Numpty

It never goes into detail about the jobs they can't find... what is the barrier they are dealing with? Experience? Expectations too high?

Anecdotal i know but... my brother in law is on the job hunt and there's loads of potential employers calling him back for construction work, entry level jobs in garages, hotels looking to staff up in the summer, etc. He's working on getting his work permit sorted so he's not able to take the job offers yet... certainly seeing a lot though.

LMIA? It's one way to legally hire non-residents.

Higher interest rates are impacting Canadians in every corner of life. Food costs... mortgages... fuel... they all domino and collapse together. The lack of urgency is directly hurting the vulnerable portion of our society. There's no easy fix. Drop interest rates too fast and you risk pushing inflation back up... don't drop interest rates fast enough and you risk pushing a significant portion of the population into bankruptcy or homelessness (not just home owners... also renters who are forced to absorb that same interest rate hike in the form of higher rents). Within my circle of friends. several have been forced to close businesses because of the impact of the rapid increase in interest rates. It's not the base rate itself, so much as the speed with which it was increased which was faster than their businesses could absorb.

As for mortgage renewals themselves... the insanity of the Canadian system of the typical 5-year renewable mortgages is just plain vanilla stupid. It makes everyone incredibly susceptible to microeconomics instead of averaging out the risk on a macro scale like most other countries do.

No urgency

Meanwhile people are facing financial struggles with stupid high food prices and out of budget mortgage renewals.

Let them eat cake....

The whole "run a business" thing is bonkers. No wonder so many family doctors give up and go do something else.

With that change in the CBC article that you linked... there's hope. My family doctor told us that she's going to retire this year... hopefully there's a replacement or 10 at the clinic so people can start getting that initial care they need and relieve the pressure on the ER :-(

I'm in BC, and technically have a family doctor... and it sucks. My doctor is only seeing patients a couple of days per week, so appointments are currently booking out around 4 months. There's ONE walk-in clinic where I live (Nanaimo), and they take a limited number of patients per day - they put out signs on a Saturday morning like "Only accepting 10 patients today" (I have a photo of this one to prove it). TThe ER is backup up so bad, you could die before they even triage you (18h or longer wait is normal). The staff at the Critical Care unit in the neighboring Parksville yells at you and tells you to go back to Nanaimo (it's happened to both my wife and I at different times... and we both actually needed medical care). We've ended up driving to Port Alberni or Courtenay for medical care... or in my case, I'm travelling for business and have booked a doctor visit in another damn country to get some checkup work done because I can't get it done locally... OK, I can get it, but the local wait times are so fucking long that I can book a flight, fly overseas and see a doctor, get my results and be back home a month before I'd even start the process with my family doctor.

Talkign with the parents at the local school... many are afraid that their kids will catch something... and thehy won't be able to see a doctor to get the help they need

So yeah.. there's widespread frustration :-P

You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.

Have you been playing on Reddit again?

estimate age based on a webcam scan of a user’s face.

Ummm... right... VPNs are going to have a LOT of business in Canada.

Well.... to be fair, I lived a good life from my mid-20s to my mid-40s. I traveled the world. I have worked in various parts of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I've done a solo motorcycle trip from Nairobi to Cape Town... just as one example. The problem is... while I had money during these years, I didn't save much. What I did save was used up in the in-between-jobs times after I was laid off... and this happened more than once over the years. Before I got married, I had a plan to retire at 50, and I was actually well on my way to achieving it. Then life happened... and kids arrived... and money disappeared faster than it came in.

Now that retirement is closer... and I'm thinking about it, the reality of it not happening. I look at the stupidly broken medical system in Canada... and think "shit, I'm screwed". I can't see a doctor for example.... just to do some preventative body maintenance and checkups. The local walk-in medical clinics are overwhelmed. I have a family doctor, but she's retiring this year... and she's currently booking in-person appointments 3 to 4 months out and every day the gap for appointment availability gets bigger. The only other option is the ER... and if you show up at the ER saying "I am almost 55, I need a physical just to check on things" they show you the door and say "come back when you're sick". I'm literally booking a flight to Europe to go see a doctor for a checkup.

So yeah... wheeee.....

It's amazing how quickly they get it.

My kids use Linux. They are 5 and 7. They do just fine. They are "normal"... as in just beginner users.

The 5 year old only cares where Steam is, and where the games are in the menu.

The 7 year old is a master at it all already. He's installing Minecraft mods all the time... downloading, unzipping the mods... running java -jar XYZ from the terminal... yeah I had to show him the first time, but TBH, I didn't show it all to him. He read up on how it works and watched YouTube videos on it.

It's all about what you're used to and if you're actually interested in learning the bits. Normal is what? Someone who treats the computer as an appliance? Yeah... with those users as long as the machine actually works... they don't care what the underlying OS is... OSX? Windows 11? some Linux distro? It's all the same to them. The computer is a magic machine that does things and they have no clue how or why.

dye a hero

Yes.... but what colour?