the goings on in States not my own) are of course the same problems this hypothetical Empire would face.
> If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves.
This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves. Politics is how groups of 2 or more people make decisions; in order for humanity to advance we have to believe we can work together despite our differences.
> People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.
Both States would suffer greatly because of lessons we learned while we were governed by the Articles of Confederation.
> Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.
There really are no homogeneous cultures--for example Sweden has 25 provinces with "their own cultural identities, dialects and folklore" [1].
The reason Congress has ground to a halt is the George W. Bush administration killed the Republican party by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and presiding over the financial collapse of 2008, but rather than adapt it doubled down on its (admittedly successful) politics of demagoguery, using wedge issue after wedge issue to divide the electorate while also pursuing anti-democratic electoral strategies like gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. This lead to leaders who succeed not by appealing to a majority of all Americans, but by proving their bona-fides to a small subset of increasingly radicalized voters on the right (Republican primary voters), largely by "not compromising their values" to work on legislation with the Democrats and instead obstructing and grandstanding. An unfortunate byproduct of this is there's no longer any governing expertise or even impulse in the party, so even when they're in the majority Republicans have a difficult time providing effective governance.
But that's just Congress, and I wouldn't say we've not implemented major policy reforms--the Supreme Court (an intensely anti-democratic institution dominated by the far right and largely appointed by non-representative Senate cohorts) is working hard to reshape the US.
Anyway, Christians would say we're all God's children. I don't know why people on the right are so taken with this idea of balkanization and segregation (I, of course, have some ideas), but it's not the path forward.
> This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves.
This is provenly false, as countries do stabilize when small at around a few million or so and people no longer feel the need to split up more.
Its just dumb to try to argue that there is no optimal country size, so trying to make it smaller will only lead to single person countries, that is clearly not true in reality.
If you were right about this; countries never would've fallen apart when the human population was much smaller than it is today, but it happened a lot, so you're not.
Another thing that disproves this is long lived empires. Japan's been around what like, a millennia and a half? Rome was almost around a thousand years, etc.
Poilievre is barely nationalist; he believes Canada is a nation and shouldn't be embarrassed of that fact I guess... Versus Trudeau who has said Canada is a post-nationalist state with no identity, that immigrants are more Canadian than Canadians born in Canada and proceeded to fuck up the economy more than anyone in living memory. That's on top of more scandals than any politician in any other western country could possibly survive...
And this whole article is nonsense because literally no politician anywhere, in Canada or the EU, has suggested this union...
You last point is the most pertinent. Labour didn't win a majority because they offered compelling platform ideas, they won because the Cons failed to deliver on their platform and Reform UK exploited that failure to split the conservative vote.
Opinion polls already have Labour and Cons at an even tie with Reform UK doubling their overall popularity in just 6 months.
All this to say I wouldn't want to suggest that the trend towards nationalist politics ended with a Labour majority but rather that the Conservative Party wasn't sufficiently nationalist enough to entice public sentiments away from Reform UK
Only if you define “combined left” to include the centrist liberal democrats, who were part of David Cameron’s Tory-led coalition from 2010-2015.
“Membership is primarily made up of middle-class professionals and the party's composition has a higher proportion of university educated members than the other major political parties of the United Kingdom.”
These folks are far afield of the traditional Labour working class base, many of whom have defected to Tories or Reform. They are what we’d call the “Acela Class” in America.
Luckily for Labour, they don’t have to make any policy concessions to these voters.
Labour won the election, but Starmer’s approval rating is already down to 27% after just six months. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/dissatisfaction-starmer-reaches-.... That’s not surprising given that Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did in 2019, when it lost in a landslide, but won anyway because of infighting among the right wing.
That’s what I meant when I said nationalists have rendered ruling parties impotent even when they can’t outright win the election. Similar things have happened in Germany and France. In Germany, it took the right splitting and a stoplight coalition of greens, neoliberals, and socialists to cobble together a majority. In France, it took a coalition of communists, socialists, and centrists. It’s hard to actually govern when the winning side has little in common other than opposition to nationalism.
And any leftist/centrist coalition is fragile, relying on infighting among the right. If Tories became a strongly nationalist, anti-immigration party, they could probably win. Same thing for CDU. That’s already happened in the U.S. GOP.
There was an objective left-of-centre majority in the 2024 UK election if you combine vote shares of all left-of-centre parties. The combined right managed only 38% vote share.
Only if you - unlike most people in the UK - consider the Lib Dems, who have governed in coalition with the Tories - as a left-wing party. Something most of the UK left, and quite a lot of Lib Dems would find mutually offensive.
Also Austria. The phenomenon of bizarre unworkable coalitions forming to try and keep out right wing parties is found everywhere in Europe. The left and old right (now usually themselves centre left) would rather have no government at all than one that includes anti-migrationists.
But the UK doesn't really follow that trend. Labour isn't a coalition, it's a unified party with a large majority that can do what it wants. It's deeply unpopular but that doesn't translate to weakness.
> Approval ratings are stupid. The 27% on a ~65% turnout roughly corresponds to the % who voted for them
That’s the point! Labour can win the election under the UK’s rules but at the end of the day the Labour government is immediately unpopular it doesn’t have the support of anything close to a majority of voters.
“Coalitions” exist in politics regardless of the election rules. In the U.S., parties have to form internal coalitions. In Germany, parties need to form coalitions between multiple parties. In the UK and Canada, a party can win a majority of seats without anything approaching a majority of voters, but that’s not sustainable. Nationalism eviscerated the traditional Labour base, which is why they lost in a landslide in 2019. In the long run, a party can’t government with a sub-30% approval rating. What’ll likely happen is that you’ll get a game of ping pong where Labour just gets voted out in the next election.
And that's assuming these ratings last to the election and aren't a reflection on one thing, the budget. If the real economy improves then his approval rating will too.
This is nonsense. Labour have a huge majority, there is no coalition, and their fall from popularity is 100% their own making and largely down to their own left wing policies (increased taxation, lying about it, bungs to unions, increased workers rights) and perceived corruption due to freebies (clothes, glasses). Labour basically ignore the right wing as irrelevant, Reform are only currently a problem for the Conservatives, due to splitting the right vote.
Liberal democrats, who got 12.2%, aren’t a “left wing party.” They were in a coalition with Tories from 2010-2015. The current leader of the party served in the Cameron government.
From a left-wing perspective it does not feel correct to describe Labour policies as enacting "left wing policies". The Winter fuel payments are the biggest example, whilst the two-child cap and the stance on Israel are right up there.
This version of Labour has been against the left of their own party and trying (unsuccessfully) to court the right.
They would call it centrist "practical" "adults in the room" or whatever, while those 'left' behind simply see it as a slide to the right.
It looks like they want to be more like the Democrats in the US who are roughly where the UK conservatives used to be before everything shifted rightward.
(Of course left/right is a simplification we can substitute ordinary folk vs vested interests).
The Democrats in the US are still to the right of the Tories in the UK.
Your analogy is fatally flawed.
Ask a Democrat where they stand on gun control. Ask a Tory.
Ask a Democrat where they stand on nationalisation of George Washington University Hospital.
Ask a Tory where they stand on the privatisation of St Thomas' Hospital.
Right wing infighting is one reason. But not the only one. And claiming it is, is just distorting reality to make a political point. Turnout, Liberal Democrats and more, all those matter as well.
>Labour won the election, but Starmer’s approval rating is already down to 27% after just six months. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/dissatisfaction-starmer-reaches-.... That’s not surprising given that Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did in 2019, when it lost in a landslide, but won anyway because of infighting among the right wing.
The "a million fewer votes" is technically true, but misleading. It's entirely driven by lower turnout, not lower popularity. Despite "a million fewer votes", Labour's share of the popular vote actually went up from 32.1% to 33.7%.
So in other words, whether or not you call it misleading, Labour has a massive problem, as replacing the historically unpopular Corbyn only caused Labour to increase 1.6 percentage point over the historically bad 2019 election.
No UK PM in modern times have had as little electoral support.
You're right. I don't live in Canada anymore, but even my moderate and liberal friends in Canada regularly complain about immigrants. That sentiment feels very new to me, though. I think Canada did have a positive view of immigrants for a long time.
In Canada, one cannot lump all immigrants together even those from the same part of the world. Canada used to be pretty strict on immigration only allowing highly skilled individuals from all over the world. But in the last decade this has changed to just importing as many bodies as possible. I won't go into the reasons for this change but it has dramatically altered the character of the country in this time.
We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs.
Canada is in a demographic crisis: The birthrate is too low, the population is aging and the country can’t afford to provide people with all of the social benefits AND have no laborers paying in to the benefit system. Importing lots of young labor rebalances the demographics and bolsters funding of benefits, at the expense of a housing crisis and social tensions. The alternative is to deeply cut benefits, which is political suicide for any party that dares to try.
How is this largely under-educated, low-skill workforce working menial/minimum wage jobs going to rescue the entitlements system? Canada's Southern neighbor has a similar issue: despite what may be morally correct, it's been a net negative for taxpayers, and the US doesn't have near the number of expensive social programs.
The article is about illegal immigration while the rest of the thread is about legal immigration.
Isn't it clear to everyone that the kind of people the government doesn't want in the country don't bring benefits to the country? And if they cheated on their way into the country, what does it imply about their integrity and their future tendency to cheat on taxes as well?
I can make an opposite claim on immigrants: those wealthy enough to clear the bar of entry, have more incentive to cheat on their future taxes to maintain their lifestyle. Though it sounds like the real issue is probably "getting paid under the table", which happens plenty for citizens and "undesirables" alike.
They're not talking about the low skilled illegal immigrants.
If someone can manage to clear the bar to immigrate in the US they're likely to be way more productive than your average american, so it makes sense that they're creating value for society.
I don't think we have that much of demographic crisis. First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth. And secondly, as Boomers, they are a very large generation but will soon be dying off. But more to point, this is nothing new. We have always had immigration to offset low birth rate.
I'm more inclined to believe that the recent importing people en masse has benefited a few large employers of low skilled workers, continue to increase the cost of real-estate which has become more than 50% of our GDP, and artificially pumped up the GDP purely through population increases. Canada might have better off if it wasn't mostly unaffected by the 2008 financial crisis; instead we have been kicking that can down the road for almost two decades.
Canada probably shouldn't have gotten itself into this mess but it's easy to see how it happened and also why it's so hard to change course.
>First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth.
The working age population is the wealth. For example, you can have a country with 90 retired people and 10 working people. The 90 retired people can have $1M or $1B or $1T in their accounts, but it isn't going to matter if they have insufficient products/services to buy. The money just provides a relative ranking of what proportion of product/service is allocated to whom.
This is a fantasy. Those 90 returned people can spend their money anywhere in the world and do. Their relative ranking is multiple larger homes and those 10 working people paying them rent.
Land value is not a product of labour -- in Canada it's an investment and a way to move/launder money from other countries. Many many properties being build that are not designed to be realistically lived in.
At a 90 working, 10 non working people ratio, there isn’t going to be much to export, and hence the local currency isn’t going to buy much elsewhere in the world.
Also, at 90/10, the working people will surely start to wonder why they are paying rent (or tax) and who is going to stop them if they don’t. Same for invaders looking at obtaining the natural resources in Canada.
I picked an extreme ratio to illustrate the why, but in reality, it’s a far more gradual process, where ideally there is no violence, just various renegotiations of expectations.
> Land value is not a product of labour -- in Canada it's an investment and a way to move/launder money from other countries. Many many properties being build that are not designed to be realistically lived in.
It is sort of “land value is a product of labor from decades prior that has accumulated to the orderly, productive society today”. But that can gradually change.
> At a 90 working, 10 non working people ratio, there isn’t going to be much to export, and hence the local currency isn’t going to buy much elsewhere in the world.
Canadian currency at the lowest in years. But most of the wealth of Canadians is not held in cash and not entirely even in Canadian investments.
> It is sort of “land value is a product of labor from decades prior that has accumulated to the orderly, productive society today”. But that can gradually change.
I don't see the connection. The land I live on is worth well over a million dollars and increases at an significant rate every year but has no basis in reality other than demand for land outstrips the supply.
> The land I live on is worth well over a million dollars and increases at a significant rate every year but has no basis in reality other than demand for land outstrips the supply.
It’s only worth whatever it is because that land has access to utilities, sources of food, security due to social cohesion and judicial systems, etc. Some of that stuff takes decades to build.
And if you stop being able to buy the food you want, get clean water, electricity, all that basic societal stuff because it is getting too expensive because there are too few labor sellers, then the land price (in real terms) will reflect that.
I am not disputing that supply and demand determine price, I am saying demand curves themselves can shift due to demographic changes.
> Canadian currency at the lowest in years. But most of the wealth of Canadians is not held in cash and not entirely even in Canadian investments.
I assume Canadian real estate is a huge portion of wealth for many Canadians. Maybe not nominal amounts skewed by the richest Canadians with international equities.
There are many many empty homes in Canada -- in some cases entire "luxury" buildings sit mostly empty. These properties are sold even before they are built to international markets before they are even advertised for sale in Canada (if at all).
Land is valuable investment because the government decided many years ago that it can never decrease in value. It's a cycle: Canadian land value increases due to demand, this causes prices to increase, which increases the demand because it's a good investment. You'd be crazy to invest in business or anything else in Canada other than real estate. It's a sure thing and will give you the highest returns. If you a foreigner moving your money out of your country, even a little bit of loss is acceptable. There's no point in even renting out your property; the gains well exceed any reason to deal with that hassle. This is the reality.
The fact that people have to also live in the these investments is actually the problem! It's Bitcoin that people can sometimes live in. Its use as investment is completely divorced from the income of people living here and that is the problem.
> And if you stop being able to buy the food you want, get clean water, electricity, all that basic societal stuff because it is getting too expensive because there are too few labor sellers, then the land price (in real terms) will reflect that.
That's like saying Bitcoin should be worth nothing because it's useless as currency. I agree. But the reality is that Bitcoin is worth a lot -- just like property in Canada. It already doesn't reflect all that basic societal stuff because it's almost entirely unrelated to it. It should be but it's not.
Valuable land is a product of labor, even if only due to being within the boundaries of a secure and orderly society.
Armies, judicial systems, etc, plus labor to bring about the goods and services. Plenty of examples of prime land decreasing in price due to the labor around it not being of sufficient quality/quantity.
It might even be that a society decreasing in wealth (real wealth, in the form of ability to create desirable goods and services) will try to inflate the value of land to preserve the purchasing power of those towards the top of the socioeconomic order.
Canada could have imported as many young educated people as it wanted from Eastern European countries, Russia, former USSR members etc. What happens in reality is they can't get enough points due to some truly moronic rules. Yet somehow we mostly have people from other parts of the world whose main specialty is food delivery.
canada is very protective of its regulated fields. if you didn't graduate in the US or Canada, it's very hard for an immigrant to become a vet/dentist/doctor/lawyer/engineer/accountant/etc. So these people end up in a rut where they are either delivering food, or stuck in an entry level job forever
From my experience those intelligent people who for whatever reasons can not get back to their original occupation still doing rather well in other fields. I am in Canada since the beginning of 90s. have many immigrant friends, most of them are well off.
Seriously ? People in the West have similar cultural values and customs for one which averts a whole set of social issues for a given nation, denying it and crying "racism" is just silly imo, it's an open secret that a homogeneous nation will be able to align its goals easier than others.
I'm from Middle East and am now a Canadian after many years, I know first hand it took my own family ample time to adapt to Western values. I'm not going arguing which sets of values is better (though some of them in the West _objectively_ are) but highlighting that it's reductive to deny the differences.
I've been on the grumpy end of enough scowling, dour East Slavs to think that's entirely 100% bullshit. So yes, "seriously"
I enjoy going into the (new) local Indian grocery in my town. On the other hand, I found the Russian (as an example) community in Toronto entirely hostile.
Seems like the majority of my son's friends in (small town / rural) high school are South Asian. And you know what? They're kinder better people than half the redneck neighbours I have around here, with their stupid "Stop Woke" signs on their lawns and shitty fake country music and their F150s barreling through stop signs.
What's that? Those are stereotypes? Wow. Shocking. Maybe we shouldn't make generalizations.
I don't share "values" with some amorphous blob of people from "Eastern Europe" just because they happen to have the same colour of skin as me.
Also... India is a commonwealth country and a former British colony, just like Canada... Unlike, I dunno, Bulgaria or Russia or Poland.
If that is the case why is Canadas population expanding almost faster than ever recorded???
You would think to combat birthdates you would increase immigration to an appropriate level not 10x it in 5 years.
Secondly immigration has a complicated affect on demographics since the people coming are generally 21 or older which is very clearly different than a birth which starts at 0 years old
I don't think 10x your immigrant population in 2 years is demographically the same as a natural population growth over 10 years.
They result in 2 very different distributions. One having a very large segment of the population in one specific age category. Which also puts a lot of pressure on systems / infrastructure that is relevant to that category.
The idea that a country must import more immigrants because birthrates are not increasing or are below replacement is just "number go up" economics. It's the same trite and annoying arguments that some Bitcoin boosters make (the ones who don't actually understand the underlying technology, there's a parallel there).
Japan, for one example, isn't going to collapse. Or should they import 50M immigrants from across the planet to make sure the numbers in the spreadsheets go up?
Japan has been going through multiple smaller crisis's as a result of their population problems. Because (and this might surprise you): the elderly need specialized care and that specialized care needs to come from somewhere.
That's why Japan has been bringing in nurses and caretakers from abroad en masse. Unless you want to make the argument that past a certain point they should just be left to die, but given that often the people that vote the most were elderly, well...
If anyone has wondered this Canada in the past 10 years should be a fantastic case study. It seems almost embarrassingly clear from the data that these 2 factors have a strong correlation / causation.
I really don't understand the downvotes on this one. This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy that the Liberals implemented in the last decade. In fact, Canada has been a strong proponent of using immigration to pad its lacklustre birth rate for a very long time, and is (or was) often viewed as a success model of how to achieve that while retaining social harmony.
I think that should probably be contrasted with the more aggressive policy of the last few years - that was more so a reaction to COVID related worker shortages.
> This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy
Is it? When and where did Trudeau say this, because European leaders never have as far as I know.
I'm pretty sure that actually left wing politicians always explicitly deny that this is the rationale in the loudest possible terms, because the idea that the left want to import high fertility foreigners who will then outbreed and thus replace the natives is sometimes called "Great Replacement", and the media/political establishment all consider it an unspeakably terrible conspiracy theory only believed by Nazis.
The Liberal immigration policy was created on the basis of consulting done by McKinsey & Company. This group has long been a primary source of policy and ideas for the Liberals.
In 2016 this group put out a document that says this: [1]
"Besides contributing to output today, immigrants provide a needed demographic boost to the current and future labor force in destination countries. Improving the old-age dependency ratio is of critical importance to countries like Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United Kingdom, where most public pensions have a pay-as-you-go structure and worsening dependency ratios threaten to make many plans unsustainable. The presence of both first- and second-generation immigrants can help combat such unfavorable demographic trends, particularly because immigrant groups tend to have higher fertility rates than native-born populations in these countries."
Please don't try to graft American politics onto the Canadian political landscape. This is an entirely different context, with quite differing histories and opinions. I honestly can't remember anyone in Canada saying "Great Replacement" in recent memory. Most Canadians are grateful for the quality program that we used to have, and for the issues it's helped us avoid. Please leave such conspiratorial and loaded language to Reddit.
Teenagers and old people. This is no longer possible though. In my area there were hundreds of people (mostly immigrants) lining up at 4am in the hopes of getting a job at a grocery store.
> for low pay
Why not raise the pay? Why is the solution to devalue labor by massively increasing supply? This is what leads to decades of little to no wage growth.
People in high school had after school jobs. Retirees did something on the side for some extra cash to send to their grand-kids. For whatever reason, after "tech" had its moment in the sun (and on Wall Street) the downward wage pressure went to 11. And that's why everyone is so insistent on more immigrants.
Minor correction, you have imported a massive underclass to run your fast food restaurants and other such jobs for far cheaper than a Canadian would be willing to do it for.
I've had the same complaint about DEI stuff in the US. Diversity is wonderful, but you also need people to integrate. The US used to be called the great melting pot, now we don't expect people to melt. No wonder we have so many problems. People used to be expected to integrate, that don't now, people should rightly be pissed.
Why? You literally say on your very next sentence that it’s not - that diversity must be destroyed through integration and a melting pot.
Diversity and immigration always has a cost and that’s the destruction of your existing culture in part. Sometimes that tradeoff is worth it. But you can’t overdo it.
And getting pissed at the people that don’t integrate is barking up the wrong tree. They never agreed to that and they should be left alone to live their lives.
We should go after the people that allowed this to happen.
Mix copper and tin to make bronze, thats what people mean when they say diversity is good. They dont mean they want a sludge of different unmixed metals.
I get some amusement out of people who are afraid of other cultures. Having a lot of cultures smooshed together is a culture. How do you think you got the culture you have now? Pro tip: the culture that existed when you were 12 years old might seem like it's the most emotionally 'correct' but it represents a blip in time and is no more or less significant than what came before or after it.
Have some sense of perspective and you'll be less likely to turn into an old bitter man, shaking his fist at clouds.
In response i'd suggest watching the star trek DS9 'root beer' scene between Garak and Quark.
The answer to bad ideas is not to isolate them. It's to outcompete them. The battlefield of the modern world is the hearts and minds of it's citizens. If our morality is superior and our ideas are successful, we should just keep doing what we do and let them spread, like a virus.
A monoculture is the least healthy kind of crop. We thrive the most when we incorporate the best ideas from the largest volume of idea space. We pay a price for this, in that we have to undergo the messy process of separating the good ideas from the bad but unless we're dead and stale as a culture we're doing that anyhow.
New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage that never existed in the first place and will do damage to themselves and everyone around them by trying.
Are you making the analogy because it sounds poetic, or because it actually makes sense? Humans are not plants, and they're not grown or raised to be killed for someone else's benefit.
If you insist on the analogy anyway: livestock are homogeneous just fine. Also you seem to be forgetting that weeds and invasive species are also things that can destroy ecosystems.
> New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage
That's what a melting pot is. It creates something new. You seem to be struggling to understand what people are actually arguing for or against.
There's a certain amount of people that can adapt to a place, but if too many people of common culture comes in they just hijack the place. In Canada it seems to me they didn't establish the limit properly and people also worked around it by moving within Canada disregarding the agreement that they'd stay in a certain zone that still had some slack of people they could integrate.
Hijacking deprives someone else of their rights. Living differently than your neighbor doesn’t change anything for your neighbor. Nothing is “hijacked”.
No, I don’t. This is already the case in many neighborhoods in the USA and the sky isn’t falling in those places.
Also, I live in Germany half of the year, and there most of my neighbors don’t speak any English, and my neighborhood is fine. I don’t see the problem you are describing with your example.
If that’s your “extreme” example, I am curious what your day-to-day ones would be.
Perhaps it’s uncharitable but I am having a hard time seeing how this doesn’t alias to simple racism.
I didn't claim the "sky would fall". I just claimed it would affect you.
I think most would agree that it is easier to form connections with those who are more similar to oneself. Call it racism or tribalism if you want, but that's reality.
It can be a really cool thing too if both cultures open each other to exchange languages and celebrations, but it requires a lot of effort from everyone.
It's mind boggling you are denying the fact that having many people from the same group clustered in a "multicultural" environment has no impact on society has a whole. Of course it does, this is why we have laws protecting minorities, it's irrelevant how the majority is established (either per-existing or minority suddenly growing), the impact may be positive but it's naive to assume it will always be so.
Yes this is where I split from my fellow leftists. I will not allow a parallel society to exist. The daughters of Indian parents will be granted the same rights as those of Western parents.
There will be no dowries and no caste system.
I'm pretty sure typical leftists don't want castes and dowries. They might seem to want them by saying "let people practice their own culture" but that's just because they haven't specifically thought about those practices.
The Amish have been here since colonial times and they live in their own communities and engage in seemingly cordial commerce with us “English”. They don’t even collect Social Security. They might not be integrated but they leave everyone else alone.
Yes precisely but the corporations asking for cheap labor did want poor immigrants with no options and the government caved and did basically no vetting for millions of people.
The Amish don't cause any problems. More specifically, they don't drive vehicles into crowds at Christmas fairs. They integrate very well with the rest in fact, engaging in commerce while preserving their culture.
Canada got their share of Chinese immigrants with $$$. That's how real estate in Vancouver ended up being inacessible for younger Canadians.
We don't really let "poor" immigrants into Canada. The system here attempts to cherry-pick in people based on a whole points system, with "I have money to buy a house" and "I have a $$ profession" being being points contributors.
We actually have the opposite problem, to some degree. Acquiring more skilled talent from abroad has depressed skilled labour compensation here. And acquiring people from abroad with $$ to invest in the property market has led to ridiculously high housing price inflation.
This isn't true. There are about 1 million international students in Canada and they aren't cherry picked. Basically anyone who gets into any of the strip mall colleges in Ontario gets in, and many of them are basically just diploma mills "selling" Canadian immigration status to anyone willing to pay. There is nominally a requirement to be self sufficient financially but it just requires showing you have 20k CAD in a bank account somewhere. Many people fake this by borrowing 20k to show the sufficient balance and then pay it back, and even if they aren't faking it, having 20k isn't enough to support yourself in Vancouver or Toronto for a year.
Many (most?) of those community college international students don't have a path to permanent residency. If they didn't already have a Bachelor's degree before coming, I don't think they will ever have enough points to stay permanently.
Being an international student isn't "immigration status" -- it's temporary by definition. There's a potential path to PR from there, but by no means guaranteed. I'd have to go look up the conversion rate, but my understanding is the majority of international students are returning home after, or at least that used to be the case.
Yes, many return by choice, but until the last few months, it was basically guaranteed that if you get into university or a college here and graduate, you'll definitely get a work visa, and you'll definitely be able to get a PR, and then citizenship.
This is totally wrong. The majority of immigrants that people have a problem with are poor immigrants from rural areas of India. They spend their life savings to get a college degree which used to guarantee a work visa and path to residence.
I actually think the comment you're replying to is somewhat mistaken. It's true that the majority of Canadian immigrants do have to compete on education, job prospects, language skills, etc.; but there's a sizable chunk who are admitted for humanitarian or family reunification reasons and are not held to that standard. There are also a lot of people on temporary work and student visas. I think these groups are the source of a lot of the animosity.
Here's an official government source which says that ~40% of immigrants in 2023 are not in the "middle-income range or above", i.e. they are low-income. [1] The same source says that 75k out of the 450k admitted were refugees.
I have a BIL who immigrated to Canada and most of my family immigrated to the US.
In the US most immigration sentiment is around illegal immigrants and fear of crime. In Canada, up until COVID there was basically no ill sentiment towards immigrants because no illegal immigrants and not really much immigrant crime.
COVID flipped the job markets and economy, so people turned their eyes to skilled immigrants. Most Americans are frankly not that skilled as workers, have lower educational attainment than Canadians, it's a more rural, spread out population, etc. Plus the illegal immigration is still a bigger gripe, so they never turned as much on skilled immigrants during the downfall. Canada turned sharply and many who moved there and followed all the rules feel the anger of the population towards them is way higher than they expected (or feel they deserve).
A lot of people claim the immigrants don't want to integrate, but it's largely untrue. These are usually some of the most Westernized out of their peer groups from India already, to even consider immigrating to Canada / US. They also tend to be wealthier to afford the tuition to do so. That makes people happy when the economy is good, but it sucks when jobs are scarce.
The anecdote I have heard is that the USA is a melting pot and Canada is a mosaic. I do notice when I travel to the USA that people seem much more integrated and buy into the USA culture and lifestyle. Here in Canada you just get a bunch of mini communities who do not integrate.
Although that's what they teach us in Canadian schools, in my experience it's the opposite. Ghettos and enclaves aren't really a thing in Canada like they are in the US.
There are some remarkably insular subcultures within the US like Latinos, Hasidic Jews, the Chinese (in some places), Amish and variants, Indians in certain towns like Edison, Black people in certain cities, to a degree that exists nowhere in Canada (and no, Brampton doesn't compare).
Subcultures in general are just not a thing in Canada, it's very much a monoculture.
> Ghettos and enclaves aren't really a thing in Canada like they are in the US.
I know you are making mostly an anecdotal claim, but if you compare Seattle and Vancouver, and more aptly, their suburbs Bellevue and Richmond, I think the American side is more assimilated simply because we don’t have the percentages of Chinese that the Vancouver area has.
Integration is a 1st generation immigrant problem. I don't think that 2nd gen Indians (let's be honest, that's what you're referring to) have any problems integrating into Canadian culture. In fact I've noticed they integrate better than most other immigrant groups. They tend to identify with both urban and suburban culture, and aren't overly religious.
This isn't the true problem. The old and new immigrants aren't even really that different. They are mostly from India like they were for the past 15-ish years and more.
The real true difference is that the economy and job market flipped, and now there are layoffs, fierce job competition, and inflation. That type of environment makes people generally jealous and angry at others, and so there is a new focus on immigrants (when they probably haven't changed themselves much, I mean why would they?)
Like you just have to look at the distribution of immigration across different countries in the past 10 years to see that this isn't correct.
It was not the norm that 60% of all immigration was from a single country...
Additionally immigration has objectively increased at a time of large unemployment which used to not be allowed until the current government lifted the restriction on 6% unemployment.
You can have a mixture of opinions but we gotta stick to the facts first
Asian origin (all of Asia including China and India) has been the dominant origin for immigration to Canada since 2006, and it has only changed from ~40% to ~50% since then.
This sounds like a propaganda position. We hear it in the US too. It's a typical Republican strategy to take an area where they can't formulate a coherent economic or policy agenda, and turn it into a social issue. Instead of stealing our jobs, the immigrants are now stealing our cats.
That’s not the full context of what is in the article. The full sentence is:
> Europeans could learn from Canada how to allow immigration in a fashion that the population embraces rather than tolerates, though a housing crunch has frayed that consensus of late.
Far from sounding ignorant, the author sounds well-informed.
Umm no? There is (sadly) a significant anti-immigration backlash right now in canada. Its a core election issue and one of the main reasons trudeau is likely going to lose the next election.
It is sad because the government knew and failed to act on 5x-ing the rate of housing production to keep up with new arrivals.
Failing to do so has screwed over so many people due to housing costs that went up due to mass migration. This was all predicted though if that makes anyone feel better.
Housing isn't the only thing that "solves" immigration issues. The immigrants have to, you know, assimilate.
For whatever reason this step has been deleted from the usual policy matrix, and as a result we've been running a great experiment over the last 20+ years in Canada, Europe, and the US.
Yes Indians come to Canada for jobs and money but keep their own culture.
I always find it slightly bizarre. I have tried to explain that culture and economy are interlinked.
India's inequality and superstitious beliefs will keep the population poor.
>I always find it slightly bizarre. I have tried to explain that culture and economy are interlinked. India's inequality and superstitious beliefs will keep the population poor.
These arguments are... unreliable to say the least. Back when east asia was poor, people made similar "culture and economy are interlinked" claims. Specifically, that confucianism was holding them back and keeping them poor. After the east asian miracle happened, people did a 180, and confucianism was a good thing led to their rapid growth.
I have to ask based on this. Do you live in Canada?
Canada / India tensions is definitely a pretty core driver of the immigration sentiment in Canada.
Unfortunately in many ways Indian TFW have been linked to a large number of national crime stories in the past ~5 years that have caused a lot of anger in Canada.
* State sponsored assassination
* Gang bombing / shootings related to showing of Indian movies
* International student slaying entire family at their home
* Stolen car driving wrong way down highway killing entire family
* Country wide car theft ring
* Trafficking of narcotics across CAN-USA border
* Mass immigration / employment fraud
* Violent clashes outside of Mosques
These were literally off the top of my head and every story is specifically linked to Indian TFWs. Having grown up in Canada these types of stories were not common growing up and definitely weren't so specifically concentrated.
No, i responded to the comment i meant to. I don't think "frayed" is an accurate assesment given the liberal polling numbers are in the toilet and this seems to be the election issue causing that.
“Frayed” is an understatement though: Canada has swung clearly in the anti-immigration camp over the last 4 or so years, maybe longer? It is to the point that Trump might actually be popular in Canada now just because of anti immigration sentiment alone.
Online, hate appears far more amplified than it is in the outside world.
In the real world, yes there are places teeming with immigrants and international students, but you drive a block and turn a corner, and "it's Canada again". You lose that nuance in the online world where all you see is 10 seconds of a 120 degree window into some parking lot somewhere where immigrants happened to have gathered.
If you watch a video of the Embarcadero in SF on a Sunday, you're gonna think no one actually lives in SF, there's only tourists.
However i don't think its because people hate immigrants. I think its because conservatives managed to link it to the housing crisis, which is something canadians care a lot about, and neither liberals or ndp have had an effective come back to that.
Canada is certainly not this example. Immigration is a big issue.
The only place where immigration worked I can think of was the USA, in the old times.
The recipe for successful immigration is very simple: no benefits, import only people with some money and with skilled jobs qualifications, hard stance against illegal immigration.
As a millennial Canadian, this. I've never seen this much disdain for immigration, not even close. Definitely can't blame people though, our immigration rate is completely insane, talking multiple times higher than the US rate or the EU rate at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis.
Our GDP per capita has gone down every quarter for what, at least 2 years?
Medical care, cost of living, everything is the worst I've experienced in my lifetime. When I was in university our dollar and average income were both higher than the US', now our dollar is at 70 cents USD and our average income is 40% lower...
I don't believe the concerns about mass immigration are inherently rooted in racism. Instead, labelling such concerns as racist often serves as a way to silence or delegitimise the valid grievances of the working class. When people raise issues about the effects of immigration policies - such as increased competition for housing or jobs - they are often dismissed by those who benefit from these policies, such as large corporations seeking cheaper labour. This tactic has been used in many countries, framing opposition as prejudice to avoid addressing the broader economic and social consequences.
For a moment I thought that was satire. Canada has its share of "multicultural" problems. And that's on top of french speaking people vs. english speaking people.
> It will only get worse. All the research on “diversity” clearly shows that diversity is cleary associated with increased strife, struggle, conflict and war or abuses and atrocities. It’s a very clear signal in research.
War is only good for business if your enemy can't do anything to you. WW2 was fucking devastation for everyone involved except the US, which came out saying it's good for business because it had two fucking oceans and nobody could do much beyond dropping a couple balloons.
Likewise with all the subsequent wars the US has been involved in, the homeland hasn't come under fire ever. The military industrial complex has had free reign to peddle agony and death across the planet without having to buy some ourselves.
Of fucking course this is good for business, but this is not the norm and we the people should do our fucking damnedest to prevent the country from engaging in any more wars because the fucking fire we've been playing with will fucking burn our fucking asses eventually.
You are saying that liberal immigration policy is driven by people who believe it will create enough civil unrest to start a civil war in which they can make money selling weapons?
reason for why Europeans are "against anglophones" as parent claims is likely that native english speakers tend to be only that. (not speaking anything else while for the rest of us being "anglophone" barely registers as a "skill" ...)
Not really, the real "anglophones" are against everybody else, specifically Eastern Europe. So they got out of the EU thinking that would solve their problem.
He's also unaware of the controversy and debate many places in Europe are having over immigration. At this point I'd really like to know what country doesn't have some large backlash and controversy against immigration.
Generally, countries with expanding economies and a lot of physical space do not have issues with immigration. The US has its problems, but the argument generally has been over the extent of immigration, and not against immigration entirely (minority extremists notwithstanding). Canada is interesting in this regard, because it has a lot of land but a contracting economy.
There are only two countries on Earth that have a lot of physical space and expanding economies. As you admit, “The US has its own problems”, so it is not successful, and Australia too. So it is never welcomed by citizen, both the lowly and the H1B-level.
Also what do you mean with “lot of physical space”… May I remind you that this space is empty because, in both country, we have killed the locals.
I’m afraid you are considering Europe as “a lot of empty space”.
> As you admit, “The US has its own problems”, so it is not successful
That's not at all what I was saying. I believe the US is wildly successful in integrating immigrants, since it is a nation of immigrants after all. Even the native population, which, despite what you said, was not entirely "killed". The indigenous population today owns a significant portion of land in the US and many tribes benefit significantly from using it or leasing it out (speaking from personal experience, the Agua Caliente and Apache tribes). Whether or not those tribes are "flourishing" is another fascinating story, but they certainly have the resources and potential.
I know that you sincerely believe in mixing up everyone in the same bag, but there are several bags. USA is no more successful than Europe at mixing immigrants. But USA has chosen for a long time that its immigrants were Irish, for example. And was mostly unsuccessful at integrating Mexicans, a lot of whom aren’t even given documents. What’s the difference between an Irish immigrant and an Algerian immigrant? I’ll leave it to your imagination but you can take all of the criminals from one population, the worst ones, ship them on a desert island, and you get Australia. While you can take all the best people from the other, give them wealth and infrastructure, schools and culture, and not have a single one that contributes to the home country.
USA has been successful at integrating the first kind, and the second one has just performed a nice illustration of their skills in New Orleans, like they do in my home country every year, and now every month, and one even said yesterday “We will rape all French people.”
Quote from a Chinese friend of mine form over the holidays (currently in Canada on a work visa, applying for a PR shortly, started as an exchange student in highschool):
“I really like coming back to [jmb99’s hometown], it’s all white people. Nice change from Toronto.”
I hadn't been to Toronto in years until recently. We went to some parks (i.e. Parks Canada / Provincial Parks) around.
Little did I know that you now have to register online to book your visit. You used to just go and pay cash at the entrance and that's it. This time you had to have an account and prove identity by logging in through your bank account for example, before they'd even let you purchase said ticket.
We didn't really think much of it until later on but then it struck us: All, and I mean, literally all of the people we saw looked "Indian" (some may have been Pakistani etc. but you get what I'm trying to say). We were actually taken by surprise at one place, when we saw a bunch of (non-Indian) Asians in one of the parks. And once we saw a white couple. The Algonquin was completely booked and overflowing. Like you wouldn't even be able to just park and hike illegally.
All of the Parks Canada staff was White or (non-Indian) Asian.
All the registration stuff around parks and conservation areas is a product of COVID, when these places were overflowing and needed reservation systems all the sudden.
Many organizations simply refuse to give up the "convenience" of having people booked in like that. Also the numbers have continued to be hard for these places to manage.
It's the same as tourists complaining about tourists, hilarious irony. Does your Chinese friend at least realize that he's the one causing it? Even on HN I see the sentiment very often, people going on 5 holidays per year and complaining that certain places have become touristy. You literally wouldn't even know the place had become touristy if you wouldn't have gone there as a tourist!
Maybe I should have expanded a bit more. He lives in downtown Toronto in the financial district, and went to university in Waterloo, both heavily Asian (Chinese, and to a lesser extent Japanese and Korean) immigrant populations. The Indian immigrants people complain about these days are (stereotypically) centred in the Mississauga and Brampton suburbs, with far fewer in other parts of the GTA. He is explicitly complaining about the large number of Chinese immigrants that he went to school with and are in his area in Toronto.
It's the classic thing where people are unhappy due to unrelated systemic problems and they lash out and blame the latest people to show up.
Canadians are suffering due to decades on decades of poor housing policy and a continued reluctance to seriously engage in the problem. Suddenly immigrants are to blame.
Never mind the fact that long ago, before this government even touched immigration numbers, or were even elected, Toronto and Vancouver were already experiencing housing crises of high prices and severe shortage.
I beg to differ, I think import 5x the amount of population from the same part of the world has a major impact on any country, especially if the government doesn't plan for the sudden increase in population by expanding infrastructure, healthcare, housing etc.
Leaving the social issues aside, this was very poorly planned and average Canadians, especially young ones are feeling the pressure as a direct result of these policies.
Of course there are other factors but to argue that this is "sudden" and misplaced is not genuine.
1. Canadian household size is decreasing as more people are staying single, and people are living longer and becoming widowed. So even if population was completely flat Canada would need more homes over time.
2. Of course Canada has always had immigration and the population has thus always been increasing regardless of the birth rate. This is not a remarkable issue and easily accommodated by building more housing, but the severe systemic barriers to creating housing has made it more scarce and expensive than it should be. This was already the case in the major cities all the way back to the mid 2010s and the last government. The dominant problem here is bad housing policy dating back to the 1990s, not a sudden increase in immigration numbers in the last two years.
But it was the opposite up until really recently (basically up until the economic downturn caused by COVID). Canada was an outlier country with higher levels of immigration than most and probably the most tolerant people of immigrants.
Can I ask you to explain how and why it is acceptable to you that people in Canada would be opposed to having foreigners imposed upon them against their will and then you just dismiss their wishes and justified anger about such abuses by using a preprinted trigger command that justifies abusing them further by uttering the letters/sound of “racism”?
Is it racism if all Canadians en masse, just up and moved to, e.g., El Salvador and totally swamped their culture and wrecked their identify and then started abusing them in their own homes?
Why is it always only the trigger word “racism” when people complain about abuses, but it’s not “racism” when the abusers abuse the victims, the local indigenous population that is being assaulted and abused?
Counterexample is Israel. Also Singapore I suppose but you don't hear many opinions about their founding. It's not a choice between immigrants and locals but between powerful and weak ethnic groups. Leftists side with the weak by default.
I think in this context the idea of open borders between the USA and Canada in a similar fashion to the EU would be an interesting thought experiment to study.
Presumably a bunch of Canadians would leave Canada in favor of higher US salaries, or cheaper housing. The idea that Toronto real estate pricing is so geographically close to Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh is interesting.
Then again, presumably a bunch of people looking for affordable healthcare would be moving up to Canada.
Or perhaps not all that many people would go anywhere permanently and they would just have an easier time going on vacation in either direction.
I binged watched a bunch of videos on Europe's various countries' backlash to immigration. An example was a Sweden reversal of attitude on immigration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmBOqfxPc90
Maybe the statistics in that video was cherry-picked and distorting reality. I haven't been to Sweden in 20 years to know the facts on the ground. Either way, the comments on that video are interesting.
I remember thinking 8 years ago that Trump's rhetoric of "build a wall" was insane. But now seeing the negative attitudes in every country that accepted a mass influx of immigration, it turns out he brilliantly tapped into a frustration that no other high-profile politician running for President was brave enough to say bluntly. It helped him win the election.
Reddit is completely astroturfed and shouldn't be taken as an real-world indication of political sentiments on any issue. However, turning to racist policy in light of economic crisis is not new, the last time Americans deported people of Mexican descent in droves was during the aftermath of the Great Depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation
Humanity will just have to relearn the lessons of the 1920s-1940s again, if it learns anything at all that is.
> Humanity will just have to relearn the lessons of the 1920s-1940s again, if it learns anything at all that is
Every 3rd generation, the cycle starts over. It's the circle of strife. The last generation that saw war on an industrial scale has almost completely died out.
What % of the Reddit userbase is non-legitimate, what is the source of the illegitimate users, and what is the source of your knowledge on this matter?
Astroturfing does not equal botting, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many bot farms active on Reddit.
The platform is virtually designed to be manipulated now, awards being an egregious example. Here’s an article about one such astroturfing campaign from folks who do not share my political tendencies: https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
It's not surprising that Reddit leans left on average, but what really deserves attention now is that the sentiment seems to be shifting in the other direction.
Unsatisfied with the natural fantasy world we live in, it seems we are now amplifying it on our own...and imagine how much Reddit/etc content is produced by the FBI, CIA, etc.
Westerners deserve all the pain and suffering we get, hopefully it gets even worse out there.
Canada has some of the most easily abused immigration systems in the world. Back home in India, it's considered a joke, with entire movies made on that premise. It has led to mass migration of a slice of India's low-skill-low-virtue underclass. This subgroup provides little economic value, brings down wages & slots into existing criminal gangs in Canada.
If this wasn't bad enough, Canada has the 1st world's most regressive housing system. This double whammy has made it impossible for Canada's millennials to buy houses, while boomers and gen-Xers get free asset appreciation and cheap labor. It's geriatric wealth transfer at the expense of this generation of Canadians.
Canada should join the EU, because both entities have spent decades taking bureaucracy-led self-destructive actions in the name of faux diversity & expert-led consensus.
Tell me more about this Indian 'subgroup', this 'low-skill-low-virtue underclass' that's built into your very fabric of society, ingrained in religion, that you don't like.
I think you're extrapolating further than I intended.
I used the phrases 'low-skill-low-virtue underclass', 'slice' &'subgroup' for reasons of being precise, not as dog-whistles.
'Subgroup and slice' because Canada definitely imports some elite human capital from India. Those numbers haven't changed over the last decade. It's the 2nd type of immigration that's exploded and is worth talking about.
As for your implication, I didn't call them Sikh because they aren't all or even majority Sikh. For the ones that are Sikh, their religion has very little to do with being low-skill or low-virtue. They're low skill as a matter of fact. A person doesn't chose to move to a bogus diploma-mill without basic competence in English, if they had meaningful skills. Low virtue because it involves actively abusing Canada's immigration system and closes your door to most respectful careers. It isn't endemic to the religion or the people. It is endemic to post-1980s Punjab. Now yes, being Sikh does make them more susceptible to being drawn into gangs once they're in Canada. But, there are enough non-Sikh gangs for the rest of them as well.
If your sieve preserves pebbles, then you'll get pebbles. Canada created a system that actively imports 'low-optimism, low-skill & young Indians; with no opportunities back home; low attachment to the homeland, and a propensity for using shady methods for immigration'. Smart Sikhs & Indians alike are staying back home or working in the US, where wages and opportunities are plentiful. There is ofc the aforementioned steady stream of high-skill Indians moving to Canada, but their numbers have been outstripped over the last decade.
If Canada had focused on expanding their high-skill pool while stamping some unsavory backdoor loopholes, then they could've had an excellent decade of productive immigration. Instead, they laid a red-carpet by the backdoor, added a 8 lane highway and now it's getting overwhelmed by unsavory backdoor users.
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I acknowledge that low-virtue might not be the best way to phrase it. It's just that this group is desperate for survival. They have no time or concern for integration, Canadian culture or the west's conception of civic sense. While it manifests as low-virtue optics, it is primarily about individuals who refuse to give up extractive 3rd-world-surivivalist zero-sum mentalities.
If you have references or sources I'd love to go through them.
I'm an Indian who has lived in Canada for a decade now, and I haven't seen or heard much about Indian immigration specifically for joining gangs or anything like that.
If anything there's more evidence that Canada's immigration crisis is a result of ridiculous barriers for high skilled workers if they don't have a degree from a North American university. Countless tales of medical professionals having to redo certifications because Canada doesn't accept their pre-existing education.
Canada tries to hide it in official statistics, but it still peeks through. Despite being a model minority in every other nation, ethnic-Indians have the 2nd highest crime rate by race in Canada[2]. Gang violence is primarily intra-race, and the over-representation of ethnic-Indian in homicide victims points its prevalence [3].
Canada's Indo-Canadian crime are limited to ethnic-neighborhoods and townships. Irishmen & italians on the west-coast would have been blissfully unaware of their respective mafias on the east coast. Similarly, unless you live in these neighborhoods, you won't notice it one bit.
Those statistics don't seem to prove what you're claiming. At all.
Even if we go with your premise (which in itself makes a whole bunch of assumptions), South Asian homicide victim rate per 100,000 people is comparable to the total rate (and for some years significantly lower):
2019: 1.77 vs 1.84 total
2020: 1.21 vs 2.01 total
2021: 1.69 vs 2.09 total
2022: 2.35 vs 2.27 total
2023: 1.38 vs 1.94 total
So even if your argument was valid (in inference, which I'm absolutely not convinced about), the data doesn't even back it, so it is at the very least unsound.
Did you confuse Indians with Southeast Asian by any chance? That group has a little higher rate of homicide victimhood, though only marginal. SE Asian people include Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, Philippine etc nationals, not Indian/Pakistani/Sri Lankan.
I mean racism isn't directly associated with support or opposition for immigration. You can be opposed to all immigration, even support remigration, and not be racist
Remigration [...] is a [...] political concept referring to the forced or promoted return of non-ethnically European immigrants, often including their descendants who were born in Europe, back to their place of racial origin, typically with no regard for their citizenship [^1]
Sounds pretty racist to me. Maybe you can be clearer on what you mean by non-racist remigration? The far-right groups, which are, at least in my country (Germany), the only once using the term to my knowledge, clearly mean it in a racist way.
I think a lot of these discussions get held up on what "racist" means to them.
I don't think the native people of Hawai'i or the Maori in New Zealand wanting Americans (for the former) and Anglos (for the latter) to leave is "racist."
Similarly, I don't see how Germans wanting non-Germans to leave is racist.
To me, "racist" would imply the belief one is superior to the other, and that's clearly orthogonal to the remigration question.
Wow. Comparing colonization with 20/21st century labor migration is peak far right playing victims. I guess the people of Hawai'i and the Maori were also asked and decided in a democratic process if they want their colonizers to come in and help rebuild their economy and do the jobs no one else wants to do.
> Similarly, I don't see how Germans wanting non-Germans to leave is racist.
Wanting non-Germans to leave when they are not refugees and do not participate in society is not the problem. The problem is the definition of non-German.
It would be inhuman to not give someone either citizenship or a permanent permit residency if they worked for a long time in a country. Do people really expect guest workers to come (alone?) into a foreign country, work the shittiest jobs for 15 years and then return to their home country to start a family with 35+ years?
Also, it would not work. Germany still attracts foreign workers in some fields (e.g. nurses). If you tell them, they get to work for 15 years and then have to return, no one would come. If the indigenous people of Germania advocating for no labor migration are ok with dying in their own excrement, because there are no nurses, I guess that would be one way to solve the problem.
I don’t know any modern country where people got to vote on immigration. It seems like even if you vote for the anti immigration parties you get just as much immigration.
At least in America, “less immigration” won out over “more immigration” by clear polling margins every year since 1965, except for a few years in the 2010s. Democratic processes gave them more.
I’ve seen similar results in the UK. Parties mentioning immigration restriction consistently do well and then end up doing nothing or increasing it.
Obviously colonization is only one kind of mass human migration and there are important differences between it and the migration now ongoing, but I don't think "the choice of the people already there" is really a factor in either. One could also argue that in most cases, a determined effort to repel colonizers would have prevented colonization. There was no such societal consensus, so it happened.
> Also, it would not work. Germany still attracts foreign workers in some fields (e.g. nurses). If you tell them, they get to work for 15 years and then have to return, no one would come. If the indigenous people of Germania advocating for no labor migration are ok with dying in their own excrement, because there are no nurses, I guess that would be one way to solve the problem.
Why wouldn't more young Germans just go into nursing? This seems like a rather exaggerated doomsday scenario. There would be shortages, wages would have to rise, and more Gerrmans would choose nursing over what they choose now.
Further, since birth rates are dropping everywhere, aren't you just buying yourself a few years? Eventually everywhere the immigrants are coming from will have the same problem you describe - and their home countries will be in horrific shape because you've sucked away all their talent. What happens then? This is a shortsighted policy no matter how you look at it.
> At least in America, “less immigration” won out over “more immigration” by clear polling margins every year since 1965, except for a few years in the 2010s. Democratic processes gave them more.
You are probably referring to the Gallup poll [1]. To me, it seems, they don't make a distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Some questions even dig into the illegal part. I'd say illegal immigration is a different question, and also somewhat unique to the US. Here in Germany, illegal immigration would be a no-go. If you look at polls about legal immigration in the US it is a totally different result where 46% say keep the level and 30% want to increase it. [2]
> It seems like even if you vote for the anti immigration parties you get just as much immigration.
I did not find anything supporting your argument on an international level. Although for the US you are probably right considering the recent H1B drama. On the contrary, here is an international comparison showing that in many developed countries, people think migration strengthens their country vs. being a burden [3].
> wages would have to rise, and more Gerrmans would choose nursing over what they choose now.
I think it's not an either/or. It's a big problem with no silver bullet. We'll have to do multiple things.
> Further, since birth rates are dropping everywhere, aren't you just buying yourself a few years?
No. Look at the age pyramid of Germany. We have to overcome the baby-boomer generation.
> and their home countries will be in horrific shape because you've sucked away all their talent. What happens then?
In the past, Germany had deals with the respective Governments called "Anwerbeabkommen." The other state often had a high rate of unemployment. Also, they haven't been skilled workers, mostly. But yes, I think now it is different. And I heard, they are already pissed at us today.
But it's also a totally different argument. And the Nazis on German streets definitely don't care about effects in the home countries. They just want ethnic homogeneity without the consequences.
> No. Look at the age pyramid of Germany. We have to overcome the baby-boomer
Everyone has this problem. Birth _rates_ are declining everywhere. Different countries are just in different parts of the decline. Even if this is your reason for importing immigrants and you think it’s worth any negatives, you are simply helping the boomers and doing nothing to help later generations. In addition, you are making the situation dramatically worse for migrant origin countries as their young people leave to be workers somewhere else.
I do think it’s also worth asking, if you keep this policy up, what you mean by “Germany.” If it’s an economic zone defined by arbitrary borders, all well and good, but if you think anything more of it than that, then obviously importing immigrants to create a square or non-inverted population pyramid means that at some point in the next century, German culture, norms, morals, and ethnicity will be a tiny minority in Germany the economic zone. If you’re okay with that tradeoff then alls well, but it seems worth acknowledging. I did some rough calculations with Canadian demographics for example, and in 80 years Canada will be totally unrecognizable as it will have had near-total population turnover via migration. Unless birth rates suddenly skyrocket instead of declining, or immigration comes to a screeching halt.
The future is never really predictable, but it’s looking like the future of a lot of Western countries is that they’ll end up basically satellites of countries like India, China, or Turkey. (Of course they’re facing their own declines, particularly China, but there’s a lot of quantity involved.) It’s also unclear to me that voting blocs of young voters will continue to fund entitlements. It will be pretty interesting to live through. I think the closest historical parallel is the total collapse in the Roman population during the early empire.
> In addition, you are making the situation dramatically worse for migrant origin countries as their young people leave to be workers somewhere else.
I did not disagree. But I also think this is a whole other argument.
> German culture, norms, morals, and ethnicity will be a tiny minority in Germany the economic zone.
Ethnicity I really don't care about. Why do you? I'm also fine and actually glad about people bringing along their culture as long as it doesn't get in the way of life of other people and most importantly respects everyone's human rights. The other ones are a question of integration. There is certainly a lot of room for improvement, but making it sound like they come here and will replace German culture is a big stretch. If anything is killing German culture, it is increasing cost of living and it being somewhat outdated, e.g. a lot of meat in cuisine, outdated values from Christianity and alcohol consumption. If any culture is replacing ours, it is US/consumerism.
People want temporary foreign workers--who immigrated here in unprecedented numbers in recent years--to leave the country, not anyone who has darker skin. No no brought up remigration.
Not sure how "No no" is, if it is a language barrier or if you meant to write "No one". But the parent comment to mine brought it up.
> People want temporary foreign workers--who immigrated here in unprecedented numbers in recent years--to leave the country, not anyone who has darker skin.
I'm not very familiar with Canadian immigration. But if they are temporary foreign workers, they by definition shouldn't have a citizenship and instead just a (temporary) work visa. Also, I wouldn't call that immigration, hence it also isn't remigration. The challenge should just be, to no longer extend the visas and not fuck up the economy, right?
I think I understand the disconnect. In Canada, anyone who is living here but is not a citizen is usually considered an immigrant (unless they are a refugee). Once they have their citizenship, they're just Canadian. We don't really make the migrant distinction, at least in my experience.
So when I say that we need to reduce the number of immigrants living in Canada in 2025, I only mean we need to reduce the number of temporary foreign workers. Part of the problem is that many people who came on temporary work visas don't plan to leave, they intend to exploit loopholes in the system to turn what was a temporary visa into permanent residency. So yes, in theory we just need to not extend the visas. In practice things will be messy.
Justin Trudeau, maybe the "e" was an accident. He's about to receive a no-confidence vote from the opposition parties in parliament, which will force an election.
"Justine" is what some people who disapprove of him are calling him. It's a mocking conspiracy theory that JT's wife left him due to him being transexual.
Looks like it is changing, with geographical location being a factor too.
> For the first time in a quarter century, a clear majority [58%] of Canadians say there is too much immigration, with this view strengthening considerably for the second consecutive year. This trend is evident across the population but is most significant in the Prairie provinces, while least so in Quebec.
The biggest "We told you so" moment I had in the past year was seeing the reversal of the ROC calling us racism to basically adopting our position that quality (value compatibility, economic plus value) and quantity (capacity to receive) in immigration are two important factor to not f*ck up social cohesion.
This does not sound remotely close to my experience. According to StatCan, about 6 million out of 8 million have French as a maternal language, and the same is true for the language spoken at home. Even more have French as the "language the most spoken at home".
Speaking as a Vancouverite: nope. I'm more vocal than ever about calling out any shred of prejudice or hate from anyone around me -- not that I have to do so very often at all. Once or twice a year at most, I'd say.
If you are in Canada and you have a problem with immigration, uhhh.. sorry, but you might want to figure out how to accept it.
"According to the 2021 Canadian census, immigrants in Canada number 8.3 million persons and make up approximately 23 percent of Canada's total population. This represents the eighth-largest immigrant population in the world, while the proportion represents one of the highest ratios for industrialized Western countries" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada
As an immigrant in Canada, I have observed a relentless increase in anti-immigration discourse. While there are valid critiques of current immigration policies, the conversation too often carries a racist undertone.
Yeah, there are surely aspects of the immigration program(s) to criticize, but the racism aspect has been either totally unchanged or decreased over time, from my observation. Though, maybe that's unsurprising considering: "Vancouver is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities in Canada: 49.3 percent of its residents are not native English speakers, 47.8 percent are native speakers of neither English nor French, and 54.5 percent of residents belong to visible minority groups." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver
In a, maybe not worst case, but really bad case, where there is violent conflict between the west and the PRC, how mught that play out in BC? My understanding is that a large portion of that 54.5% are from there? In the US during ww2 many Japanese business and land holdings were nationalized and then auctioned off to local business people. It seems like a work of fiction now, but such things have precedent.
Similar situation in Australia and US. And most of it misplaced.
One major issue is trying to buy a first home where the blame goes towards immigrants. Instead of towards older generations where the problem really lies. They apply political power across multiple levels of government to affect everything from planning, taxation, inheritance which systemically prevent young people getting into the market.
Likewise upwards mobility and income inequality gets blamed on immigrants instead of the wealthy.
I've seen that tactic to try to discredit real, valid concerns with immigration, either by lumping it with racism (which definitely exists, but is not the only argument against unfettered immigration), or by pretending something else is the problem (something else may also be a problem, but that doesn't make the problems that people are worried about with high levels of immigration invalid).
In my understanding, the backlash against immigration in Canada is relatively recent, and it's basically caused by the fact that Canada took in a huge number of immigrants, historically speaking, in recent years. This results in:
1. People feeling likes many immigrant communities are creating enclaves instead of adopting the culture of Canada.
2. Many recent immigrants are unskilled, resulting in a larger burden on provincial-based social services.
When you couple that with astronomical housing prices and a stagnant economy with rising unemployment where many people see less opportunity, it's not hard to see why citizens are demanding lower rates of immigration.
In Australia up to 70% of the cost of a home is dictated by zoning and land release issues.
70%. Thats not "Something else" thats "The majority of the issue"
Immigration is already controlled here so that its roughly just backfill for population growth targets. State governments are supposed to release enough land to meet population growth targets. They have never met these land release targets.
So "Immigration" is already meant to be factored in as one of many factors, but isn't, and that immigration is a tiny % of the overall problem.
To focus on immigration as the entire issue, as happens quite a bit here, is fundamentally racist. And quite obviously so.
I honestly couldn't give 2 shits about enclaves. I live in a region where the australian government has dumped every refugee population since the 70s and uses it as a baseline for targeted welfare studies. This worst part of living here is the halal pepperoni.
Immigration may be "controlled" in the sense that there's rules around it, but it's at record highs (Net Overseas Migration). This is a huge driver of housing prices.
No sane person is focusing on it as the "entire" issue, but it's one of the largest drivers, and it's not racist to notice that. To decry it as racist out of hand is precisely the problem.
Its at record highs because its backfilling a population growth target that had more space.
Its not a "Huge" driver of housing prices, its a rounding error off the back of the fact that the states refuse to meet land release targets. Targets they signed up to. And its completely irrelevant to zoning issues.
Minimizing the actual issue in favor of reacting to race, man there's a term for that.
>When you couple that with astronomical housing prices and a stagnant economy
When you compare Canada, the US or some of the higher immigration countries in Europe to developed countries without immigration you'd wish you'd have price increase problems.
Japan, sometimes hailed as an alternative to immigration is now so poor and old that middle class Westerners travel there like they traveled to a middle income country twenty years ago. If you think Canada is stagnant you haven't been to places where a quarter of the population is aged over 60.
Immigration problems and friction are real but they absolutely pale to the economic disaster that low birth rate aging economies experience. Without significant migration you're looking forward to decades of deflation, politics dominated by people who raise pensions and basically no entrepreneurship. Cultural and housing problems are fixable (just build more housing), dying out is not.
>Prices feel like a middle income country, but that is just the Yen sucking
No it isn't. In purchasing power terms Japan has been, or is about to be overtaken by Poland and Slovakia [1]. This is largely due to demographics and the declining share of the working age population. There is nothing that impoverishes countries more. Gradual decline feels fine for a while, until it doesn't when the bulk of the workforce ages out.
Japan demographic crisis is due to a mismanaged economy where many Japanese leave the country to find work. They are also not interested in mass immigration.
Does this not speaks to the rapid growth of Central Europe economies rather than a decline of Japan? I have read similar comparisons for both the U.K. and Germany vs Poland.
Also, a quick googling suggests both Poland and Japan both have fertility rates around 1.2. Working age of Poland is 65% of the population vs 60% for Japan. So a bit worse.
> Cultural and housing problems are fixable (just build more housing), dying out is not.
We've been through this endless times through history. When one ethnic group is exterminated, they are still dead even if strangers move into their land and dwellings. Whether that is done through war, disease or economic strangling of the youth. All has the same result and it is a crime against humanity and a crime against God.
As long as the Japanese are allowed to exist, they can flourish again. Not if they've been replaced by different people. It's the same for all of us in the world.
You don’t even have to exterminate the people; the culture can be replaced by another more powerful one - this has already happened especially to Canada; it’s much more like a weird copy of the USA than it was a hundred years ago.
I think literally all of those problems also apply to Canada. The population over 60 is around 20% and our birth rate as of 2022 was 1.33. We have low productivity, low entrepreneurship driven by a number of factors, and a stagnant economy that by the Bank of Canada's own admission is propped up by post-COVID immigration.
It is important to differentiate between immigrants vs temporary workers and foreign students. What Canadians seem to have issue with is the latter, which is being abused by Canadian companies.
The anger should be aimed at the rich in Canada abusing the system, as well as the paid for politicians enabling the abuse. It shouldn’t be aimed at the newcomers.
It’s an immigrant community that refused to integrate into the culture that existed there before them. If that sounds ridiculous it is because this entire conversation is ridiculous.
> It’s an immigrant community that refused to integrate into the culture that existed there before them.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow, you're in need of a major history lesson, like how the British first basically committed genocide with the expulsion of the Acadia French, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians, and then when they realized that was a collosal fuck up they explicitly put policies in place to not expel the rest of the French in Quebec and deliberately treat them as second class citizens.
Again I think you might need to educate yourself on Canadian history.
The French that founded Quebec where here predated the English that eventually founded the county of Upper / Lower Canada... You might have a misunderstanding of what the term immigrant means.
Our problem is that state governments have never reached their population growth based land release targets. And zoning laws are fairly ridiculous.
One study found that something like 70% of the cost of owning a home in Sydney comes from zoning and land release issues. That is, a bit of reform in zoning laws and a heap of land being released could see a 1 million dollar home being available for 300k.
That said, so much of australias economy is based on the false premise that housing is a stable long term investment. If you dropped housing on its face you would probably bankrupt the country for a generation. That said, better now than later.
That’s just supply and demand in another way, you could also argue the number of houses is fine you just need fewer people.
In either case you’re saying “make the number of houses correct for the number of inhabitants” - of course an obvious answer is “build more houses” but that can’t always work - San Francisco can’t remain SF at the density of Singapore. It’d still exist, but it wouldn’t be what it was.
It's not entirely misplaced. There's supply, and there's demand. You can't point to one and ignore the other.
I'm all for the YIMBY and zoning reform push, but a) that's decided on the municipal level, b) change is slow, c) immigration rates can drastically change in very little time, if the feds decide. In Canada feds wanted to have their cake and eat it too: the population grew by over 3% in a year, but infrastructure at the provincial level (e.g. healthcare) didn't budge, and housing isn't building much faster than it was before.
If we understand that the key factor behind housing affordability is inelasticity of supply, then it should be easy to intuit that other things can be inelastic: policy and the law. By contrast, immigration rate might as well be a push of a button. It's not responsible to jack up the rate first and keep it that way just because it's not "the-thing-that-ought-to-change".
There are of course other externalities with high immigration rates (for contrast, US immigration rate is not that high), and the downsides to low immigration are overstated. Older generations won't live forever, but what I generally see is a call for unnecessary wealth transfer from young generation to old. Boomers are the wealthiest demographic already. We don't need to give them more freebies.
We have a very similar situation in Australia which proves you wrong.
Federal government gave billions of incentives to states to build more houses who in turn enacted higher density zoning and overrode the concerns of municipalities. And suddenly we have lots of houses being built.
Less immigrants makes the house situation better but not does not solve the problem. Having a continuous system for building lots of houses does.
Canada did this with a housing accelerator fund, for municipalities. Did not amount to much of anything. It's not clear if provinces can override but there's no political will for it. Without reading the numbers for Australia, I expect reform has been modest.
> Less immigrants makes the house situation better but not does not solve the problem.
You contradict yourself in the same sentence. The same result can be achieved whether improving elasticity or reducing the immigration rate. "the problem" is the affordability, not the elasticity. That is your just preferred vector.
Even if zoning is improved, you can't defy the laws of physics; housing will still be relatively inelastic, whereas immigration rate can be much higher.
Australia's population growth rate was less than 1% last year, basically on par with US. Canada's was 3%. Incomparable. No amount of zoning reform will be enough to handle that sustainably.
In NL the housing shortage is blamed on immigrants whereas the actual reason for said shortage is absolutely the politics of the right-wing cabinets for the last 15 years who did nothing significant to improve the speed of housing construction.
It’s not that strange as one of the political parties basically explicitly protects business interests and oh boy did they profit. It’s political nihilism.
It doesn't matter either way. The population growth is lower now than it has been during pretty much the entire 20th century. If we could build houses to keep up with a 1.3% growth in the 1960s, why can't we build enough to keep up with a 0.5% growth in the 2020s?
Maybe it has something to do with the Ministry of Housing and Planning being abolished because the minister believed the "country was finished", or a minister telling a woman who asked how she was supposed to afford a home to "find a rich boyfriend", or all construction being blocked because the country has been violating NOx emission laws for decades, or an insanely high tax specifically on social housing, or...
I see where you’re going for but asylum seekers aren’t the bulk of the immigrants, that’s Europeans that come here to work and do the work “we” don’t want to do, but is absolutely necessary to keep our country running.
We can kick them out for sure, but you won’t like the consequences.
Inheritance goes to young people in the same family. I doubt that is holding back the young people who get it.
Immigration keeps salaries low which is great for companies bad for young people.
Immigrants of a similar age want the same type of housing. Young people starting out cannot afford their parents home. They compete for the same resources. Older generations are least affected.
These days inheritance almost all the time goes from very old people (70-80 years old) to old people (50-60 years old). It almost never goes to young people
If true, it would explain the massive post-covid revenue bumps at Carnival Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean. These guys are making double their pre-covid revenue, and 2019 was a really great year. They're heading to almost 3x their revenue before that: https://valustox.com/RCL
This is more true than people realize; it seems every week in bogleheads there’s a question that’s basically “how can we use the inheritance we just got to help our grandkids get a leg up without huge tax implications?”
a) Inheritance is a problem because instead of property going back onto the market it is instead like you say kept inside families and typically used as investment properties.
b) Immigration isn't keeping salaries low. Companies are. Because they have eliminated unionisation and so workers have no means to demand for higher wages. And with so much remote talent companies always have a backup plan in case there is a supply shortage.
c) As you say they compete for the same resources. Now why can't there be more homes ? Because older people fight increasing density, refuse to support taxes on investment properties and are increasingly refusing to downsize once their children move out. Remember for many their legacy depends on high property prices.
How did you just argue both that companies need backup plans to keep wages low in a supply shortage and also that immigration, which solves supply shortages, does not keep wages low; and not see that those claims are contradictory?
It's crazy to me how many old people who self-identify as conservatives / capitalists have no qualms about using their political pull to get government muscle to kill competition in real estate using the building permitting process. Free markets mean free markets. Charlie Munger was right: it's all about incentives.
Traditionalist when it comes to pensions. They paid their share, so young workers should pay them high pensions for decades after retirement.
Capitalists when it comes to ownership. They've made the investments, so young workers should work hard and accept lower wages to pay them shareholder profits. Company taxes should be low.
Socialists when it comes to healthcare. They are old and fragile, so young workers should pay high taxes on their labour to help the old people needing socialized service.
Feudalists when it comes to estates. They are the rightful owners of the land they inherited, so young workers should go into debt for life to buy it off them so that they can cash out lottery money for selling their real estate. Or even better, cash rent money while keeping the property.
Canadian high housing prices is certainly a multi-factor problem, but to say that the frustration with high immigration is "misplaced" is tremendously disingenuous.
Unless your claim is that "supply and demand" is somehow irrelevant, the immigration rate is a knob that can be dialed down to reduce the severity of the problem. It's one of the easiest knobs to adjust too.
That's why people are frustrated, and understandably so.
It was a legitimate question. Issues related to displacement of people are often labeled as related to immigration or immigration problems while they’re closer to things like policy and services. These are also topics favourited by populist parties because it’s easy to generalise on them and misrepresent facts.
The one without quotes means "people moving across borders" the one with quotes means "people we've chosen to label as scary and dangerous because it makes you vote for us".
I think there is a real difference between immigration to Canada and immigration to Europe.
Canada's immigration policy is on the whole highly selective, focused on skilled immigrants. The largest category of immigrants is professionals. Immigration laws are enforced and illegal immigration is relatively low. Refugees are admitted, but the government retains control over the numbers, the source countries, which individuals get chosen, etc.
In 2015–2016, Germany admitted close to one million Syrian refugees. Over the same period, Canada took 44,000 of them. There is a never-ending stream of unauthorised arrivals (some genuine refugees, many economic migrants–it can be difficult to distinguish them) crossing the Mediterranean.
The biggest complaint about immigration in Canada is that it is contributing to an overheated property market, locking many younger Canadians out of owning their own home.
But the majority of immigrants to Canada are well-off, educated – so unlikely to get involved in social problems like crime or terrorism, and they tend to integrate well with mainstream society. There are some poorer and disadvantaged immigrant groups who are more likely to experience those problems, but their numbers are smaller. Compare to Europe where the number of poor / poorly educated / socially deprived immigrants is much larger.
So while both Canada and Europe may have some problems with immigration, they are rather different problems.
> Canada's immigration policy is on the whole highly selective, focused on skilled immigrants
Was. At present nearly every min wage and gig economy position in the country is 99% early 20s males from India taking advantage of being able to enrol in a diploma mill to qualify for PR. The Feds knew of this shady pipeline for years and did nothing because it juiced GDP numbers that otherwise would have revealed a recession.
Even once reputable colleges/universities couldn’t resist starting part-time no-show “hospitality” programs with 0 work and 100% pass rate to siphon tuition as the table stakes for being able to circumvent other immigration streams.
> At present nearly every min wage and gig economy position in the country is 99% early 20s males from India taking advantage of being able to enrol in a diploma mill to qualify for PR. The Feds knew of this shady pipeline for years and did nothing because it juiced GDP numbers that otherwise would have revealed a recession.
Australia has had the same problem and in the last few years the Australian government has cracked down heavily on education visas, diploma mills, etc. If Trudeau isn't doing it already, I expect Poilievre will. Which means this may turn out to be more of a passing problem.
Canada has begun cracking down on this. There are now caps on the number of visas issued. Foreign students are no longer allowed to work full-time jobs by default while studying. This is especially relevant, because the Comprehensive Ranking System for permanent immigration gives points for years of full-time work experience in Canada, as well as for diplomas earned in Canada.
Unwinding it will be a bit messy: lots of post-secondary institutions have to figure out how run programs with a lot less funding, and what to do with capital projects that no longer make sense in light of greatly reduced enrollment, etc.
The damage done to the average Canadian's view of immigrants will take some time to fade away. But I suspect it will, with time, especially since our traditional immigration system really does just skim the "good" immigrants -- the ones with money and the skills to succeed.
Are you my doppelganger? I made almost this exact comment word-for-word to a friend of mine a few weeks ago.
Trudeau's immigration video from December [1] was one of the most dishonest, condescending productions that I've ever seen, basically amounting to, "Yes, we destroyed our previous internationally respected immigration system and imported five million low skilled laborers over a couple years without adding any housing or infrastructure. Yes, that's hurt a lot of you and made you angry. No, we don't think that's a problem. But because you're so angsty, we'll throttle it back a tiny wittle bit over the next year or two before throwing the floodgates wide open again."
Not a shred of anything even resembling self-awareness or humility throughout.
The most shocking thing to me is the heavy involvement of McKinsey consulting in all this[1]. Feels anti-democratic to let a foreign consulting firm set immigration targets.
That's absolutely bananas. $3 million for a _report_ about suggestions for possible immigration reform (to speed it up of course). In the hole $62 billion a year, and a sizable chunk is going to overpriced MBA grads right out of school to produce PDF documents. How the hell do we reign these people in.
The student to permanent resident pipeline is an entire booming industry in Canada with a dozen loopholes to exploit. Unless you honestly believe that millions of Indian international students are here to receive a quality education in “hospitality” at a strip mall diploma mill then return home.
It doesn't matter today, does it? There are way too many of them. They don't integrate with the locals and they are taking jobs and housing away from young people. Nothing against them, it's not their fault, but we can't sustain anywhere near this number of Indian TFWs. Canada has been completely swamped.
Just a nitpick -- the "overheated property market" sounds like a bad thing, but I don't understand why it must be that way. In the end -- property developers are Canadian companies, and must bathe in money. "Younger Canadians" must be enjoying elevated salaries at these companies.
The only reason I see why it is that way is when other Canadians restrict the supply of real estate (NIMBY) to inflate their own property value. Same for most other democratic real estate markets in the world in the past years, not just Canada, regardless of immigration levels.
That may be true, but money is still expensive, lead times are absurd, and we have a small number of companies who probably make most of their money jsut by owning the land regardless of whether it's developed or not. Likewise, even if you're making very good money in one of a scarce few highly specialized or senior positions, you'll need to be doing so for an extended period of time, and probably make much more than even that, along with your spouse, to buy a place.
Vancouver (the city) is a town where a 2 bedroom condo built in the last 20 years is likely going to run ~$1m, and where some 1 bedroom places go for that. The suburbs are a smidge better but not by much. A house, albeit probably a comically large and stupid one on the outskirts near nothing of flavor could be $1.5m-$2m
It's not so much that we're blaming immigrants, anyone doing so isn't appreciating that something like the situation we're in is the result of multifaceted fuckery; an economic failure at some scale. Many types and waves of immigrants are involved—most recent ones being thrown under the bus unfortunately—but generally Canadians accept immigrants more than not, it's just that the rate was intentionally increased haphazardly to such a degree on top of an already abysmal outlook for anyone who wouldn't stand to profit off of increased population.
If you had a big house in Vancouver, if you are a developer, if you are a certain type of business owner, you were riding high. If you're anyone else, your resume is now one among a thousand for almost any low-med skilled position, and the most viable cities were already! sitting at a ~1% vacancy, which is a real life pressing problem. Immigration numbers are a part of this, but not remotely close to the whole picture.
You're right on the money imo and the author clearly shows a lack of understanding of systems thinking.
He takes a simple observation and generalizes it instead of working backwards to the fact that Canada is just like the US geographically highly isolated with giant oceans on each side whereas Germany and Europe are a landmass directly connected to other continents.
I highly recommend the books "Prisoners of Geography" (1/2) for anyone interested in realizing how geography silently shapes politics.
> But the majority of immigrants to Canada are well-off, educated – so unlikely to get involved in social problems like crime or terrorism, and they tend to integrate well with mainstream society.
This seems to be very out of sync with the opinions of the Canadians I know, and the recent public issues with heavy immigration of unskilled males from the Punjab.
There is a slight of hand that is done in these arguments - some take “immigrant” to mean “anyone who was not born in Canada” and others take it to mean “any non-citizen/temp worker”.
Those are two vastly different groups even if one contains the other.
I will not comment on the European data here, but this is so wrong on the Canada side.
Sentiment against immigration is real in Canada. You're comparing refugee numbers when in reality Canada's population grew faster than most of the G7 in 2023 [1]
This observation is moot and quite frankly pretty boring for two reasons:
Firstly, as much as people spouting the same simplistic tune may wish for, by all means the government is not just a single person.
Secondly, Merkel or anyone else who would have been in that position during that time would have simply needed to deal with the fact that there were millions of Syrians bleeding into Western Europe across dozens of different routes and hence in ways which the legally open borders of Europe were absolutely not equipped to deal with effectively.
The fact countries of entry to the EU did not at all fullfil their legal obligations with regards to asylum processing is.... let me guess: Again Merkel's fault right?
With comments like these, you might win some imaginary "Thanks Obama/ Thanks Merkel" bingo you're playing with yourself, but it's really not contributing to any debate about where we pragmatically go from here into a better future.
I'd love to hear more about the latter rather than the former.
And yet racism is on the steep raise in Canada. I guess there's no way of doing migration that doesn't spark racism even if you are super careful about who you let in.
That's not true. Canadians were, in general, very pro immigration until recently, because we had a highly selective process. Public opinion has only changed recently because federal immigration policy opened the floodgates to millions of Indian temporary foreign workers (mostly young, male, and unskilled). This has proved to be way too much for the country to handle.
A bunch of states ought to get split into multiple because it would result in a better mapping of state governments to economic and cultural lines and result in better representation for all parties on the state level.
Of course it will never happen for a multitude of reasons
IMO, remove the cap on the house of representatives and go back to the original method in the constitution (1/30k).
And then if you and ~30k other citizens all agree to sign for a specific representative then they're in the house but you can't vote for a different guy in the normal election.
You'd generally have to have the urban areas be one state, and everything else another. But those areas still have large numbers of people aligned with the other party, so those people will be even more disenfranchised.
And if a county "flips" parties in one election, do you then move it between state lines?
I remember when CETA was ratified, and there was talk about labor mobility which got me excited. Having more options on which countries to work is always better than fewer, but I ended up in the U.S. and turns out that worked out much better for me. Others may have different views.
I was once young and had romantic notions of living in Europe, but I realized that I cultivated those notions as a student, tourist and urbanist. The realities of living in Europe are more complicated. I can still deal with the downsides (would still love to live in London), but as I've moved around and lived in more places, I realized it's not incontrovertibly true that the European lifestyle is better than in North America. Just depends what you're optimizing for.
Europe is still a good destination for the well-heeled (and with a job lined up -- but that's true for almost any developed country), but if one isn't in that situation, Europe not the paradise many young people in Canada think it is. Sure you have walkable cities, universal healthcare, social safety net, train travel to tons of interesting destinations. But you also have to deal with a lot more bureaucracy, inefficiencies, and ultimately being a foreigner in a land that is not an immigrant nation like Canada is. The cuisines in European cities are nowhere near as diverse as the cuisines available in Toronto. You can't take risks and do new things as easily. The downside of the good life is comfort -- and a lack of dynamism.
p.s. looking back on CETA after 7 years (it's still not fully in effect), it looks like the effects were largely negligible to Canadians except in niche areas because of other effects that canceled out the advantages.
I am continually amazed at how many of my fellow Canadians are unaware of CETA.
I buy ski equipment from European online retailers for cheaper than from the US because no tariffs on it. It arrives here faster, and with better customer service, too.
I don't think this is an attractive option for Canada. The main downside of EFTA is that you are required to follow a lot of single-market legislation, without getting any say in it.
Considering how tightly Canada is currently coupled to the US, this would be an absolute nightmare for many businesses. Yeah you'd gain a hypothetical overseas market, but in turn you're losing alignment with an absolutely massive market right next door! That's something like 60% of your import/export, gone.
The weird trade things between the provinces are more to do with special exceptions and regulations around alcohol, trades regulation, etc. than the kind of tariff-oriented things people are talking usually with "free trade". They're a product of the fact that Canada, like the US, is a highly federal system and the provinces have strong powers. In some cases, stronger than in the US system (and in other cases, not)
In any case, we already have a free trade agreement with the EU. In some respects for some products its better than what we have with the US.
Why? Until its recent immigration debacle, Canada was one of the most efficiently governed countries in the world. 15-20 years ago, Canada had lower non-defense government spending per capita than the U.S., despite having a universal healthcare system. Canadian federalism has been incredibly effective, with the majority of all spending happening at the provincial level and meaningful differences between provincial policy reflective of local concerns.
Indeed. I don’t think I have met a single person that thinks the Canadian constitution as is is the right thing, but also have never met any two people that agree on what it should be instead.
If anything the recent Trumpian outbursts have demonstrated just how strong the inertia is on this. For it to change will take a genuine existential crisis.
Another potential union that gets the occasional mention is CANZUK - a union of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. [0] Practically, and legally, they all share the same head of state and similar cultures (although culturally Quebec is the outlier) so perhaps it would be an easier fit.
I’ve been a proponent of CANZUK for 20 odd years now. My support comes from the cultural side of things. I spent 15 years working and living at ski resorts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and worked with a lot of young adults from the UK and Ireland). You can basically swap out anyone from the CANZUK+IE countries and get someone similar in language/culture/work ethic/etc and only have a slightly different accent.
I also know dozens of international couples who met and fell in love with someone from one of the other countries and have seen countless relationships forced to part ways because of stupid visa issues.
I’d like to see the free movement of people come first, a military agreement second (a la NATO) and then whatever free trade agreements that make sense.
Personally I'm a lot more interested in us (Canadians) joining an existing successful union than us trying to start up a competitor. The two actions don't seem particularly similar in potential costs/benefits/drawbacks/...
In practice, our head of state here in Australia is the governor-general.[1] That role is largely ceremonial too.
Anyway, I tend to agree with the sentiment that, in ascending order of silly accents, Canadians, English, Irish, Australian, and Kiwis, share a common culture and work ethic.
I dunno how anyone can take New Zealanders seriously, if you’ve ever heard one speak you’d surely agree.[2] I’m gonna blame the Dutch, the silly bastards.
Wacky idea. The EU is an awful lot of legislation to sign up to, not the most popular it's even been either. If it's just about trading space and resources for people I'd imagine a more bespoke arrangement would be preferable for both sides.
Only the free movement of labor is really unusual. As in ... really, really, really unusual. Lots of trade deals include variations of the first 3 ... free movement of labor is basically unheard of between nation states as part of trade deals.
Australia and New Zealand have both free trade and free movement of people between them. They aren't formally linked – free trade is a treaty, free movement of people is just an "arrangement" (not a legally binding agreement under international law, rather a political agreement implemented in each country's immigration law) – but it is all part of the overall multifaceted bilateral relationship.
Well, that gets the heart of what's do revolutionary about the EU's basic premises. "You want to move capital and profits and materials without limit? Sure, no problem, but only if labor has the same freedom."
I think a big difference is that Australia and New Zealand are only two countries, so there has never been felt to be a need to establish many joint institutions. Issues can generally be worked through by one-on-one negotiation. Rather than some single overarching body to manage everything, there are lots of individual agreements and arrangements on separate issues.
There are some joint institutions – for example, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), which is in charge of food regulation for both countries – but rather than an international bureaucracy, it is an Australian government agency. Even its Wellington office, all the employees are technically Australian public servants, even though they are mostly New Zealanders. New Zealand pays the Australian government part of FSANZ's budget; FSANZ issues new food regulations under Australian law and then the New Zealand government copies/pastes them into New Zealand law too: with rare exceptions, they are allowed to refuse to adopt a change if they disagree with it–Kava is a recent example, Australia has been cracking down on Kava due to concerns about the health risk, and using both controlled substances and food standards regulation to do so; New Zealand has been unwilling to go along due to its cultural importance to New Zealand's Pasifika (Pacific Islander) minority.
The issue is that the neighbouring countries are generally a lot poorer, and many of them are small island states, often with a shaky track record on democracy, so it just isn't politically and economically feasible to integrate them into the same economic relations as Australia and New Zealand have. There has been some talk of turning the Pacific Islands Forum, the regional international organisation, into a "Pacific Union", by expanding Australia/New Zealand's de facto economic union to the whole bloc. But realistically I think that's decades away, if it ever happens. And unless and until that happens, there is no real need to put the Australia/New Zealand economic union on a more formal footing.
Germany has no domestic military power to speak of, military is comically underfunded. No nuclear deterrence. Not sure what kind of protection you're thinking of.
We can send beer to your enemy in hopes they opt for boozing rather than shooting.
And the international political and economic influence. Really of the whole EU - those countries together, including their currency, have global weight. Together, they are on the scale of the US and China.
Also, they would like to sell things to and buy things from Germany and France, and the rest of the EU.
Economics determines military power. If Germany wants to build a military, they can and now they are, to a significant extent.
Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, Croatia in 2013. Ukraine, Moldova, and (last I knew) Georgia are all trying to get in. Iceland is considering it. Many are even talking about it in the UK, though obviously that won't happen soon.
Given the limits of oceans and seas, and Russia and Turkey to the east, there's not much more of Europe left that hasn't joined. They've actually succeeded in uniting almost all of Europe - pretty effing incredible, an historic achievement that will be admired for millennia.
> conditional on things like only voting in left wing parties
Thefuck? The EU has been making everything conditional on privatization, deregulation and generally adopting more capitalist models in practically every aspect of government. You're calling this left wing??
A few examples of the demands: sell off our largest and state-owned bank; decouple, deregulate and privatize electricity generation and sale; open the up publicly-owned railways to private operators; increase the minimum age of retirement...
The EU isn't exactly famous for its love of deregulation, you know. Quite the opposite, especially when it comes to tech.
But I'm referring to the withdrawal of cohesion funds from countries like Poland and Hungary under newly invented rules like needing to share "EU values". These values aren't defined or written down anywhere, but the only countries that seem to violate them are those with conservative parties in power. The moment the conservatives are no longer in power, suddenly the country is in compliance with "EU values" again.
You know that's not what's happening. The EU is withholding money because those countries have regressed democratically, with the executive controlling the judiciary and press, and oppressing the political opposition.
Plenty of conservative governments are in the EU. Freedom and democracy - which mean an independent judiciary and free and independent press - are not left-wing ideas!
Geopolitical thought experiments pop up from time to time but rarely come to fruition. There will be enough domestic opposition from both sides that this will never happen. The idea may become more compelling if Canada completely loses freedom of movement and free trade with the U.S., but that means the Canadian economy would have to crater first, which weakens the benefit EU would receive from accepting such a member country.
Canada needs people? I thought the recent controversy is all about Canada having too many people and the pro immigration government also taking a more tempered immigration stance?
Canada has a population of 40 million in a land area larger than the USA. That's hardly "too many people". Too many people in a handful of dense urban centers maybe, but overall the country is basically empty.
Because much of the landmass is uninhabitable. For instance, Nunavut is about 20% larger than Alaska, yet has less than one tenth its population - because most of the province is tundra. Even building a road through it is iffy - a city? Forget it.
Most of Canada is habitable. If you meant "comfortable to live", then draw a 100 miles radius circle centered on any existing comfortable Canadian city and see how much of it is actually developed.
The argument is that we are taking on too many people and neither jobs nor housing completions are keeping up. There is an element of truth in that however our birthrate is not sustainable, either, so we're caught between those two eventualities.
The empty parts start just outside the cities, so obviously yes.
The thing is there is no REASON to; a city can’t really be self-fulfilling until after it has grown for some other reason (oil, or crops, or shipping, etc).
I suppose Canada could chose to move the capital to some small town in Nunavut and cause a population boom there.
Glad you asked. My cousin grew up in Toronto. He was joking the other day about it Canadians. “You can just shove them! Try it! They’ll probably apologize to you.” Those are Canadians. They’re people socialized according to customs that, among other things, prioritize public civility and turning the other cheek. (Might have something to do with the fact that founding Canadians were virtually all Christian, and that percolated into secular Canadian culture.)
My cousin is not Canadian. He’s an immigrant from a Muslim country. He’s “assimilated,” professionally successful, etc. Now, I don’t think he actually goes around shoving people. But we’re from an honor based society, so we are socialized to view that sort of passive behavior as weakness.
It's not a skill issue, it's a sunlight and temperature issue based on geographical science. There are hard limitations, including the length of the growing season. Canadians are also arrogant; most have never tasted the produce in California. Just look at what we call "Farmers Markets" here and compare to SF Bay Area and NYC Union Square Greenmarket. Even a trip to an American Whole Foods groceries section is scales off the eyes as to the quality differential.
Not the point. If you can grow then why are Canadian supermarket produce so awful compared to American tomatoes and raspberries? Think about that for a second and why that would be the case, if not for fundamental geographic limitations (the objective length of the growing season and the angle of sunlight). BC in particular is inferior and Montrealers moving here have made this exact complaint, it's not "just" me, sounds like you're in filter bubble.
Instead of rudely retorting 'it sounds like a you issue' why don't you not make such an arrogant assumption and suppose I had a deeper reason for saying what I did, that actually is based on experience and research rather than a superficial tour through Delta in peak summer. Don't argue back; just ask why.
Don't argue back? Way to promote intelligent discourse. I just disagree with you.. I've had lots of American produce and I can grow tomatoes just as good as those I've had in the US.
Comparing what's in a supermarket is also kind of a bad way to judge things, as both Canada and the US import a lot of items from each other or South America.
I'm not making an "arrogant assumption" I'm just refuting your broad and negative claim that our "land sucks." I shouldn't have to assume a bunch of nuance when you don't include any in your original comment. Is their limitations to growing in Canada/BC? Yes. I'm not growing citrus for a reason. But I disagree with your take, and I find it doubtful our geography is to blame for any poor performing tomatoes. Gardening/farming can be hard. My tomato year this year was poor but that was the fault of slugs.
Raspberries and tomatoes seem to grow fine on the boulevards despite rainforest soil being less than ideal. Otherwise Canada has extremely fertile land.
They are inferior goods and require warmth and sun, that's what they are limited by, the Canadian latitudes. Try American raspberries, it's a world apart.
Canada gets plenty of warmth and sun, and Raspberries do quite well in other provinces naturally. In Vancouver though, there's a few varieties that people plant and seem to flourish, but they don't propagate quite like the Himalayan Blackberries that seem to consume the city
Canada does not have the infrastructure to support more people. Housing costs are out of control, healthcare is in a terrible state, etc. If those things were resolved first before bringing people in and straining the already strained infrastructure throughout the country then there wouldn't be nearly the pushback that is happening right now.
Care to elaborate? If you have thoughts on what has been said, what could have been said better or what you agree/disagree with, please share it so we can have a comprehensive conversation about a real issue that is affecting millions of Canadians.
Downvoting doesn't solve much in cases like this—all the top-level comments are political to one degree or another (mostly very political), and they're pinned to the top at this point by upvotes from politically like-minded people.
There are a bunch of downvoted comments from the less-popular political perspectives in the threads, but them being downvoted only decreases the quality of the conversation, because the greyed-out comments warn curious people off of participating in an increasingly hostile discussion.
The article itself is political, so why wouldn't the discussion be? The real question is whether HN wants political discussion, which at least in the past has been "no".
I guess the distinction I'm drawing is that the comments aren't interestingly political. The political topics that are left on the HN front page are usually there because the discussion is heavily moderated to keep things civil and interesting, and that doesn't seem to be happening here.
The top comment by tsimionescu is fine. Not great, but par for the course. The replies are at least mostly civil, but they're also mostly drive-bys.
The other top-ranked top-level comments range from uninspired to terrible. There's this one (which suggests that OP and I aren't the only ones feeling this way), then the usual "the right is ascendant" comment, then an insanely flamebaity comment (235 replies and counting) that begins with "clearly the author is ignorant" and somehow manages to go downhill from there.
Then there's a tired/wired meme and two single-sentence calls pointing to alternative alliance/free-trade arrangements with no further explanation.
The “clearly the author is ignorant” comment is only flame bait to people who aren’t up to date with how immigration has destroyed Canada. Actual Canadians are being displaced by people who don’t care about any kind of Canadian values. There’s people who hold the permanent opinion that immigration can do no wrong.
It’s pretty outlandish. One of the core tenants of EU expansionism and the politics around it is that the applying nations are considered European enough and physically located in Europe in addition to being willing to cooperate with the EU in meeting the general requirements of a member nation.
But just because you’re at least partly in Europe isn’t enough in some cases depending on who you are, and this was used in the aughts as a way to defer any potential membership by Turkey (which at least started the process of joining back then) and Russia (something European politicians didn’t want to even consider) by pointing out how much of their territory is in Asia. Morocco’s self-proclaimed justification was that Spain has a couple of cities in Northern Africa wholly surrounded by Moroccan territory, but Morocco still doesn’t make the cut for EU politicians.
However the Republic of Cyprus is entirely on continental Asia, not wholly in control of the island it claims as its sovereign territory, but considered “culturally European”, so it got in.
Canada is probably more of a Morocco than a Cyprus in this case, not physically in Europe, not even physically proximate to Europe the way at least Cyprus and Morocco are, and probably not considered European-enough.
If this all sounds like crazy EU politics, that’s kind of what it is, but in defense of the crazies here, you have to be a bit crazy when you’re trying to build some kind of weird supranational cultural identity in a place like Europe.
Greenland has the option to join the EU. French Guiana is in south America and is part of the EU. Both of these territories are parts of existing EU member nations. I guess with brexit it won't help Canada to claim they are a British territory :)
In either case, if a well functioning oil producing nation wanted to join the EU, I think we should accept them.
In fact I think we should accept any wealthy democratic country with strong institutions, free press, etc.
I would wager that the issue with Marroco and in particular Turkey is more the lack of human rights, death penalty, corruption, weak democracy, unwillingness to acknowledge historic genocides, etc.
If anything, I don't think people want another Hungary in the EU. That said, eastern Europe was probably a project the EU had to undertake.
> I would wager that the issue with Marroco and in particular Turkey is more the lack of human rights, death penalty, corruption, weak democracy, unwillingness to acknowledge historic genocides, etc.
The entire idea has been deader than disco even on the Turkish side since Erdogan took power, but that was part of it, however I would turn your attention to former French President Nicolas Sarkozky’s comments on the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/world/europe/25iht-union....
That said, you are also not wrong the issues around the Armenian Genocide were part of why member states campaigned against Turkish membership, as well as the issues around Cyprus and North Cyprus. The differences in law are less pressing though, and things you address during the negotiations for admission, but the process was halted long before it really got to that stage over political issues.
As for Morocco, the reason was much much simpler:
> The application was rejected on the grounds that Morocco was not considered to be a "European country" and hence could not join. This geographic membership criterion has been part of the EU's and its predecessors' treaties since the Treaty of Rome (Article 237 of the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community) and was later also included among the Copenhagen criteria. The rejection was expected as the King had sent feelers two years prior and received such a response.
So going back to your lead-in:
> Greenland has the option to join the EU. French Guiana is in south America and is part of the EU.
The EU has not made any of this black and white, but at least in the case of French Guiana, the fact that you are referring to it as a mere territory is reflective as to why it is complicated and negotiated through the core treaties that form the EU and the ascension treaties of new member states.
Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and its citizens are Danish and EU citizens, but the country itself actually voted to leave the European Union after it was afforded a higher degree of autonomy and self-government by the Kingdom. French Guiana on the other hand is an overseas département. It is physically located in South America, but its status as a département puts it legally on par with any département in France. It is considered as integral to the French Republic under French laws as Paris, and this applies to the other four overseas départements as well, but does not apply to all of France’s territories. For the Americans reading this thread, consider the detached nature of France’s overseas départements to be more similar in legal status to Hawaii or Alaska than to Puerto Rico or Guam.
The nature of these territories is also why Ceuta and Melilla are able to be admitted to the EU under Spanish sovereignty despite Morocco which wholly surrounds them being rejected and between the Danish, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, even Norway and formerly under the British when the UK was a member, there’s a lot of external territories that are or were considered part of the EU to varying degrees from wholly part of it to having no real part in it at all, although its people might still be considered EU citizens since they’re nationals and citizens of member states.
I'm going to talk about much longer timeframes, but as a reminder, the Mediterranean used to be the center of Western Civilization (because trade was ridiculously more effective over it than over land), with what is now Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Tunisia... being major """European""" centers. At the same time, what is now the British Islands were some kind of "end of the world" location (the equivalent of today's Alaska/Greenland/Northern Canada (?))
The importance of the Arctic becoming viable for trade routes should not be underestimated.
(Even more so, on a longer timeframe, if equatorial locations become uninhabitable because too hot.)
The rejection was expected. The EU and its associated organizations are only open to countries on the European continent by their current rules. Canada would have to broker a hell of a deal to get even partially in. EFTA membership might be a possible goal.
Canada is still under the British Monarch, Charles as King of Canada. Not saying that would work but it might be one avenue. It’s also good reason that Canada joining the US would be very hard as things stand.
In Canada, the titles he has in his other realms are irrelevant, though - the only Crown in Canada is that of Canada (well, and the provincial crowns in each of the provinces).
I guess that one can find a political definition of Europe that is lax enough to justify inclusion of these countries if so motivated. Turkey is formally in (suspended) membership negotiations and a major discussion point was that most of its land area is not on the European continent.
Redefining Europe to include Canada would be outright ridiculous. The Union would have to redefine its own identity if it wanted to admit Canada.
> Turkey is formally in (suspended) membership negotiations and a major discussion point was that most of its land area is not on the European continent.
Would the that be a discussion point if Turkey had a well functioning democracy? Solid economics? Didn't have the death penalty? Found some sort of resolution to conflicts on its borders?
I don't have answers for your questions. My wording is also imprecise. I only meant to say that I remember that the location of Turkey was used as an argument against starting membership negotiations when that was deliberated within the EU.
Turkey has a functioning democracy it's just that most of the population loves populist rhetoric. Erdogan's party lost mayoral elections in all the major cities.
> Solid economics
Turkey had a GDP PPP of $3.45 trillion in 2024 (12th in the world)
> Didn't have the death penalty
Turkey doesn't have the death penalty.
> Found some sort of resolution to conflicts on its borders
The conflict in Syria is resolved in Turkey's favor. The potential conflict with Greece is a different issue though.
I don't think Turkey's EU application being in limbo is because of whatever excuse EU politicians can conjure up at any moment in time. It's because Turkey, if accepted into the EU, would be the most populous country, the biggest country by landmass, the most powerful country militarily, and the youngest country in the EU. Turkish agriculture and manufacturing would be a lot more competitive compared to EU products.
> The conflict in Syria is resolved in Turkey's favor.
Is it? The SDF is still there, and was always one of the biggest reasons why Turkey got involved.
Now, that one, Turkey might still resolve yet... but if it does, that will likely come in form of another genocide. Which would hardly improve its chances of getting acceptance.
Martinique is an “Outermost Region” (and so, part of the EU) unlike St. Pierre et Miquelon which is one of the “Overseas Countries and Territories” (not part of the EU).
Or to be a bit more precise, the rule says any "European state" can join, but there are no set-in-stone definitions of what that actually means.
People here are mentioning Morocco as the example of a country rejected for not being European, but that's not quite accurate: Morocco got rejected from the European Communities in 1987, six years the Maastricht Treaty officially established the EU. Maastricht Treaty specifically put the European Commission in charge of figuring out which countries are considered to be "European", but as far as I know, they never said no to anyone. They did say yes to Cyprus, Georgia and Armenia.
Canadian GDP per capita is 15 times that of Morocco. The EU would much rather admit a wealthy country than a relatively poor one. So there are clear economic reasons to treat the two differently.
Canada is a longstanding liberal democracy with a distant and purely symbolic constitutional monarchy. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which (until recently at least) the monarch played an active political role, there is still a widespread expectation among the population that he ought to do so, multiparty democracy is young and weak, and security agencies engage in repressive behaviour. [0] So there's political reasons too.
If Canada really wanted the EU and the EU really wanted Canada, they'd fudge the whole geography issue–probably won't happen but not completely impossible. But no way the EU is going to want Morocco any time this century, so they won't do it for them.
Yes, but why would Canada want the EU? it's just a complete fantasy from the economist, I don't see why a country that's already wealthy would want to join the EU, especially when it's a country that basically is completely dependent to the US. It makes as much sense as Norway wanting to join NAFTA when most of its trade is in Europe.
It's par for the course for Charlemagne (the column in The Economist). It's not meant to be an actual realistic analysis and reporting (the way their non-columnist articles are, even if they all have an editorial streak). Mostly it comments on the topic of the week/month in some irreverent way[0], or entertains a modest proposal[1] like this one, in a "ha ha wait a minute" sort of way.
> I don't see why a country that's already wealthy would want to join the EU, especially when it's a country that basically is completely dependent to the US.
Reducing the degree of dependency on the US would be one obvious reason.
> Europeans could learn from Canada how to allow immigration in a fashion that the population embraces rather than tolerates, though a housing crunch has frayed that consensus of late
A little bit of an understatement, that consensus has almost been completely shattered in Canada.
Currently Canada can barely handle the people it has, there's quite a severe housing crisis. There's just not enough housing in any of the areas that people want to live. Canada does not need more people.
And most of the people hypothetically moving to Canada from Europe will probably be refugees who have little ties to Europe. Which would also not go down well in Canada (because of uhh, human tendencies against the outgroup).
Personally, I'm pro-immigration. It keeps the cost of labour down which is good for people like me. I just think even the current level of immigration has been too destabilizing for our society, so I'm opposed to increasing it yet further.
That being said, as a Canadian I'd love to have the right to live and work in the EU, and I would love for honest hard-working Europeans to have the right to live and work in Canada. And I'd love closer and denser trade ties, for example an investment in LNG shipping infrastructure to help Canada and the EU, assuming this is economical and not just a pipe dream.
The number of houses isn't fixed, nor are almost any other resource. The way economics works, each average person produces significantly more than they consume.
Someone living alone in a cabin is (economically) poor. Someone in a small town may have customers, but not many, and it's going to be hard to expand. What you need is more people - more people buying, more people to work for you.
Housing supply is inelastic, in part because of zoning (but it's not the only reason). Know what doesn't change very quickly? Policy and law at the municipal level. Know what changes quickly because it's done at the very top level? Immigration rate.
> Know what doesn't change very quickly? Policy and law at the municipal level. Know what changes quickly because it's done at the very top level? Immigration rate.
In my experience, local policy and law changes much faster than federal, especially with GOP opposing everything on the federal level. The GOP shot down the immigration deal they negotiated last summer. Locally is where I see solutions happen (and then state GOP parties, where they have power, will sometimes undermine that).
> Know what changes quickly because it's done at the very top level? Immigration rate.
How is immigration rate "done" at the federal level? With federal inaction, it's mostly an organic outcome of economics and politics in other countries.
But also, for all practical purposes, the migration rate to all rich Western countries is limited only by their respective laws and regulations governing immigration. For all of them, there are more people who want to get in than the quota allows (whether explicit or implicit via point systems etc). Any country that would fully open its borders would see millions coming in from Asia and Africa. People generally want to move where the life is better when they can.
> Housing supply is inelastic, in part because of zoning (but it’s not the only reason). Know what doesn’t change very quickly? Policy and law at the municipal level.
Assuming policy and law at higher levels are more responsive, if there is a broader problem due to common and inflexible municipal policy, this can be resolved by changing the policy at the higher level to change the scope of municipal options and/or the applicable process so as to either steer it in the desired direction or make it more responsive.
Nobody is willing to go “long” on housing when the government can go “short” on supply at any time.
So you have to normalize that somehow, and since the government controls immigration levels, it should subsidize housing construction to match, somehow.
We need both, without a healthier population density Canada will forever be a bunch of exploitative oligopolies in a trenchcoat hopelessly dependent on a benevolent USA.
What will boomers, the richest generation, ever do?
This is overstated. The alarm was sounded on this 2 decades ago for several east Asian countries, but they're not on fire. They're fine. Old people die.
If the fertility rate mattered that much, they'd have scrambled to make any number of policy changes including better work-life balance (see: Japan, SK, China), or plain ol' immigration, but they don't because it simply does not matter. All the efforts have been completely half-assed (like tax benefits, cash).
If people really cared about the fertility rate they’d ask those with two kids what it would take for them to have a third. The answers could be used to modify policy, but it’s more important to give tax credits for EVs, apparently.
> What will boomers, the richest generation, ever do?
A wad of cash isn't going to help you of bed. Yeah they are going to die, but if you're not careful it's going to be a lot quicker and a lot more painful than you had hoped.
I'm generally not a fan of integrating more and more countries into ever larger political unions.
Countries are a bit like experiments or alternatives and that's a good thing!
While I don't think that we'll see a one world government in my lifetime, I believe that Canada joining the EU would be a sort of approximation of that and would be bad for our Canadian experiment.
The Economist is a great magazine for understanding how a certain type of person views the world, and for a survey of goings-on you might not get elsewhere.
It is not great if you are looking for useful policy.
borders matter less and less. tech, travel and trade have essentially made globalization inevitable at this point. (or at the very least between western democracies)
free movement of capital and people between eu and canada would probably be the next major step in this direction
This is hardly a serious analysis, and the author knows it.
No European would seriously consider the reduction of population density that comes from admitting Canada to be a meaningful improvement to the EU. Canadian energy resources would definitely be welcome, but that's hardly enough of a reason to extend membership, especially since a trans-Atlantic power cable (which would be needed to get the most out of Canada's hydro) would be a beast of an engineering challenge itself.
Tighter EU-Canada integration is a much more important and achievable goal, as the article points out in the final paragraph.
As someone who has lived in the EU for over 20 years, I can say that the Schengen Area is a fantastic thing, whereas the EU itself is a disaster. Civilized countries should join the Schengen Area but avoid joining the European Union (these are two separate things). They should take an example from Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein - countries that are part of Schengen but not in the EU. Joining the European Union means a complete loss of sovereignty.
Strictly speaking, you're correct, but practically speaking, I believe not so much.
For example, France lost a key advantage ("competition rules") with nuclear energy essentially because it was considered unfair to other countries. But energetic independence is fundamental in part to economical independence: it's a key aspect of sovereignty.
Another example would be the Euro ("monetary policy"):
> Give me control over a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.
Or, the fact that external laws (from the UE) can be applied to member countries without approval from the people is IMO another rather clear form of loss of sovereignty: a considerable amount (~20% for France IIRC) of legislation is imposed by external, un-elected bodies.
Many perceive EU laws as imposed without democratic oversight, but this isn't quite accurate. The European Parliament, elected by EU citizens, is involved in most legislative processes. The EU Council, made up of ministers from elected governments, also plays a key role. It's not how national democracies work, but with no unified European public, this system might be the best compromise for now.
Let's look in practice[0]: there's 720 seats in total for 2024. France has 81, spread on its local political spectrum [1]; biggest group has 18 seats. So while there's some democratic oversight, the public perception remains reasonable: the representative weight of an individual is severely diluted (divide & conquer, yada yada).
As it plays on the democratic oversight perception as well, we could also look at the perception/quality of the locally elected bodies, and their general attitude towards the UE: a great example is [2] ("let's ask the people but do it anyway").
That's to say, I believe there are good reasons for people to perceive EU laws as imposed without democratic oversight. It's not 100% true, but overall, it's not an unfair qualification either.
Wasn't the federal government of the US formed with a very narrow mandate, and then ratcheted up control with the the innocuous sounding Interstate Commerce clause?
Disclaimer: I am neither American, nor very educated about what I just wrote.
Instead of reading the documentation, let's answer three questions:
1. Can your country introduce any law without asking the EU for approval?
2. Can the EU mandate your country to implement a specific law?
3. Do you still believe your country is sovereign?
In that case, I suggest taking a closer look at the definition of "sovereignty". When it comes to lawmaking, if you say that your country can basically do "almost everything" without the EU's permission, "BUT with certain exceptions" it simply means that it is not sovereign. This is not a matter of opinion but of facts. It's binary — either it is sovereign, or it is not.
EU countries aren't forced to stick to the union. If they dislike EU decisions, they are free to leave and do their own thing at any time. This is very unlike US states that aren't allowed to secede from their union.
Whether one can opt out or not, whether someone likes it or not, and whether this state was reached voluntarily or by force, is irrelevant here - definition of sovereignty is pretty much clear
Ad 3. If you believe in the European idea, it is not about my country being sovereign but the European people. There's tension in this for sure. Do the Catalans feel sovereign? The Scots? The Californians?
Canada will do much better joining US (and distancing itself from declining EU and its disastrous policies). The US is much better managed; the results speak for themselves.
Gonna tell you a secret, the world isn't black and white, while there are areas such as the economy where we struggle to compete as an European I would never want to live in the US again (I studied in Columbus Ohio for 7 months as an exchange student at OSU and traveled US multiple times).
The streets here are clean, spotting a homeless person is borderline impossible even if you try, in US I've seen tents, bidonvilles, homelessness everywhere, drugged zombies as soon as you entered the wrong streets in basically every city.
There's much less anxiety around healthcare or education here, violence and crime are very different too. My 180k people city hasn't seen a murder (outside very few caused by family violence, which are virtually the only cause for murders in my country) in decades.
Actually now that I think about it, I also found Canada (where my wife has family that emigrated there 80 years ago) to be better in all those regards. Have you ever crossed from Canada to US at Niagara falls? If you did and walked more than 500 meters you know what I'm talking about.
Mind you, there's no doubt US does many things great, as an engineer and wannabe entrepeneur I know US would've given me more chances, but believe it or not, not everybody wants to live the american way and money isn't everything if you have to use it to feel safer and less anxious in guarded neighbourhoods like some of my best friends in US live in.
There's countless things that US does great, and that does awfully, different people and cultures may weigh the pros/cons differently.
I've lived in the US and Canada (a couple large cities in each country), and briefly in a medium-sized city in France.
Canadian cities are the cleanest of the three countries, but homelessness and drug use are just as prevalent in Canada as in the US. I don't remember seeing many addicts in Europe but there were certainly a lot of homeless refugees when I lived there. I guess you could argue that's not the fault of the host country, unlike the homelessness in Canada/US.
Other than that, the US cities I've lived in have felt safe and livable, with vibrant street life and plenty of great restaurants and events. I prefer urban neighborhoods which are close to the downtown core, but outside of it; the visible social problems seem to be very concentrated in certain areas, which can be avoided.
If by "guarded neighborhoods" you mean gated communities with full-time live security, I think your friends are major outliers. A very small minority of people live that way in America.
I do agree with you about "less anxiety around healthcare or education". My European friends see the world and life very differently. People don't feel guilty about living a normal life in the same way that some Americans seem to: the culture here screams "strive" and "excel", and I think that drives a lot of people to be miserable when they feel they are falling short of that expectation.
Every city in the world has good parts and bad parts, the question is in what proportion and how are they changing.
The ones that are weirdest to me is when you have people living in gated skyscrapers with homeless literally leaning against the sides of the building, so much wealth and destitution mere inches apart.
Do you see a strong economy as a goal in itself? I see it as a proxy measure for the things that truly matter. Happiness, good health, good education, the freedom to lead your life the way you want. America fails miserably on all of those.
A strong economy makes the rich richer. (Trickle down didn't work.) That means for the rich who are beneficiaries of a strong economy, they are indeed enjoying happiness, good health, good education, and the freedom to lead a good life.
The US is fifth in the world in terms of incarceration rate (i.e., there are only 4 countries which imprison a larger portion of their population). The thirteenth amendment allows the US to enslave its imprisoned population (which they do, and it's a very lucrative business). The US also has a thing called the death penalty where they literally _kill_ the person convicted of a crime.
According to the world press freedom index, the US ranks 55th when it comes to freedom of the press.
I don't know if you know this, but the US has been holding immigrant kids in cages at the border. Started with Obama, increased under Trump, and then increased some more under Biden.
Guantanamo also still exists, but I suppose torturing civilians without formally charging them for a crime doesn't count against the freedom of US citizens.
By what metric does the US have a lot of freedom?
> Our universities are probably the best in the world
Good colleges aren't worth anything if only the owning class can afford to send their kids there. Going to college puts people into lifelong debt (in America, that is). Out of the top 10 universities in the world according to the QS world ranking, 4 are from the UK, 4 from the US, despite the UK having about a fifth of the population of the US.
> And having a strong economy is generally a good thing -- there are jobs, which matters.
There were jobs during slavery too (I mean the slavery from before 1865, not the 13th amendment slavery from today). Jobs are not an inherent good. About 40% of the homeless (in the US) have a job, but cannot afford housing.
With respect to your lived experiences, as a fan of the US I would just like to say that it is a country of 330m+ whose physical presence spans a majority of a major continent, so I would encourage you not to generalize us based on what you saw in Columbus. That would be like me visiting Paris (a city I particularly did not enjoy) and generalizing all of Europe!
What of this is not true for the rest of the country then? I haven't visited at all but what the comment above you mentioned (basically the woes of limited social mobility, bad employment terms including tying healthcare to it if you're not rich, insane incarceration, etc.) is the kind of stats and stories I'm familiar with. The country does some things well also, as the commenter above also said, but it's not a place either of us would recommend most people to live after having known EU life. If there is even 10% of the 'major continent' that is not as described (besides Canada), I'm genuinely curious to know of it
> it's not a place [I] would recommend most people to live
Your recommendation (or lack thereof) carries little weight, then.
But to actually answer your question, there are many places in the US (urban, suburban, and rural) where fear of violent crime is not a major factor in the day-to-day life of most people. I don't know anyone who has been a victim of violent crime, and it does not feature prominently in conversations. In fact, the highly touristic areas in Europe seem to have more crime than anywhere I've personally been in the US, but I know better than to judge the entire continent by those outliers. I probably worry about as much about gang violence in south-side Chicago as you do about Romanian sex traffickers, or pickpockets in the 1st arrondissement of Paris.
Right, exactly! I personally felt much less safe in Paris than anywhere in the US (including Chicago and Oakland), which is not to say "I'm right and you're wrong", it's just entirely subjective and often the result of having not traveled extensively enough or lack of understanding.
Thanks for the answer. Though I can't say that I expected most people to fear being violently killed on a daily basis indeed, murder is something the person above mentioned so that technically is an answer to my question about which bit is not ubiquitous for the country
Fair enough, I only provided a counterexample to a part of the argument. I think a lot of the social criticism in that comment is more accurate, e.g. the stuff about health care and education quality. In a lot of America it seems like the only solution to those things is "don't be poor".
I'm not sure what you're responding to. I'm asking whether there is any bit of the place that is worth differentiating from what was said above, not having a prejudice about any which 10%
Easy to say "you're extremely ignorant" without even mentioning what of the data I saw is wrong, let alone provide a correction. Also makes it hard to know where to even start to either update my understanding or find that you're wrong and I'm wasting my time, whichever case it may be
>whose physical presence spans a majority of a major continent,
I take your point, but this part isn't true. Canada is a little larger, and then there is also Mexico which is about 1/2 the size, so US is roughly 2/5ths of North America.
Oh you’re right about relative size of Mexico - my memory had a units error (km vs mi). Still, it’s not even as big as Canada so the statement wasn’t close to right…. It’s a bit under 9/20
The opposite would be better for the US. If the US joined Canada, they could benefit from universal healthcare, schooling, and responsible gun laws within a short period of time, given the available resources that would be added to the Canadian system.
This is wishful thinking. The quality of public healthcare in Canada has been declining. In particular, the waiting times are long. Those who are well off go to US for important timely care.
The gun violence in US is higher, but the chances of that impacting you are low, if you avoid problematic areas.
The waiting times for healthcare in my part of the US are extreme, and are complicated by things like prior approval. It varies a lot depending on where you live. For instance my parents were able to get same-year medical appoints in southeast Michigan. My mom recently moved to my state, and is appalled at having to make appointments a year or more in advance. She has talked about flying back to Michigan for her appointments.
Your chances of gun violence are also greatly lowered by not having a gun.
Spot on. I'm quite well off but don't think I'd support a system where only the well-off get good treatment. Better to have all shoulders supporting the system for everyone. Even if that means going through lesser years (also since it's not like good healthcare stops altogether during that time), having the relatively rich as well as politicians also need to make use of the system makes a lot of things suddenly possible
Canadian healthcare is quite interesting. It's the best in the world if there's someone from the States in the room but as soon as it's just Canadians in the discussion, it instantly becomes the world's worst.
Having lived on both sides of the border for many years, Canada first needs to improve its version of "universal healthcare" before making a pitch like this.
The enshitification of health care has been happening whether your bill is paid by taxes or by insurance. Both systems were probably better a few decades ago.
I want American and Canadian healthcare both to remain the way they are, I have timely access to care with my American health insurance, but if I lose my job I can get healthcare anyways with my Canadian passport
There are something like nearly half a billion Americans - they’d immediately and irrevocably outvote the Canadian remnant and turn it into cold Texas.
"The point" of Canada is that it's a separate country that doesn't have US politics.
That being said, the general lockdown of the boarder after 9-11 has driven a lot of people who live close to the boarder nuts. Crossing the boarder used to be like crossing a state/province boarder. If you look at satellite photos of the boarder around Maine, NH, and VT, it's full of little country roads where you could cross unimpeded until 9-11, and private properties that go right up to the boarder.
There's even a golf course that's in Canada, but the driveway is on a US street. You're allowed to enter from the US, but they follow Canadian laws (specifically, the Canadian drinking age.)
Personally, I wish we could figure out how to resolve our (relatively minor) differences so we could keep an open boarder.
Interesting. How do you define "success"? Is the average American Joe really better off than the average European Joe?
In the U.S., a cancer diagnosis can lead to bankruptcy, while treatment is free (or close to free) in most EU countries. Education is largely free as well, and you don't see people walking around armed like they’re in the Marine Corps. So, I'm not sure what benchmark we're using to measure this.
Which way are the immigrants flowing? If European Joe is better off than American Joe it should be a net flow to Europe, no?
And I’ve seen way more people walking around with military weapons in Europe than I ever have in the USA - to be fair, they were the literal armed forces of the country, but still exceptionally weird to see as an American.
I truly cannot tell whether you're joking. If you're not, I'd love to pick your brain. I'm very interested in what standards you have and why you have them.
depends on how rich each individual is. US is great if you're rich enough to pay for any medical emergencies out of pocket and you want investor money for explosive growth.
Long term, maybe. Short and medium term, let's see if you guys tear yourselves apart in a civil war or some other footgun. Nothing other than internal shenanigans can possibly threaten overwhelming US hegemony, after all.
Reconciling the constitutions and laws would mean you'd basically be creating a new country.
The Republican party seems to view any new possible states as free congressional seats for the Democrats, so I can't see enough votes for such a thing regardless.
Let’s set aside the jokes for a second... there’s a case to be made for Canada, Greenland, and the US forming a closer political and economic union. Not as some imperialistic land grab, but as a pragmatic response to shifting global power dynamics and shared interests.
Just hang on - this isn't as crazy as it sounds!
Think about it:
- There would be a shared defense and infrastructure: NORAD already has the US and Canada tied at the hip for defense. Greenland, being strategically crucial to Arctic security, fits naturally into this alignment. Folding them into a single framework could simplify and strengthen North American defense.
- Economic integration's already there: the US and Canada are each other's largest trading partners. NAFTA (and now USMCA) means much of the heavy economic lifting is already done. Greenland’s resources are becoming increasingly important as Arctic access opens up.
- Population and resources balance out: Canada has land and resources but not enough people. The US has people and markets but strained resources. Greenland sits on untapped potential. There’s a complementary puzzle here that fits. Heck, I know a bunch of people that would move to Greenland in my circle of friends alone if it were a state of the Union.
Think about the plausibility, even if you don' think it's likely.
Sure, there's political gridlock in the US? Sure. But let’s not pretend Canadian politics are a beacon of stability. And Denmark’s hold on Greenland isn’t exactly ironclad. In unstable times, pragmatic unions can look attractive.
And yeah, there are a lot of cultural differentials, but flipping flap jacks, look at the cultural divide between California vs Indiana or TX vs Vermont. Mergers like this happen incrementally - closer military cooperation, shared Arctic development, economic harmonization.
Not saying this will/could happen tomorrow, but in a time of rethinking alliances, I think it’s less far-fetched than it sounds. If Europe can experiment with supranational governance, why can’t North America????
What are the realistic roadblocks here beyond just "politics?"
The current state of the US is the roadblock to this. We already have very high economic integration between Canada and the US, but we now have to deal with a belligerent and incompetent American administration coming in that seems dead set on extracting as much from Canada as possible.
Canada needs to move away from the Americans as much as possible. Easier said than done given that America is an economic powerhouse.
Greenland is Denmark. Why are you including it? (FWIW Inuit in Greenland are better off than their peers in Canada [or Alaska]. Higher quality of life)
The reason Canada and the US are not closer than they already already -- which is very close -- comes down to the same story it has for over 200 years: massive political cultural divide.
"Peace, Order, and Good Government" vs "Don't Tread On Me" or whatever.
American expansionism, manifest destiny, and the populist politics that go with it only sell well to a minority here. This is a country that has deep loyalist roots and a long history of preference for our Westminster style gov't and the balances it has.
Not because we love being ruled by a king -- the monarchy is not popular -- but because we don't like to be ruled by demagogues and militia-men. I say "we", but of course there's people who would disagree, like anywhere else.
If this was still the Obama-era US I think the case for closer ties could be made -- a currency union, perhaps, some kind of Shengen-style border arrangement. But as long as US politics is taking the form it is right now, not a chance. I, for one, want nothing to do with it.
But yeah, Greenland's not just Denmark's icy backyard... it’s a strategic Arctic outpost sitting on rare earth minerals and shipping lanes that are about to become prime real estate as the ice melts. The US already camps out at Thule Air Base for a reason, and with Russia and China eyeing the region hard, folding Greenland into a North American framework isn’t about expansionism, but rather it’s about locking down resources and supply chains before someone else does. Greenland’s been flirting with more autonomy anyway, and when the time comes, stronger North American ties could offer stability without the economic freefall of full independence. Ignoring Greenland while the Arctic heats up (literally and politically) is leaving the back door wide open.
I get the hesitation. 'Manifest destiny' doesn’t exactly have the best branding. But this isn’t about expansionism or flag-planting; it’s more like making sure the neighborhood’s in order before someone else moves in and rearranges the furniture. Greenland’s interest (if it ever happens) wouldn’t come from the US kicking down the door, but from their own evolving relationship with Denmark. If anything, the US would probably just be the least disruptive option on the table.
Honestly though, what do you think about China’s own 'manifest destiny' moves in Africa, Brazil, the US, Canada, and basically everywhere else?
Haha, fair enough! Let’s just hope no one ends up eating their own words if Greenland - or even Canada - starts rethinking their options... Arctic politics can shift fast, and it’d be a shame to see China further sink its teeth into the region while closer ties with people who actually share similar cultures and values were on the table. But hey, I’ll happily shelve this take if Denmark and Canada keep things locked down! Good luck!
As a Canadian, the idea of becoming part of America makes me absolutely sick to my stomach.
Our country has problems, yours is broken.
It's been broken since its inception. Giving every state an equal representation in the Senate and an outsized representation in Congress meant that it was ALWAYS going to break.
I the 70s a few people tried to change this by abolishing the electoral college and ensuring you vote directly for the president at a 1 to 1 ratio. Unfortunately, that was shot down by some selfish liberals who thought they'd get more representation in particular situations (they won't for anything more than shilort term). There hasn't been a proper chance to fix it since.
Now Democrats simply do not have any power whatsoever. If Republicans don't want to let something pass, they just hold it up in the Senate. Something Mitch McConnell has done relentlessly.
Oh, and since the senate has to approve Supreme Court appointments, they've taken control of that too. McConnell blocked Obama's picks, using the excuse that it was an election YEAR. That handed the pick to Trump. That evil little man then let Trump have appointments much closer to an election.
Now your Supreme Court is fully stacked with Republicans. Some of which engage in open corruption.. And they're wiping out decades old rights. Anything is on the table.
Youre living in a country that has fallen into fascism and don't even know it.
Also, states being able to run their elections has allowed for an absurd level of corruption. Some states specifically design their voting districts for a particular outcome.. Like come on..
Anyway, I'm hoping for a CANZUK alliance or joining Europe. I will reluctantly flee the country if our sovereignty is threatened by the US.. Which is unfortunately looking more and more possible.
I get the sentiment, but let’s not pretend Canada’s running some utopian alternative to the US. Canada’s got deep, deep, DEEP structural cracks that are hard to ignore. I've got family that fled Canada and I've got some more that are miserable up there at the moment. They hate the government, they hate the cultural evolution, and they simply hate all the possible futures right now. Think about this:
- Trudeau’s leadership is on life support, with his own party circling the wagons to push him out. Even Liberal MPs are openly calling for his resignation. The country’s direction feels more dictated by party infighting than any grand vision.
- Economically, Canada’s in a rougher spot. GDP contracted last quarter, the Canadian dollar’s getting steamrolled by the USD, and political uncertainty is scaring off energy investments. Meanwhile, the US economy is actually growing. That’s not exactly a great look for the 'better system.'
- Housing? A total disaster. Young Canadians are stuck renting indefinitely, and wages haven’t kept pace with living costs. By comparison, even in US cities with high real estate prices, the economic mobility is still better. I know twenty-somethings who are buying homes, living life, and having large families. One friend is 25, already has three kids, and owns a home—stable as can be.
- And don't forget groceries... food prices in Canada have been soaring to the point where one in five families are skipping meals or turning to food banks just to get by. That’s not just bad policy, it’s a slow-rolling humanitarian crisis!
I’m not saying the US isn’t broken. Sure, it’s a mess in a lot of ways, but which country isn't right now?
But if we’re comparing corpses, at least one of them still twitches. Canada’s problems aren’t just political, they’re economic and cultural... and there’s no clear path out. Maybe that stomach-turning thought of joining the US will feel a bit different if things keep sliding downhill.
And about the US being 'broken since inception' - come on. Canada’s flaws run just as deep, if not deeper in certain areas:
- Political gridlock? Trudeau’s barely hanging on, and Parliament is a powder keg of internal rivalries. Party leadership fights dictate policy more than voters do.
- Representation imbalance? Alberta’s voice gets drowned out, while Quebec rides on political privilege. Sounds familiar, right?
- Judicial interference? Trudeau’s government meddling with court decisions drove his own Attorney General to resign. LOL
- Corruption? From the SNC-Lavalin scandal to WE Charity, Canada isn’t exactly shy about political favoritism and backroom deals.
- And don’t even get me started on voter disenfranchisement! Canada’s own electoral system ensures whole swaths of the population feel ignored. I mean, this is what I’m hearing from Canadians, so you’re not gonna convince me otherwise. I’ve even heard talk of civil war scenarios if the government doesn’t change, and that’s saying a LOT for Canadians. You know it’s bad when folks known for telling each other to go to hell with a smile stop smiling - and forget to apologize halfway through.
I get the appeal of CANZUK or joining Europe in theory, but let’s be real, Canada’s fate isn’t going to be saved by cozying up to the Commonwealth. If Canada collapses under its own weight, it won’t be US 'fascism' that’s the biggest threat. It’ll be watching foreign powers scoop up influence while we argue about which utopian club to join!
Alberta's voice being drowned out? Civil war? "Fled" Canada?
C'mon. Get real.
You sound like you've been talking to a pretty far right-wing echo chamber.
I'm from Alberta originally and ... no... not drowned. Shrill, and a with a strong persecution complex, but... very well heard. And with way more power than it pretends.
There are certainly forces... American forces included... that would like to characterize things the way you are. For their own interests.
Look, I get that you don’t see it that way, but dismissing this as some far-right echo chamber narrative feels pretty shortsighted. When I hear this stuff from actual Canadians - family, friends, and people living the experience - it’s hard to chalk it up to 'outside forces' pushing an agenda.
I’m not saying Alberta’s voice is literally drowned out in the sense that it’s silent. It’s drowned out in the sense that for all the noise, policy-wise, Alberta’s concerns often get sidelined while other regions take priority. That frustration isn’t imaginary. You might be comfortable with how things are, but not everyone is.
Shrill? Persecution complex? Maybe. Or maybe people are just fed up and tired of feeling like they’re being patronized when they point out legitimate issues. You can call it overblown, but the cracks are there whether you acknowledge them or not.
>there’s a case to be made for Canada, Greenland, and the US forming a closer political and economic union. Not as some imperialistic land grab, but as a pragmatic response to shifting global power dynamics and shared interests.
Canada I understand.
But why Greenland, other than the fact that Trump saw it in the window and decided he wanted it? The US already has a base there, it doesn't seem to be that vital to our strategic interests.
So while it's kinda hard to see at first blush perhaps, Greenland plays an actual critical role in North American security and economic interests - far more than it might seem at first glance. Yeah, Trump's interest aside (which definitely brought some unnecessary circus to the topic), Greenland’s value lies in a few key areas:
- Strategic Arctic positioning. It's central to Arctic geopolitics. While the Arctic ice melts, new shipping lanes are opening up, and countries are vying for control over these routes and untapped resources. The US already maintains a military presence at Thule Air Base, but integrating Greenland more formally would secure this position and reduce the risk of competing interests (think Russia and China making moves in the region - which they are very, very much doing).
- Resource potential. Greenland's rich in rare earth minerals and many others that are critical to modern tech and defense industries. These materials are currently dominated by Chinese markets. Greenland’s dev could diversify supply chains and reduce Western reliance on Chinese exports. This is SO insanely critical right now.
- You might not like this one, but: think geopolitical stability... Denmark’s grip on Greenland isn’t absolute. There’s been growing interest within Greenland towards greater autonomy, and while full independence is really complicated and economically (ultra) risky, stronger ties to North America would absolutely offer an appealing middle ground and protect the people of Greenland itself.
Ultimately if we ignore Greenland it feels like we're leaving a crucial puzzle piece out.
These all seem like post-hoc rationales to me, because as far as I know (and I may be wrong) no one was talking about Greenland in this context until Trump brought it up.
If Greenland is that important, we already have all of the money if we wanted to buy it, and all of the tanks and planes and nuclear submarines if we didn't want to take no for an answer.
LOL, right? Somewhere between ‘affordable defense budget project’ and ‘sell your national debt to make it happen.’ Either way, the geopolitical value is worth more than the sticker price, and that’s the part people underestimate.
Yep, and it’s not as far-fetched as people think. The US tried it under Truman too. This isn't just a Trump brainwave. It’s been on the table before, and it’ll probably come up again as Arctic competition ramps up. The question isn’t 'if' the US stays involved in Greenland but how. Whether through diplomacy, economic partnerships, or something more official, Greenland’s future is tied to who secures influence there first.
Honestly, Greenland’s probably tired of feeling like a geopolitical football at this point. But as long as the Arctic’s up for grabs, expect it to stay on the radar.
For the cost of only $14 per American per year, we could pay everyone in Greenland $85k/yr for life. It’s $4.5/bln a year.
Greenland has already obtained some independence from Denmark and is looking for more. It’s unlikely they sell themselves to the USA directly but something that is effectively the same with a fig leaf on it could certainly happen.
And if actual world-scale conflict broke out, it would de facto be a US protectorate at best, and just another territorial acquisition at worst.
That $14 per American sounds like a deal, honestly. But the tricky part is less about the money and more about convincing the people of Greenland that closer ties to the US are better than sticking with Denmark.
Economic incentives only go so far—there’s a cultural and political dynamic at play. If Greenland leans towards more autonomy, stronger US ties as a protectorate might happen naturally without needing to 'buy' anything outright. If they drift away from Denmark, North America becomes the obvious landing zone.
I get why it feels like that, but Greenland’s strategic importance didn’t suddenly appear because Trump made headlines. The Arctic’s been heating up (literally and politically) for a while now. Russia’s been militarizing its Arctic coastline, and China’s trying to gain influence in the region through ‘research stations’ and resource deals. The US presence at Thule wasn’t just for fun... it’s part of a broader strategy that predates Trump by decades. Trump just made it louder (and weirder), but the underlying value of Greenland has been quietly escalating for years.
no thanks, we don't need the next thierry to have an expanded fief to "regulate". if anything, canada should model itself closer to the states with more personal freedoms and less regulation. there is a lot of land and resources to develop, the politicians need to just stop trying to maintain the status quo and aggressively try to develop all the land we have. the idea that we can't is a loser's mentality.
Your malevolent childs-ego-inflated-to-national 'winners vs losers' notion will inevitably, if not expunged, make losers of us all. My 'us' is of course unimaginable to your minuscule 'me'.
Someone once said something to the effect: "I'm not concerned that computers will become more like people, I am that people will learn to 'think' like computers".
A fortiori humans vs social media. You are faux-thinking in a series of tweets.
If this comment thread dropped to the level of twitter somewhere, it's the second level comment ("malevolent child"). I'm not sure what sort of vrai-thinking response you expect to that.
You're quite capable of seeing that a serious of ludicrously generalised ideological statements, entirely abstracted from reality, are as close to meaningless as human statements get (which is exactly why social media affords them). You are just blinkered by acculturation, and prefer it that why. Drama is so much more fun than reality.
All of the statements are fact, they are not meaningless.
> the EU is stagnating
True. Verifiable. Compare the value of the EU vs the US's or China's tech industry over time. The US's is now worth 20x the EU's.
A region's technological prowess lagging behind or even declining vs its peers is the very definition of stagnation.
> and definitely losing on the global stage.
The EU has a declining share of global GDP is increasingly becoming a less valuable market as companies opt to simply not deploy new products to the region.
> It has totally suffocated itself with regulation
Also correct. You can talk to essentially any EU small businessman - or even any of the (very few) AI companies in the EU. Mistral - the EU's most promising AI company - has been practically killed by the EU AI Act.
This isn't a hot take, nor is it overly general; the EU's regulatory industrial complex is a well-recognized problem.
> and is fading into irrelevancy with every passing day; soon, it won't be much more than a tourist spot for everyone else.
With the EU economy declining, and its share of global economic activity declining, and the EU preemptively locking itself out of a AI market worth trillions - one of the only major areas the EU remains strong is tourism.
> And they've gaslit themselves into thinking everything is fine, but no sane country would look at it as a model worth emulating.
References the common discourse from EU regulators where they pat themselves on the back for passing terrible regulation - e.g. passing the AI act and severely disadvantaging one of their best companies. Indeed, no one would want to emulate this.
These are just examples. Generalized statements are used because tens of examples can be provided for each example. It is more succinct to communicate the generalized example, with an understanding that anyone keeping up to date with events in this space (EU regulation, progress, technology) will understand what is being referred to.
If Canada joined the EU, they would have a TON of immediate immigrants, ranging from manual labor (e.g. plumbers, builders, cleaners, factory workers, ...) up to knowledge workers (e.g. software engineers, doctors, nurses, ...).
Not sure what that would do with Canadian economy. IMO it would be even more desirable target for emigration than the UK when it was in the EU. I know I would certainly consider it, being a software engineer.
We can only guess I suppose, but I don't know how high the immediate transfer of people back/forwards between hypothetical new EU Canada + existing countries would be. Might even turn out to be more Canadians leaving for Europe than the other way around.
Canada's points-based system already makes it pretty easy for the latter category to come here. To the point where people in our profession have highly depressed compensation packages when compared to the US because our job market is very much flooded with inbound foreign talent.
Domestic trained talent tends to leave for the US. Because under NAFTA it's trivial to do so.
Manual labour, yeah, that's another story. NAFTA doesn't grant free movement of unskilled labour at all.
My understanding is that Canadian FAANG offices are staffed mostly with those who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa, plus the odd local who doesn't want to move to the US for personal or family reasons.
Not sure about Toronto, but from my anecdotal observation, people come to Vancouver because it's awesome, not because they couldn't get into the US. At least, I've never heard a single coworker say anything along the lines of "I wanted to work in [anywhere in US], but couldn't, so I came to Vancouver".
For a time there was a little bit of that. Some of the FAANGs in particular were growing their offices here significantly, and paid above the median for it.
Now there's a surplus of talent in the US, so no need.
NATO is probably even less solid than the EU : France historically not being all in, the very reason for the pact being under question between the fall of the USSR and Putin deciding to shot himself in the foot, and who knows what Trump will do... (last time he already siphoned NATO funding, including for the Ukraine ramp-up, to build his (strategically) stupid wall).
With Trump already threatening Canada without this ridiculous plan, no thanks.
> The Monroe Doctrine is a United States foreign policy position that opposes European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. It holds that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is a potentially hostile act against the United States. The doctrine was central to American grand strategy in the 20th century.
Exactly what I was going to say. It was only in the 1980’s that Canada fully freed itself of British domination; there’s no justification for Europe to regain any political control over any independent country in the Western Hemisphere.
EU needs to clear out its own backyard first, kick Hungary out... Orban has brought nothing but chaos and costs.
After that, why not? Turkey has been in discussion for ages and is barely in Europe. Also, South Africa might be interesting in the future if they can see eye to eye on political and economic issues.
> South Africa ... if they can see eye to eye on political and economic issues.
That's a pretty big "if".
Right now South Africa is a basket case, with corruption at the highest levels of government, and one in five citizens living in extreme poverty. The crime rate is extreme, with high levels of murder and rape.
So yes I agree, South Africa would be very "interesting" if it joined the EU.
South Africa has currently so warm relations with Russia that Hungary is the only EU country that would not block its accession in this surreal scenario.
one of the carabean island countrys, tried to join
Canada, they were already useing Canadian money.
We (canada) said no, cause they would leave there island and move north for free health care, which is like ok, here wana trade houses?
But the EU?, joining canada, yah right, bunch of snooty hosers, they are already trying to put in private airports for there private jets.
And there are countless EU beurocrats who have moved over and are working in government here, they like small towns....
And as for imigrants from india/asia, plenty of friction there, with a large number of names from
those places showing up in the court docs(availible online....), and then many of the best talents from over there, 1 not planing on settling and 2 traveling back home for medical treatment.....even those who are working in health care,here.
Brampton, Ont, is already a punjabi city.,.....
samosas 3 for a dollar....and litteraly no euro
origin people in sight, at the bank and grocery store.
A bit of whats going.
Traffic jams in places where that was impossible?, yup!, every day !
Housing prices going up, up, and up ?, yup!
Dustin toodough on the way out ?, yup!
Cranky, wall eyed "old stock" canadians not dealing well with mass imigration ?, yup!
walleyed?, cow eyed?, definitely startled!, but generaly not mean and nasty, go Canada!
Euro origin beurocrats talking about new zealand?
yup!, buh by!
South aisians with some real grit, working in Iqaliuite ? yup!
Jamaicans working in the north woods, doing forestry or fish plant work?, yup
Which makes it possible that I could encounter both of my favorite accents conversing, Jamaican
and Newfy.
I supose that in.a way, Canada is doing a mass imigration "melting pot" thing like what the US did long ago, which did actualy turn out well for the US, so
Can't read because of the paywall, so I'm curious how it handwaves away the EU's own membership criteria which requires applicants to be "European countries".
Cyprus is geographically located in Asia but has been successfully been admitted to the EU after satisfying other (non-geographical) conditions for EU membership.
Armenia and Georgia have also been determined by the EU to be eligible for membership despite being entirely located in Asia:
I don't believe either of these statements is accurate. Russia agreed to Ukraine joining the EU but not NATO, why would it be any different for Canada? The EU is China's largest trading partner, accounting for around 20% of China's exports. Adding Vancouver’s port to the EU market could significantly enhance trade between the EU and China. However, the real issue lies at the geopolitical level – the EU is heavily influenced by the US, and with Trump aiming to initiate a trade war with China, tensions are likely to escalate.
Russia didn't agreed to that, it sabotaged any effort and any agreement between EU and Ukraine to the maximum of its abilities. Ukraine paid a huge price to be able to have an association agreement with EU.
Russian diplomacy tends to be straightforward – they make their positions clear and repeat them often to ensure their message gets across.
Putin has explicitly stated he’s not opposed to Ukraine joining the EU. He has no trouble stating his views, no matter how controversial, publicly.
However, he has repeatedly made it clear that Ukraine joining NATO is unacceptable to Russia. In the past discussions about Ukraine’s accession to NATO were blocked by Germany and France.
Russia invaded Ukraine when they were not seeking to join NATO and had no chance of joining anytime soon. So yes Russia did oppose Ukraine seeking EU membership
And yet, Russia started an aggression when there was no chance and no plan for Ukraine (or Georgia for example) to join NATO but agreement on the EU association was being prepared.
Does that come with a few trillions in reparations for lands confiscated from Loyalists who were forced to flee to Canada at the end of the American rebellion? Or for the Mohawk who fled here and helped us fight the Yanks off in 1812?
I wasn’t speaking about money. Neither about skyscrapers. Only after you lived for a while in many countries and cities can you realize how terrible Europe is in terms of everyday comfort and growth potential.
i needed the belly laugh, thanks...we have an office in canada. the last 4 years the canadians that work there are more anti-immigrant every time i visit.
The biggest problem with the EU is that it is built for bureaucrats and as such it is geared towards irreversible "blob" decisions.
Brexit should have been a near no-op. But it was a huge pain. They hadn't even planned for it or thought about it.
EU should have a pre-memeber clearing state that countries stay in and then vote every year or n years to be "in" or "out" of the EU. But part of being in the EU should be to maintain non-in versions of all policies so that members can actually negotiate and easily leave without having huge bureaucratic cost.
This would make the EU stronger and better. Currently, there are many terrible undemocratic institutions that are being used to ruin countries.
> “But part of being in the EU should be to maintain non-in versions of all policies so that members can actually negotiate and easily leave without having huge bureaucratic cost.”
So countries should maintain two sets of all regulations — the actual ones and then also parallel hypothetical ones — and this would somehow reduce bureaucratic cost rather than double it?
The execution of Brexit ought to put to rest the notion that “we’ll make our own rules!” somehow would save money or improve anything. Britain has accomplished exactly nothing except recreate local bureaucracies they had already managed to eliminate because of harmonized EU rules.
> Brexit should have been a near no-op. But it was a huge pain.
How was it ever going to be a "near no-op"? Putting everything else aside, Northern Ireland was always going to be huge sticking points. Ireland would make sure it was.
Besides, it was in the EU's self-interest to maximise the pain for the UK, in order to discourage other member states from going the same way - and the EU succeeded. Marine Le Pen no longer talks about "Frexit", instead she proposes reforming the EU from within.
The UK were just being difficult and asking for things they knew they couldn't have. Like to join the single market for services but not for products. That breaks one of the most fundamental values of the EU. This is what made Brexit negotiations so difficult. And of course there was the northern Ireland issue with which they didn't even know what to do themselves.
Also, them constantly replacing their negotiatiors didn't help. But at least they're out now.
> EU should have a pre-memeber clearing state that countries stay in and then vote every year or n years to be "in" or "out" of the EU. But part of being in the EU should be to maintain non-in versions of all policies so that members can actually negotiate and easily leave without having huge bureaucratic cost.
Ah yes ... in addition to all the existing bureacratic costs of the EU, we should add "constantly maintain a parallel set of rules so that member states can leave easily and cheaply whenever they want".
Why on earth would the EU do that? Why would any organization put in huge effort to ensure that its members could easily and cheaply leave at any time?
Let’s meet at the border, we’ll give you everyone who always threatens to move to Canada, and you can give us everyone threatening to move to the USA. Sort of an amnesty deal.
I literally can't think of a single canadian population/group that would be willing to die for canada. Liberals don't care, conservatives (the group more likely to join the military) absolutely don't care about the Canadian identity anymore, Quebecers sure wouldn't, immigrants (me included) wouldn't either...
Like, this isn't 1812 where Upper and Lower Canada had an actual identity or link to the British throne, or were descended from loyalists. We are mostly just a country that is held together by economic interests and a lot of inertia.
I'm from Quebec, I completely agree that it wouldn't go well at all, but that doesn't mean that we would try to defend Canada.
And that exact Canadian identity has been eroding very strongly in my experience. There's no real Canadian identity, I'm not even sure why that has shifted, but apathy is much more common than any feeling of belonging. Maybe the fact that urban areas control Canadian politics (which makes sense, that's where the population is) and has been doing so for decades now leads to a stronger disconnect between rural populations and their governments.
I think people are quite tired of the harms of a centralized globalization effort - whether from a decentralized cabal or official part of law and official government agreements.
For my evidence I'll reference this top upvoted comment that references actual truths, realities on the ground:
"Does the economist know what time it is? Nationalism is resurgent: nationalist parties now control the U.S. and Italy. Canada seems poised to Poilievre, who has made impassioned appeals to Canadian nationalism. And in Germany, France, and the U.K., nationalist parties have effectively rendered the governing coalitions impotent, even if they cannot yet command a majority. What a time to suggest that Canadians cede their sovereignty to bureaucrats in far-away Brussels!"
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42591290
I think this says more about the state of Canada, and the state of the EU, than it does about a good economic union. It’s like two bankrupt companies trying to form a profitable one.
I'm sorry, but what a bizarre and ridiculous way to respond to this rhetorical, largely humorous thought piece. Especially given that it's a response to Trump's continued declarations that Canada should join the US. Is Trump's constant senile yapping about absorbing Canada or Greenland or Panama also proof of how broken the US is?
As a Canadian, the #1 reason I wouldn't want to join the EU is that the Schengen Agreement almost seems purpose designed to force destructive mass migration, diluting cause and effect just so much that no one in particular can be accountable and put a stop to it.
> Is Trump's constant senile yapping about absorbing Canada or Greenland or Panama also proof of how broken the US is?
I mean, the fact that his name is spoken about in public as if this is a serious leader capable of managing a nation's affairs is evidence enough of, yes, broken US.
Situation in Canada isn't awesome. But if there's anything that would bring Canadians together it's listening to blowhard Americans pretend some level of superiority while they elect a game show host and felon to the highest office in their land.
Nothing lower value than criticizing a satirical post about a piece of satire. How dare I offend the “humorous thoughtpiece” with my own humorous thoughtpiece.
Does Canada have a migration issue? It didn’t seem that way the last time I was in Vancouver.
Meanwhile, in Europe, self-inflicted wounds from austerity, corruption, and years of ineffective policies continue to mount – and as usual, immigrants are the scapegoats. When the euro was introduced, the conversation was about harmonizing taxes, social welfare, pensions, and wages. Now, the EU celebrates forcing iPhones to adopt USB-C, as if that matters – and they pat themselves on the back for it.
Big corporations avoiding taxes in Ireland? Silence. German companies suppressing wages by threatening to relocate to Poland? Why not raise wages in Poland and create a fairer landscape?
These days, the EU feels more like an extension of NATO than a representative body. Its survival so far seems like a miracle, but I wouldn’t place bets on its future. The normalization of parties like AfD, pushing to exit the EU, adds to the uncertainty.
An increasing number of Canadians think they have a migration issue. This rhetoric is currently selling well.
It's not really factually correct though.
Canada has a housing price inflation problem, at a level I don't think most Americans can really grasp. It is definitely connected with high legal immigration, but not exclusively, as the exponential growth curve in prices began a long time ago (like 20 years ago) and is definitely connected with fiscal policy choices and legal aspects of how the property market is managed.
It is absolutely, unequivocally factually correct. Canada is under population-trap growth levels, growing by over 3.2% in a single year. That is absolutely bonkers growth. Canada had more growth in absolute numbers than the US, a country almost 10x the population (and thus ability to absorb).
Canada's housing is completely disconnected from reality and has a wide range of reasons, but right now we have a housing crisis, not just a price crisis, because of unchecked, outrageous migration through a thousand different programs and venues. Hospitals are clogged. A substantial percentage of housing transactions over the past couple of years -- fuelling the massive spiral upwards -- was predicated on hosting a number of international students in the basement.
Highways are clogging. Everything is at crisis levels. Canada has 5 million visa holders in country who are expected to leave over this calendar year. The vast majority have no plans on leaving.
There are legitimate problems with the housing market, but the moment someone makes the outrageous claim that migration is just "rhetoric", they're either grotesquely misinformed, or they're outright lying.
Canada does not have an illegal immigration problem, which is what is implied by the phrase migrant especially in the context of US politics and what American observers of this thread would think of as "migrant"
Canada has a massive program of legal immigration, and if you'll note above I did say it plays a part in housing price inflation here, which is bonkers. In particular our legal immigration program targets almost exclusively wealthier / skilled people from abroad, too, whereas the US system is... more complicated. People come here with money to spend. On houses.
But do go go back and look at the housing price inflation since the last crash, end of 90s. Through multiple federal gov'ts, with multiple immigration rate eras, multiple economics situations. It's basically following an exponential curve.
There are deep systemic issues here beyond just "we let too many people in"
A migrant is simply someone who moves from one place to another, in this context from one country to another. The legality of said move is irrelevant, and they are additional people that need housing and services. The number of people who have moved to Canada, through an unending series of special programs and exemptions and visa waivers and programs is colossal.
But if we must talk about illegals, yes Canada has an enormous number of people who technically aren't allowed to be in country. They came here legally -- given that this government is so set on not being racist that they removed virtually all checks and restrictions -- and just...didn't leave, for instance it's incredibly common for legal temporary residents to bring their parents here to "visit", where visit means live here. And anyone thinking the five million with expiring visas are going to leave is deluded.
As to housing, it basically hit peak insanity in 2016 on its natural curve and stagnated through to 2020 (literally - 2020 was slightly below 2016, inflation adjusted). So this government juiced every immigration channel to the max, leading to a massive inflation in housing. Yes, it was immigration that caused that, as something where demand closely matches supply is going to be massively out of balance when suddenly demand vastly exceeds supply over a short period of time.
One of the parent posts lamented people "blaming immigrants". I don't blame immigrants. I do blame immigration, however, and a government that turned a blind eye to the catastrophic effects, buying as much time as they can by just telling everyone that it's racist to dare question mass migration or its effects. All of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East can't just move to Western countries. That isn't rational or sustainable.
"targets almost exclusively wealthier / skilled people"
Have you not updated your priors since 2003? Wealthier/skilled people make up a very small minority of Canada's new residents. An absolutely tiny proportion. Which is a big reason Canada has had multiple years of GDP/capita contraction. We have millions of doordash drivers and Tim Hortons workers imported from abroad.
> which is what is implied by the phrase migrant especially in the context of US politics and what American observers of this thread would think of as "migrant"
This isn't really the case, and especially not so in the Trump era.
If anything I'd say it's the reverse - i.e. voters and even more so politicians specifically talk about "illegal immigration" with an emphasis on "illegal", but once you start digging into it, it becomes clear that they really have a problem with immigration in general.
It's a terrible idea to join the EU. You cede your control on economic policies to some central bureaucrats in Europe while holding the bags to pay for all the local societal infrastructure and welfare. You won't have enough political power to direct the flow of economic activities to your local region. Germany will suck up most of the economic benefits.
It's funny how the people of Germany think of this in exactly the same way you describe, except for that last part. They replace that by "country X will suck up most of the economic benefit".
Meanwhile the policies the EU makes are created by politicians from each of the EU member states. Some of them being originally proposed by politicians from the very countries whose citizens decry them the most.
It's fun to draw parallels to "the federal government sucks for reason X" in the US.
Canada works well as a buffer state between USA and Russia. Canada acts as the USA attack dog in foreign policy. Don't forget which countries won the war and still rule globally with nuclear powered aircraft carriers, strategic bombers, submarines, ICBMs and who prints the world reserve currency (hint: it isn't Europe or any of the countries therein).
Canada is effectively already the 51st state and has been so for 200+ years. It cannot be understated how greatly Canadians have benefited from this association and arrangement.
As far as immigration goes, it seems to be beneficial for the existing residents of a country to have controlled immigration at a certain rate. If the rate is too high, people complain, and if rates are too low, economies suffer.
Building houses works the same way, build them too fast and everyone suffers, build them too slow and everyone suffers. We aim for the slow, steady and sustainable increase.
As for this idea... barring a massive increase in spending by NATO members not including USA, Canada doesn't have the ability to become part of Europe. OTOH, they sure could/would get annexed by USA if that's the way the conversation is starting to go.
