A little too late Justin. You let corporate greed rule your policies when it comes to immigration and foreign students without working out the strain it qould cause elsewhere in the economy. That is the absence of governing not good government. PP and conservatives will be the same if not worse!
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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I know that my opinion on all this is not popular, and I usually keep it to myself especially where immigration and students are concerned since, lets face it, the hate for them can be unreal, but in this case I feel compelled to say I feel like this criticism is unfair.
The government is dealing with many real problems at once, and federal government policy impacts often have incredible lag time , meaning you can't just keep making changes every quarter without risking a lot.
With immigration, the Fed was (and in some cases still is) responding to real worker shortages, slowing population growth, and generational change and retirement. Real problems that need to be solved, and immigration is a solution to it. Some of the changes were actually humanitarian changes to reduce TFW exploitation and abuse. Meanwhile, the fed have no control over interest rates, little to no control over global inflation, and we exist in a federal system that separates powers and responsibilities which not only limits what the federal government can do but guarantees any perceived overstep will be challenged in court by at least 2, if not more provinces.
They've been governing, you don't have to like it and many people don't consider all the factors that go into these decisions, but it isn't fair to say they've been absent.
responding to real worker shortages
There is no such thing. In a capitalistic free market, the price of labour is set by the market. If the demand is more than the supply, that’s not a bad thing, that’s just the short amount of time that labour has some leverage, and it’s destroyed with increasing supply.
Thank you. You get it. The problem isn't a labour shortage, it's a pay shortage. Rather than increase wages along with the demand for labour, they get cheap labour rubber stamped from overseas because the government lets them.
Federal government has the means and responsiblity to persuade and cajole provinces in certain directions when it comes impacts of policies they are implementing. They could have foreseen the housing shortage or the unemployment or the depressed wages with the immigration, foreign workers and foreign student programs they are creating, because that's what the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats in various government agencies are for - to plan and study all the freakin impacts- but didn't foresee it or chose to ignore it, having faith in the "markets" to solve needs of the economy. Alas, the "markets" are slow moving and not efficient at all.
I think it's more difficult than you imagine to persuade provinces to go along with them, almost anything that might infringe on provincial jurisdiction is going to be challenged by at least Quebec and Alberta. I also don't believe we, here in 2024 with the benefit of hindsight, can fairly criticize the government for not foreseeing how the last few years have gone.
It's not automatic that provinces will follow the Feds. But the Feds have sticks and carrots to motivate provinces. It's politics. What provincial government wants to be seen BLOCKING a federal program to create more housing? That's one of the sticks - politics through the media.
Certain provincial governments have developed a tendency to scream "but jurisdiction!" about any federal policy that might affect them, whether or not it's useful or justified to do so and regardless of what other stimuli are applied.
Federal government has the means and responsiblity to persuade and cajole provinces in certain directions when it comes impacts of policies they are implementing.
I'm not going to defend Trudeau. Not on any front.
But this is a bad take. Any federal government taking a take-it-or-leave-it approach to the provinces is attempting to operate as a dictatorship, and it's something that should be actively resisted or rejected.
The problem right now is that there are a lot of Conservative Premieres, and they can taste blood in the water, so they're circling and stonewalling.
AFAICT the federal daycare deal, dental care, measures to address the housing crisis, and price on carbon were implemented by negotiating/cajoling the provinces. Generally speaking, I believe those were mostly successful initiatives that help Canadians.
Dental care, housing deals with cities and the fall back carbon pricing were all done dispite provincial pushback (as far as I'm aware).
The only one where they worked with the provinces was the daycare, and that took like 18 months for provinces to actually agree on and even today provinces like Ontario continue to drag their feet on.
From what I've seen over the last 3-5 years, the provinces have very little interest in actively working constructively with the feds.
I don't know what the current status of the healthcare chats are, but a few years ago the feds were willing to help push additional funding into the provincial healthcare systems, but the provinces needed to agree to terms (I believe the terms were around the money needing to be spent on the public healthcare system and not working towards privatization). as far as I know the talks never went anywhere, and healthcare systems are still underfunded.
responding to real worker shortages
I have to disagree. And I'm as left as they come by the way. I don't blame immigrants for wanting to come her to make a better life. I blame the corporations for taking advantage of that and the government for rubber stamping LMIA applications.
We'll take my little nothing town for example. Swift Current, Saskatchewan. According to the LMIA map available here, we have 84 approved temporary foreign workers, mostly in coffee chains, convenience stores and gas stations.
Meanwhile, as a retail manager, I get five or six resumes a week from people who are either a) naturalised immigrants b) Canadian by birth, or c) folks who have just recently finished up their own TFW "contract" for lack of a better word.
So the way that LMIA works is that the business owner "applies" to the federal government and makes the case that they need to get a cheap overseas labourer because there isn't any local person available to do the job. So in a town of 15000 people, there aren't 84 unemployed people looking for part time work? I know for a fact that that's not true because I get them applying here all the time.
The fact is, these corporations apply for an LMIA because they don't have to pay them more than the bare minimum for an "x" amount of time. Then when that time comes up, rather than giving our raises, they don't give them raises, forcing them (who are now effectively naturalised) to go find another job, freeing the corporation up to apply for ANOTHER LMIA, which gets rubber stamped.
Like I said, I'm as left as they come. This country is made by it's immigrants. It's rich because of our multicultural history. Immigration is a great thing. Hell, I'm a first generation Canadian. But the temporary foreign worker program is just a way for companies to use indentured servitude to create a "service class" made up of immigrants.
FWIW, this announcement deals solely with temporary foreign workers - I don't believe there's an easy path for a TFW to become a permanent resident.
The expansions in TFW policy are definitely corporate-friendly, in the sense that they suppress wages. They also discourage businesses from improving productivity, which has long been a problem for the Canadian economy.
Is this the Liberals deciding, a bit late in the day, that the best way to take on the Conservatives is to imitate them?
Libs have been centrist and pro-business for sometime now. While other liberal governments had balanced policies between pro-business and social responsibilities, this liberal government seems to have exuberantly responded to business wants when it comes to labour needs. This is the mess we have here.
The Liberals have been unambiguously pro-business since Cretien. It's just which businesses have been the focus of their support that's changed somewhat over time. Neoliberalism has been at the heart of the party since the Red Book.
The current administration has been throwing all of its support behind big city "businesses businessing businessly" businesses. Think of Bill Morneau and his family enterprises, or anything B2B where it seems like something the client company could just do on their own, but they gain a lot of connections by working with the other business.
You know. Rich people bullshit.
Are you joking? Conservatives love TFWs; I guarantee the owners of places that employ most TFWs are right wing. They get to take advantage of them for however long, paying them shit wages and refusing to respect their labour rights.
Clamping down on TFWs is good for Canadians, both immigrants and those born here.