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Canada Moves to Keep Skilled Workers
ashitaka writes "Just in time for all those who have vowed to leave the United States in response to government policies and mainstream cultural malaise, the Canadian government is announcing a C$700 million initiative to help skilled workers stay in Canada and become citizens. If you had the choice, would you really uproot to a new country especially one where the lifestyle isn't that much different than your own?"
If you had the choice, would you really uproot to a new country especially one where the lifestyle isn't that much different than your own?
It seems to me that a lifestyle that includes warm weather would be reason enough.
Having done alot of travel to the US, both for business and pleasure, let me assure you Canada's lifestyle is far different. We live in a much more secure, comfortable and friendly environment than most places in the United States. We have very little crime (Toronto, our largest city, has about 70 murders a year), we have the best health care system in the world, we have tonnes of green land, and are well respected by most of the World.
If the US is such a hell hole, why does it have to go to such lengths to keep people out?
If American citizens are frustrated and annoyed with their government's behavior, can someone please explain how expatriating will do anything but make the problem worse?
If they have any interest in achieving their goal, shouldn't they be sending a loud message to the rest of the world, inviting like-minded individuals to come live there instead? Or perhaps convince their neighbors to read a newspaper?
Oh, wait. That would involve effort. Never mind - I forgot who I was talking about.
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As an American I am in a better position to fix the problems than anyone. If I move to Canada (and even if I become a Canadian subject, or whatever) I have given up on influencing the course of events because I don't want to deal with some sort of guilt over my failure to do so recently?
We don't know how much worse things might have been, either. We say, and it's true, that the domestic opposition didn't prevent the administration from invading Iraq. Well, that was a failure. There is literally no way of knowing what else they might have done if given free reign - Miers on the SCOTUS is only the start of it.
In case you haven't been paying attention - the two last US elections have been very close, and their outcomes (especially in 2000) have had a tremendous impact on the rest of human history. In spite of those election results, public opinion here in the US still plays a big role in determining what the administration can and cannot get away with. If you're really concerned with human civilization, and not with melodrama, you move to a purple state, not to Canada.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The upper class seem to do well with the people currently in control in the govt. The lower class does fairly well with the hand-outs. This leaves the middle class to support all three. Immigration is mainly by people in the lower class, where they stand to benefit by moving to the USA. Meanwhile, the middle class that are already IN the usa find their situation going downhill. So you see people that want in, and people that want out.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I've already uprooted and left the US for another country.
Japan in this case.
I just couldn't get past America re-electing the failed
ideologues in the White House. Pity the people have seen the err of
their ways all too late. (ref: Bush's declining approval rating)
Barring stumbling into marriage over here, I can't see myself
staying forever though. A place like Canada is *extremely* attractive
to me on a number of levels - it's similarity to America being just one.
Having spent a bit of time in Toronto and Vancouver, they're both places
I can easily see myself living in. They're not New York or Tokyo, mind
you... but they do seem to be everything America believes itself to be -
with Jesus wonderfully absent.
The only problem I can see being an issue is that I don't particularly
care for hockey... Is that a deal-breaker on naturalization?
Better economy?? The Toronto Stock Exchange index is up 20% so far this year - the Dow Jones is down. The past few years have had similar results - and that is without taking into account the changes in the currencies. The Canadian federal government has posted a surplus each of the past seven years. The US government, uh, has not. Canadian unemployment levels are nearing record low levels....
What's your feeling about people immigrating TO the United States? If one applies your position equally to all countries of the world, nobody should ever leave their native land. Are you advocating that? This country is largely populated by immigrants and those descended from immigrants. I don't know the details of your family background, but chances are they were immigrants at some point. Should they have stayed in their home country? Should you have instead been born and grown up there instead of here?
How about giving up the Socialism, eh?
People leave Canada for a country with a better economy, and the government's solution is to spend more tax money! Brilliant move, eh?
I presume you're talking about the US - one of the most socialist countries on the planet (or have you opted out of the endless socialist pork projects, massive socialist war machine, and corporate welfare? Is that a checkbox on your income tax return?). Of course it isn't to benefit the poor, so Americans lift their chins up and talk about their great "capitalism" versus the evil "socialism" (of the REST OF THE 1ST WORLD), strangely imagining some moral high road.
Absolutely amazing that any American, with the enormous pork and tax-grabbing bloat of its government, can bleat the word socialist in any manner other than humor or self-deprecation.
What's even more remarkable is the fact that the all-in tax load in the US is, in many cases, similar to or greater than a comparable person in Canada. Don't tell Americans this, though - it might upset their imaginary world.
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Also if you are gay or a muslim you are much more likely to be accepted in Canada then the US.
evil is as evil does
(Actually, in America, you might get turfed out in critical situations anyway. Many hospitals don't have an emergency room, as they cost more than they make and US hospitals are there for profit not care. Those ER rooms that do exist are hopelessly overcrowded, overworked and are considered by the CDC to be extremely high risk areas in the event of an outbreak of a contageous disease. If bird flu ever goes critical, it will likely do so in a US emergency room.)
The American situation, unlike the British and Canadian counterparts, is not fixable. Because hospitals in the US are profit ventures, not health-care centers, they have no interest in doing anything that will cost more than it will earn. Proper emergency care is expensive and earns little, as most accident and crime victims are uninsured and/or flat broke. They have no interest in lowering prices, because the bulk of "paying" customers have health insurance and so never see the real price tag and therefore have no reason to care what it is.
Insurance companies in the US are also money-grubbers and they know how to rake the money in. By charging the companies a "reduced rate" for bulk purchases, they can absolutely guarantee that customers never see the real cost to their paychecks. The victim - errr, employee - only sees a given deduction for their deduction. What they don't see is what the company is really paying and therefore what the company is really calculating payscales on. In the end, you pay the full cost but you only see a fraction of it on the pay stub.
By these accounting tricks and other fraud, the US employees are bilked billions of dollars and somehow consider themselves better off because they don't have the wait. Trust me, if you threw billions of dollars out the window in England, you'd get prompt healthcare too. Well, just as soon as anyone realized that was real money and not something from a Monopoly game.
(For that matter, there's always BUPA, if you insist on the insurance thing in more civilized lands.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They've (the wealthy, like the Waltons ) been spending their no-tax windfall by buying other companies, and buying back their own company's stock to privatize their corporations. What they aren't doing with the money is spending it on new jobs, which is what the putative purpose of the cuts are for; no less authority than the American Enterprise Institute states that, to their surprise, the newly released wealth is not returning to the economy at large, but is "going into the matresses".
When the economy tanks in the next year or so, all that hoarded wealth will be released to purchase stock and real estate at greatly deflated prices. They'll make a bundle on our economic disaster, eventually, when the US climbs out of its debt hole (by raising taxes and cutting public spending) and the value of the holdings they will purchase at fire-sale prices go back up.
Supply side economics, as Reagan's budget director David Stockman admitted, is a con to lower taxes on the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. He should know, as he was Reagan's salesman to congress.
Supply side cuts have failed. Jobs are gone, poverty is up, aid to the poor is going, we're trillions in the hole in debt to China, the wealthy are insanely wealthy and poised to become mega-wealthy after the crash caused by the tax cuts and borrowing. Bush believes in his supply side cuts. But, as we've seen, his beliefs are gut-based, not fact-based, and his gut is unbelieveably incorrect about reality. He simply didn't believe in his own college education, and certainly had his own ideas about economics, his Harvard professor says. Faith-based economics, welfare is communism, government is evil, all that.
Economic booms are based on the price of oil, not tax cuts. Reagan cut taxes and increased spending, sending us into a spiral that mirrors today's death swirl, but he was saved by one thing: OPEC's pricing discipline collapsed in the early Eighties. So much wealth, which had been hemorraging to the middle eastern princes since 1973, suddenly flooded into the American economy. We sang with power and money and grew, even as the debt ballooned. Reagan was a lucky bugger: his supply side con would have ruined him had OPEC not collapsed.
Bush the senior had to raise taxes to stop the disaster that supply side created. He paid for it by losing a chance at a second term.
Bush the junior came into office believing, as all the other conservatives did, in the Reagan Miracle. He was wrong: the miracle was the OPEC collapse that saved the old fool from the folly of believing the pack of thieves that sold him on the supply-side con.
So, Bush slammed straight into OPEC and the oil companies ascendant, believing that tax cuts were the solution to all, that government was the problem, and that debt would eventually force the death of the New Deal programs the wealthy hated so. It's five years later, and the International Monetary Fund is telling us we can crash hard or crash soft -- but we will crash, when the Chinese and all the others lending us money cut us off. They will dictates terms to US. And Bush will probably react by screaming at his aides and locking himself away from the public, which is pretty much his reponse to every challenge.
After the crash, the very people who keep selling the supply side con will be flush with offshore cash. They will swoop in and buy cheap, while taxes for the lesser mortals go up 20% to try to stop the bleeding. And oh yep -- they will be the ones who'll be lending us money to shore up the tax base, so they'll make a trillion bucks in interest alone in the next couple of decades -- paid for by tax payers.
Yup, the money is in the mattress - for now.