The "LOLCANADA" thread...again

Building homes isn't rocket science. A big reason is PE, giant home builders and foreign investors bought up all the land. Before a family could buy a piece of land and hire the local family owned home builder to build it for them. Now all the land is bought up, and companies are building 50+ homes and subdivisions at a time and the small mom and pop home builder has been squeezed out.

What Canadian business has a competitor advantage because of low wages?

This is like saying farmers need slaves because who will grow the food.

thats fine? im like not that right leaning some things are more important then profit. Its not like were really competing outside of natural resources anyway. im not a huge believer in graph must go up at all cost. I like downswings its healthy. and as shifty said we already can't compete with labor costs. Thats never been the goal. Should we go back to coal mining? Slavery was pretty cool

but if the government did some imitative to build homes they actually can't because there's no one to build them. None of the immigrants go into the trades either. Its stem fields or tim hortons

"Despite a severe labour shortage and high demand in Canada's construction and trades sectors, the proportion of immigrants with an apprenticeship or trades certificate has dropped from 9.6% in the 1980s to roughly 2.4% in recent years. Although tradespeople are in high demand, they represent less than 2% of new permanent residents admitted since 2016"

It's practically a tautology. If you increase your labour costs, or any other costs, your profit declines. Take something like the biotech industry, just as this is one I'm familiar with. It's well established that Canada has cheaper labour costs than American counterparts, which gives a competitive advantage, one of the very few we actually have, so often we are at a disadvantage. Of course in any industry there are strengths and weaknesses, and indeed Canada having a highly educated workforce is one of those strengths on a global scale and I don't think ya'll should be so quick to abandon it.

This is a hilariously inept comment. Noting that increasing costs lowers competitiveness leads you down a pathway to slavery? LMAO.

I'd be totally happy to admit international students to trade schools as labour supply issues in many many trades keeps being a recurring theme.

I guess I can't really argue against this. I would like Canada to not suffer a deep economic downswing which is what would happen if we followed Pablito's plan at least. But if you are totally cool with deep economic downswings I can't really argue further.

What can I say im pretty left leaning on economy. I wouldn't mind a 25$ minimum wage or ubi. but you can't have that when you can live in canada by taking out a small loan in india. Were not basing wages on fair market value currently anyway

It's hard for me to challenge this because I'm not too familiar with university budgets but a quick google search shows me that ''the University of Toronto has approximately 72,982 domestic students enrolled across its three campuses.'' who are paying an average tuition of $8000. Am I really to understand here that universities can't pay their bills(without int students) on that amount of money?

Again, genuinely clueless about budgets, so feel free to call me an idiot and show me why I'm wrong.

My objection to you is that we've tried it your way and our economy has barely seen any significant growth. Most Canadians my age will tell you their lives have become significantly worse, not better.

Realistically speaking, we've never really had this. Reality is, if you're a unique talent you're moving to the US not to Canada. If you have an idea worth billions, you're moving to Silicon Valley, not Canada. Our own homegrown rich are leaving the country in record numbers because of our economy and being an entrepreneur in Canada means you're faced with high regulatory burdens and limited access to start up funds.

I think Canada needs to invest in its own people and not patch every issue with an influx of immigrants while our infrastructure is years behind.

Now to be clear, I'm not blaming immigrants, I'm blaming policies and more importantly 10 years of Harper followed by 10 years of Trudeau.

I'm not abandoning it. I'm trying to make the point that we do indeed have a highly educated workforce that has difficulties finding jobs and we don't need to make this workforce bigger with highly educated international students who then also struggle to find jobs.

This was a problem when I graduated uni, which is 15 years ago, luckily for me I found poker during uni and wasn't planning on working straight out of uni but the unemployment numbers simply don't support your portrayal of a lack of STEM educated workforce. We have too many Canadian born STEM graduates who can't find jobs. Why should these people have to compete with foreigners too?

If we want to treat international students as strictly an export, without putting a strain on our infrastructures and no access to working off campus, I'm 100% for that.

This isn't a big deal in comparison to the big negative effects on our economy of zeroing out all trained international students, but yes it has a big negative impact on budget even amongst the richest and biggest institution in Canada UofT (which you got mad at me referencing earlier). Basically the three biggest sources of income for a university or college are provincial transfers, domestic tuition and international student tuition. So when a domestic student spend $8000 and an international student spends 50k plus, that international student is subsidizing the costs of the university. The effects of this are actually worse at smaller institutions than bigger ones. What I've experienced locally at my institution is basically just a squeeze, not the end of the world. Things are a bit worse, budgets are tighter, quality of education not quite as good, worse student to professor ratios, that kind of thing. At a high level, if you remove a big source of income, you're going to have to replace it somewhere else either with increased tuition, increased deficit financing from provinces, or lower quality cheaper education. That's not good.

This is an absolute claim. We're debating a relative ones. The Canadian economy has a LOT of problems, some due to the recent US situation but a lot are "internal". I'd list declining productivity as perhaps near the top of the list, for instance. The question is whether cutting out immigrants helps or hurts. I think there IS a meaningful, nuanced debate on turning down the dial here as the Liberals appear to be doing. But your suggestion is just kneecapping entirely, and I think that isn't a little hurt, it is a big one.

I used it as an example because you used it as an example. We don't have to fight about everything dude.

I understand this. I'm asking why UofT can't pay its bills when we remove international students entirely from the equation. This isn't even a suggestion I made, my suggestion is 0 hours worked off-campus and no access to benefits other than specifically healthcare.

I'm basically wondering if Canadian universities are just another example of poorly ran institutions who are bringing in heaps of money but somehow claim they need to charge international students 50k a year to ''subsidize'' domestic students while charging them between 7k to 15k a year.

At some point Canada's basic necessities and infrastructures need to be given time to catch up. We are not letting it catch up by adding more people into this country, sure at a slower pace, but still a number far too high.

As for the debate whether immigrants are a positive or negative to this country. It's simple. If we bring in what we need, without making life for the average Canadian worse, I'm all for it. Unfortunately the opposite is happening right now.

Profit decreasing because of labour costs doesn't make a company less competitive. The biotech industry is also way larger in the US so I'm not sure there is much of a competitive advantage with lower wages.

Nope, saying we need immigrants for cheap labor is.

20% of the construction workforce are immigrants. Labour shortages are not the reason more homes are not being built.

Canadas main economic problem is research and development and investment into that and business to make them more efficient. The average Canadian business is something like 40% or more less efficient then its American counterpart.. . Since that hasn't improved since we let in 3 million people in a single year I dont think mass letting in cheap labor is going to solve that problem. Its a band aid solution to make gdp go up. Mass labor won't improve efficiency. quality over quantity

Lol. If we added costs to companies via......uh let's pick something makes conservatives mad.......charging a carbon tax, wouldn't you say that those increased costs makes Canadian companies less competitive?

Lmao. It's like you can't process the distinction between absolute and relative things. Canada having lower labour wages in biotech is a competitive advantage. That doesn't mean it magically negates all other economic forces or could be disputed by noting the US is 10 times larger. It's just a relative advantage. We have other relative disadvantages. Telling me an absolute result doesn't negate the relative one - DUCY?

LMAO the "immigration to slavery" slippery slope bit from you is pretty ridiculous.

Well yes, any university could replace the huge amount of tuition dollars from international students by:
1) Charge domestic students more tuition
2) Try to get more deficit financing from provincial governments who have spent the last decades reducing in real terms transfers
3) Cuts to programs and services

I'm not sure why any of those is a good thing. Like sure, it could do that. But isn't it a FANTASTIC thing that we have this great source of income to subsidize costs for us domestically, bringing in a huge amount of foreign money into canada????

Well you initially had a more draconian suggestion, then you slightly relaxed it to this idea where immigrants come and can't work during or after their degree, have to leave right away. That relaxation in your position is just about as bad as the former one. We're still in the situation where but for immigration we would have steep population decline, and perhaps the best source of people to immigrant would be people capable of earning a Canadian degree and then going on and being economically productive in a high skill job that earns them a PR.

But perhaps more importantly, making life as shitty as possible for international students is a terrible way to attract the "best and brightest" - they can't even work at timmies to earn enough money for basic food. They'll take those huge tuition dollars to other countries, and use their training to do high skill jobs in those other countries. I get it that you think this is fantastic. But it really isn't.

Maybe we cut waste and salaries . I was curious how much a professor at UBC makes and it's $200,000

LOL!!are you really trying to compare a carbon tax burden to an increase in wages to attract better employees and give incentive and encouragement for people to work and actually be better? It is strange that you believe companies should be taxed more but companies competing for employees and not relying on mass immigration/cheap labour is wrong.

A competitive advantage to what? 60% and growing of the biotech industry is in the USA.

No, your argument that we need cheap labour to stay competitive is pretty ridiculous.

Currently there is no incentive for Canadians to work harder. Negative wage growth, over taxation, increased cost of living. Canadian companies traded wage growth for more PTO days and hybrid work from home work weeks.

Why would cutting salaries be good? UBC is a top 3 institution in Canada, that does a lot of world-class cutting edge research and teaching. It depends field to field, but often you make far less money as a top researcher in your field than you would going into the private sector. If you are in the business of slashing the salaries of professors this is probably about the best thing you can imagine doing to torpedo your university into the ground. The best and brightest professors will just go elsewhere where people aren't so completely shortsighted.

By the way, you might not know this: a "professor" is some deep into their career. The conventional route is that you do your BSc (no money), Masters and PhD (tiny pittance), 1 or 2 or 3 postdocs ( making far less than anyone in industry), then if you get a tenured professorship its 6/7 years at assistance professor, then the same as associate professor and finally you get to full professor. So ya people can make 200k at a full professor at top universities. So ya if you do 20 years of year over year merit raises you can get there. But this is really not the bad thing you think it is.

LMAO this is just hilariously stupid. Maybe you can be mad at unions, but if you are lazy in your career you're destined for less raises and promotions and all the other things that incentivize people to make more money and enrich their lives. Yikes.

Ah so you CAN understand that increasing costs puts negative pressure on companies. You just can't seem to understand it in the context of labour costs. Weird.

LMAO absolute vs relative fail again. I just explained this. Lower labour costs is a competitive advantage for Canada in biotech. If you are deciding whether to put your startup in Vancouver or Montreal vs Boston or San Francisco, one of the "pros" for Canada is lower labour costs. It isn't the only pro. There are also lots of cons. These are relative advantages. You can't negate this by saying that the US is much much bigger - everyone knows this!

Close, I said that cheaper labour is a competitive advantage. It objectively is. This is a descriptive claim, not a normative one. But that doesn't mean you can slippery slope down to slavery by guy!

Is there no tipping in Canada?

oh we tip like 20%

Wow some of the highlights from the NDP convention were they picked a total nut case as their leader
Everyone announces their pronouns
Young folks in masks
Race cards
Misgendering the speaker who is non binary
Oh missed one Gender Equity Card