To D Formerly from BC

Canada Immigration Forum (discussion group)


 
       
Subject: To D Formerly from BC
  You wrote:

"We came to Canada and spent tens of thousands, which are probably helping pay for YOUR medical care and social services."

Don´t count on it.

"Why are you so obsessed [if you are just the average Canadian] with being in these forums and knocking down anyone critical of the way Canadians steal and misleed immigrants?

Why, because you are probably someone with a vested interest.


Amazing you want to squelch this truth. You must be an immigration lawyer yourself."

Wrong again, on both counts. I have no vested interest, nor am I an immigration lawyer... though I´m sure that would would suit your purpose at this moment if I were.

I live in Ontario, I´m an accountant, and a Canadian, who´s husband is a landed immigrant. I´ve been through the immigration process (twice!) and even have a refused application under our belts. I actually have a lot of adice/experience to share with the membership here. If I choose to paint a different picture than you do, that´s my choice.

Fortunately for you, I also choose not to post here very often, for reasons like this.

I´ll reiterate what I said in the other post:
____________________________________________

Well, clearly Sharon is but one Canadian voice amid a sea of immigrants, therefore she is an easy target. Call her biased, call her racist, call her whatever makes YOU feel better about yourselves.

But as ANOTHER native Canadian, I echo her sentiments 100%

And before you want to call ME racist, Iīll tell you I have friends of many race/religion/colour. I embrace other cultures, my child plays with and goes to school with children of various ethnic backgrounds, and I do my utmost to educate her about other cultures that exist in our society. I teach her everyone is the same inside, as human beings, we are all equal.

Heck, Iīm a white Canadian woman and last night I cooked a Chicken Vindaloo dish for dinner, HA! :D

In the workplace, I HIRE people of ethnic minorities. I believe in giving people a chance. And for the most part, those people work damn hard to build a good life for themselves and their families. The ones who work hard and stick with it succeed. The ones who expect the world right off the bat and start screaming discrimination whenever it suits their purpose are the ones that end up crying to anyone who will listen on internet forums.

My voice, and Sharonīs is just one of millions of Canadians who share our views. You can slam us if that makes you feel better, thatīs fine, but if you can open your eyes and see the bigger picture, you will understand what weīre saying. Because itīs not that we donīt welcome newcomers or regard them as inferior to us. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem is the attitudes of some once they get here. What we love the most about our Country is also sometimes what works against us. Freedom and rights. It should never be abused.

_______________________________

Make of that what you will, and I may be a lot of things, but racist isn´t one of them.

Open your eyes and back off. The only one who´s obsessed here is you. That is abundantly clear.

[22-08-2006,14:38]
[**.235.111.195]
FWChelle
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
I never called you racist, did I?
[22-08-2006,14:52]
[**.138.151.242]
Anonymous
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
Why is everyone on here so keene on telling anyone who had a bad experience that they are losers?

Really?

There is so much in the media these days about how discriminatory Canadian employers are towards immigrants, that I don´t understand how you people can deny it.

And again, D in BC never called you racist. Perhaps you are reading part of someone else´s post and confusing it with me.

Strange misunderstanding.

What I will say is that you Canadians are very smug, and very unforgiving towards newcomers. Many of you have a paricular axe to grind with Americans.

It´s a shame.

[22-08-2006,14:54]
[**.138.151.242]
Anonymous
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
I´m not confusing anything:

[**.138.151.242] - Anonymous

[**.138.151.242] - D in USA

Nice try though. In your copied and pasted lecture on dynamic IP´s, you forgot the chapter on static IP´s. Really, you´re not fooling anyone here, most of all me, so give it up.

And what you said was:

"You show the true Canadian sentiment towards immigrants and other newcomers."

Which would imply you´re grouping me into your ´all Canadians are racist´ claim.

And no, I don´t have an axe to grind with Americans, I married one.

[22-08-2006,15:04]
[**.235.111.195]
FWChelle
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
I never called you a racist.
[22-08-2006,16:26]
[**.138.151.242]
D in USA
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
the ´ all canadians are racist ´ is your claim or someone else´s.
[22-08-2006,16:27]
[**.138.151.242]
D in USA
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
Most Canadians ARE anti-immgrants for sure though!

And it´s a shame someone on here has set parameters so that I can´t mention a new web site called NotCanada dot com

when I type the URL the correct way, my post is deleted automatically by your system. Anyway, that site is filled with people who were raked over the coals, and taken for a ride by Canada.

[22-08-2006,16:28]
[**.138.151.242]
D in USA
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
If Canada want to pull in highly educated people and then deny them jobs, and screw up their lives, the least YOU can do is allow them to speak on this site without being totally harassed.
[22-08-2006,16:29]
[**.138.151.242]
D in USA
Interesting article.... (in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
When immigration goes awry
Unless Canada cuts immigrant numbers, our major cities will not be able to maintain their social and physical infrastructures, writes Daniel Stoffman
Jul. 14, 2006. 08:25 AM

It´s 2020 and, in Toronto, the days when everyone used the public health-care system are gone. So is the time when a majority of affluent, middle-class parents sent their kids to public schools. In 2020, vast tracts of suburban slums occupy what used to be good farmland on the city´s outskirts.

Traffic congestion and air pollution are unbearable. Toronto´s reputation as one of North America´s most livable cities is a distant memory. It´s now known as the " Sao Paulo of the north."

This dystopian vision of the future of Canada´s largest city is hardly far-fetched. Toronto is already suffering severe growing pains, the result of the federal government´s insistence on maintaining the world´s largest per capita annual immigration intake ? around 250,000 people a year of whom about 43 per cent come to Toronto. That´s more than 100,000 newcomers year after year after year.

It is impossible for any city to maintain its social and physical infrastructure in the face of such relentless population growth.

By 2020, Greater Toronto´s population will have ballooned from 5 million to 7 million, or even more if immigration levels are raised higher still.

Every year Mercer Human Resource Consulting ranks world cities according to their liveability. Vancouver always places at or near the top of the list while the other big Canadian cities are among the top 30. Most of the top-ranked cities are relatively small ? places like Copenhagen (500,000) and Zurich (340,000).

None of the world´s vast urban agglomerations of 10 million or more, such as Sao Paulo and Seoul, is rated by Mercer as desirable places to live. Smaller big cities are more livable because their residents can enjoy the amenities of urban life without the congestion, crime, and pollution associated with sprawling megalopolises.

Canada´s livable cities are an unsung national asset. One of the things that makes them special is the presence of immigrants from all over the world who have contributed new energy and cultural diversity. But, in immigration as in everything else, too much of a good thing isn´t better. Ottawa´s policy of mass immigration, for which no reasonable explanation has ever been offered, risks doing irreparable damage to our cities. This policy of rapid urban growth is being implemented by Ottawa even though it has no jurisdiction over urban affairs and even though the policy has never been stated explicitly.

Yet the impact is already evident.

Highway 401 across Toronto has become the busiest road in North America, the city can´t find a place to put its garbage, and its public schools can´t afford to provide the English instruction newly arrived children need. In Vancouver, meanwhile, controversy rages over the British Columbia government´s plan to expand the Port Mann bridge that links the rapidly growing Fraser Valley suburbs to the city.

Amazingly, the local politicians who have to cope with the results never suggest that perhaps the immigration intake might be lowered from time to time as was standard practice until the late 1980s. To listen to their silence, one would think the relentless influx of huge numbers of new residents was a natural phenomenon like the weather rather than a deliberate federal policy that easily could be changed.

Ottawa might claim it is not to blame for unmanageable urban growth because it just lets the immigrants in, it doesn´t tell them where to go. But this would be disingenuous, because Ottawa knows Toronto gets almost half of all immigrants while Vancouver gets 18 per cent and Montreal 12 per cent. Many of those who settle elsewhere at first also eventually wind up in one of the three biggest cities.

Attempts at dispersion are doomed because immigrants want to live where previous cohorts of the same ethnicity are already established. They also want to live in cities for the same reason Canadian-born people do ? they are more likely to find jobs there.

The country most comparable to Canada is Australia. Like Canada, it is an English-speaking Commonwealth nation settled in relatively recent history. Like Canada, it has an organized immigration program and has used immigration effectively to enhance population growth and increase the vigour and diversity of its major cities.

Australia´s current net migration rate (immigration minus emigration per 1,000 of population) is 3.85. Canada´s is 5.85. Before the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney increased immigration levels and made them permanent during the latter part of the 1980s, a policy continued by the Liberals under Jean Chr?tien, Canada had an intake similar, on a per-capita basis, to Australia´s.

There is no reason why Canada should have far more immigration than any other country. Canada´s existing population is younger than those of most other developed countries and its ratio of working age people to retired ones is higher. If Canada reverted to its traditional, more moderate, immigration program, it could continue to enjoy the benefits of immigration while sparing its cities the problems of unmanageable growth. Immigrants would benefit too. Their economic performance has been in free fall over the past 15 years.

Previously the number of new immigrants varied according to labour market needs. Sometimes it would be cut to give the newly arrived a chance to be absorbed successfully into the economy without intense competition from more new arrivals. Not any more.

An endless stream of newcomers arrives in the big cities with few options but to work in poorly paid jobs such as cleaning houses and driving taxis. Wages of these jobs are thus kept low and the occupants of them have little chance to get ahead.

Previously, poverty levels among immigrants were about the same as those of the Canadian-born. Now they are much worse. According to a report by the Canadian Council on Social Development, whereas the poverty level of those who arrived before 1986 was 19.7 per cent, or slightly lower than that of the Canadian-born, the poverty level of those who came after 1991 was an alarming 52.1 per cent, while that of people born in Canada remained unchanged at around 20 per cent.

If this trend is not reversed, Toronto and Vancouver will by 2020 be home to an entrenched underclass living in slums. Because of gentrification and rising property values in the central cities, these slums will be located in the suburbs, requiring long commutes for those fortunate enough to have employment.

Fan Yang, a reader of the Toronto Star, shrewdly analyzed the impact of federal immigration policy in a letter to the newspaper in 2003. He accused the federal government of "dumping more cheaply acquired labour into the domestic labour pool, regardless of whether there is a healthy demand. Businesses welcome that enthusiastically as they bear no direct cost of unemployed immigrants and only garner the rewards of lower labour costs."

Even skilled workers are doing poorly. According to the 2001 census, male immigrants with a university degree who came to Ontario in the late 1990s were earning after six to 10 years in Canada only 54 per cent of what native-born Canadians with similar qualifications in that province earned.

Remarkably, immigrant labour market performance has declined during a time of increasing shortages of skilled workers. But, as the above data suggest, just bringing in huge numbers of people doesn´t solve skills shortages. Mexico has a worse skills shortage than Canada yet it has no shortage of people. The trick is to match immigrants to jobs and our current immigration program doesn´t do that well.

Luckily, Canada doesn´t need to reinvent the wheel. It merely needs to emulate the solutions that Australia´s more successful immigration program has already found, such as requiring the credentials of skilled immigrants to be approved before they come and imposing strict requirements for language skills.

In addition to creating poverty, mismanaged immigration is weakening our public health-care and education systems. By 2020, the huge baby boomer cohort of Canadians will be entering its stage of heaviest reliance on the health-care system. The boomers will not tolerate interminable waits for hip replacements and cancer treatment.

As if the challenge of caring for impatient boomers weren´t enough, the presence of millions of new immigrants will intensify the demands on the system. Many of the newcomers will be old because Canada is the most generous country in allowing immigrants to sponsor elderly parents and grandparents.

There is no chance that our health-care system can survive in its current form given the demands on it from these demographic changes. As a result, by 2020 a full-fledged, parallel, private health-care system will be in operation in the major immigrant-receiving cities which are also where most of the boomers live. Private health care will be relied upon not just by the wealthy but by much of the middle class as well.

A similar transformation will occur in education. A report last January conducted for the Elementary Teachers of Toronto said teachers were spending the equivalent of one day a week trying to make up for the lack of English as a second language support for their immigrant students.

"The more time the regular classroom teacher is having to devote to ESL students ... it detracts from the level of service we want for all of our students," union president Martin Long told The Globe and Mail.

In other words, the lack of support for ESL students is hurting all students. This is certainly not the fault of the immigrant children. It is the fault of rash and ill-conceived federal policy. As a result, by 2020 most middle-class families will have abandoned the public system. This will be an unfortunate development because the public schools are where immigrants and Canadian-born get to know each other. They are an important force for social cohesion.

A seemingly plausible argument for boosting the population of at least one Canadian city to 10 million or more would be that the truly great cities of the world are very big. But London and Paris grew to their current size gradually over hundreds of years and their greatness is the result of the wealth of the empires of which they were the capitals.

You don´t build London and Paris by adding millions of bodies over a short period of time. That´s how you build Mumbai and Mexico City.

Ontario´s environment commissioner, Gord Miller, issued a warning last year about what the future holds for Toronto given current trends:

"The environmental impacts of this magnitude of growth ... will compromise the quality of our lifestyle to a stage where it will be unrecognizable," he said. "We already have trouble dealing with our waste right now ... What about another 4 million tonnes a year? What about another 4 million cars?"

The new Conservative government´s immigration minister, Monte Solberg, told a House of Commons committee in May that he was concerned about the "huge burden" high immigration levels place on our major cities. He thus became the first immigration minister in at least two decades to show any sensitivity to the impact of immigration policy on the urban environment.

Now it´s the turn of local officials to abandon their ostrichlike refusal even to mention immigration when discussing urban growth. Perhaps they fear being branded "anti-immigrant" if they do.

But Pierre Trudeau, in his last year as prime minister, cut immigration by 25 per cent and no one called him anti-immigrant. In that case, good management trumped politics. It´s an example the Conservative government would do well to follow.

[22-08-2006,16:48]
[**.138.151.242]
D in USA
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
The colour of Canadian poverty
Apr. 28, 2006. 01:00 AM
CAROL GOAR

The surprising thing about Grace-Edward Galabuzi, author of a new book entitled Canada´s Economic Apartheid: The Social Exclusion of Racialized Groups in the New Century, is that he is a gentle, scholarly man.

He uses facts, not polemics, to make his case. He acknowledges that Canada has been good to him since he fled Uganda at gunpoint in 1982. There is nothing angry or strident about him.

But passion is not measured in decibels. And Galabuzi is nothing if not passionate about resisting the formation of a non-white underclass in his adopted home.

The Ryerson University professor admits he chose the title for his book partly to jolt Canadians out of their complacency. But he does see real and disturbing parallels between the racial stratification of South Africa from 1950 to 1994 and what is going on in urban Canada ? especially Toronto ? today.

He is not accusing individual Canadians of racism, Galabuzi emphasizes. He is asking them to look at the way their labour markets and power structures systematically relegate people of colour to the lower ranks. He is asking them to explain why poverty is disproportionately concentrated among blacks and south Asians. He is asking them to face the fact that Toronto is becoming an increasingly segregated city, with non-whites living in its least desirable neighbourhoods.

"These trends are becoming institutionalized. Not by fiat, not by the state, this is not South Africa and it never will be. But when you look at what´s going on in Canada´s urban centres, an underclass is starting to emerge and it´s very clearly racially defined."

He cites a 2003 Statistics Canada study, which showed that poverty was much more prevalent in Toronto´s racial enclaves than in the rest of the city. In areas where more than 30 per cent of the population was Chinese, the low-income rate was 28.4 per cent. Where South Asians predominated, it was 28.3 per cent. Where blacks were dominant, it was 48.5 per cent. (The citywide rate was 22.6 per cent).

The same pattern was evident in unemployment rates. In Chinese enclaves, the incidence of joblessness was 11.2 per cent. In South Asian enclaves, it was 13.1 per cent. In black enclaves, it was 18.3 per cent (the citywide rate was 8.6 per cent.)

All three racial groups were over-represented in low-wage, precarious jobs such as sewing-machine operator, electronics assembler and taxi driver and under-represented in management, the professions and supervisory roles.

This combination of factors ? low incomes, high unemployment, jobs that don´t pay enough to pull families out of poverty and kids who see no prospect of a better life ? can easily give rise to anger and violence, Galabuzi says.

"You´re starting to see a dramatic increase in incarceration rates in these communities," he warns. "We´re looking at real trouble down the road."

He rejects the comforting explanations that Canadians frequently offer for racial polarization.

It can no longer be attributed to differences in education, he points out. Visible minorities ? thanks to Canada´s highly selective immigration system ? have a higher rate of post-secondary training than the rest of the population.

Nor does the old time-lag argument hold up. It is not just recent immigrants who are struggling to get a foothold on the economic ladder. Non-white citizens who have been in Canada for decades are stuck on the bottom rung. What´s worse, their children are dropping out of school in disproportionate numbers, locking in a destructive intergenerational cycle.

"There will always be individuals who buck the trend," Galabuzi says, anticipating objections. "But as a group, they´re doing poorly."

He does see a few hopeful signals.

The city is targeting resources at 13 troubled neighbourhoods before they become racial ghettos.

The labour movement is organizing Toronto´s hotel workers, who are overwhelmingly Filipino and Caribbean. They are hired for "back-of-the-house" jobs ? housekeeping, maintenance, food preparation, dishwashing ? that pay $10 to $12 an hour and are let go when their bodies wear out.

And the non-profit sector is highlighting the racial dimension of poverty. The United Way of Greater Toronto took the lead, with its groundbreaking 2004 report Poverty by Postal Code.

Promising as these developments are, Galabuzi says, they are not enough.

Ontario needs an employment equity law that is effective and enforced. The province did adopt an Employment Equity Act in 1993. But former premier Mike Harris repealed it two years later and the governing Liberals have made no attempt to replace it.

Galabuzi is aware that legislating equality of opportunity in the workplace is controversial. But he contends that employers who discriminate on the basis of race ? "blacks wouldn´t fit in here, aboriginals are unreliable, ethnics aren´t team players" ? should at least be held to account.

He also believes Canada´s political parties and public institutions have to do a better job of turning multiculturalism from a feel-good catchphrase into a visible, measurable reality.

Canadians are fair-minded, tolerant people, Galabuzi says. But the society they´ve built does not reflect that.


[22-08-2006,16:49]
[**.138.151.242]
Anonymous
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
Both are worth reading...
[22-08-2006,16:50]
[**.138.151.242]
Anonymous
(in reply to: To D Formerly from BC)
Yes, we´re well aware of the not-canada people, as they continually spam every immigration forum they can find, and usually get censored/banned for pure abuse, like posting the same post 50x in a row, filling an entire page, and hijacking other legitimate posts. Like Johovas witness´s, there´s a difference between spreading the word and shoving your opinions down people´s throats. It´s obnoxious, and people don´t like it. People tend to get HOSTILE.

I will readily admit the current immigration system is flawed, if not broken, particularly for the skilled workers. It needs a major overhaul and programs in place to start recognizing foreign credentials. That is a fact that can´t and shouldn´t be ignored. The average intelligent Canadian would agree with this assessment. But to say "Most Canadians are anti-immigrant" is a stretch, and an ignorant one at that.

And I´ll tell you another thing about webspace. Someone is paying the bandwidth on this site, and as such, they reserve the right to censor whatever they want. Get over it. The whole ´freedom of speech´ gambit doesn´t apply on people´s websites. They are not obligated to let you, or anyone spam their boards with material that is not for what the website was intended. This is a forum for information for people who WANT to immigrate to Canada, not for people who want to be talked out of it. Just because you don´t agree with the cause doesn´t mean it´s your place to ´save the world´ from the evils of Canada.

[22-08-2006,16:59]
[**.235.111.195]
FWChelle