The "LOLCANADA" thread...again

Justin acts like Harper would have been the same on immigration. We'd have taken in barely 50000 by now. 4 million people over 9 years is insane. When you consider we were at 36.8 or something when he came in.

is this you trying to argue against immigration? Sounds to me like one more among many industries where there is a labour shortage.

was it? I can’t find this. Last week there was some in court of appeals and government is going to move to the Supreme Court. It was a stepping stone, not the end state. I think you misread the article.

What it should sound like to you, is that Canadians need to be trained. Not pretend this is yet another industry that is suffering from a labor shortage and we need to bring in immigrants to fill these spots.

Can you explain to me, as a professor in STEM, what it is about international students that you can't seem to teach Canadian born students?

I read the same article btw and a few things stood out.

Our policies are meant to serve Canadian interest. Not foreigners seeking to use our education system as a path of least resistance into Canada.

Sounds like Canada has made some huge mistakes. Perhaps we should focus on addressing and fixing those instead of continuing to make up excuses for why we need more immigrants.

Sounds like just the opposite to me: a surplus of business owners.

I don't really get this suggestion. Yes, international students subsidize the higher education system. But shouldn't we think this is a GOOD thing for domestic students? Like the other options are to increase tuition or increase provincial transfers (which have been declining inflation adjusted over the decades). As in, if we don't use the massive tuition of foreign dollars flowing into Canada, we have to fund it either against domestic students or against taxpayers. The vibe I'm getting for you is that you probably have a bunch of negative things about higher education that make you think it is a "failing system" rather independently of international students, and I'm somewhat suspecting your conflating where the problem really is.

I guess I should amend the above. Your suggestion is to shift the costs not to domestic students or provinces or foreign students, but now to employers? Increasing costs in the economy is going to hurt the economy, precisely the thing you claimed to want to avoid. I'm really not seeing any argument about why it is bad the international students pay lots of tuition and would be better of employers paid it instead.

Damn you guys arguing over an issue like Immigration . We need to be more concerned as is our PM on the fact the Air Canada CEO only expressed his condolences in English

What ever happened to our lone Welfare smoking frenchie that was here

Correct. Companies no longer value loyalty or employees. Decisions are based off spreadsheets and cheap labour. The days of a person starting at entry level and working hard, earning promotions are gone. Now young people don't see that as a career path and think you need a P.eng or MBA if you ever want a good position. That is creating a big gap in the work force and as experienced people retire, young people with little experience and a degree are filling those positions. When it used to be employers saw value in employee retention and paid for strong employees to go get their P.Eng or whatever.

What Shifty describes IS a labour shortage. It isn't pretending to be one, it actually is one. I don't know anything about pipefitting, but I know there are lots of industries in Canada like this where we can't find locally in the domestic market enough people to do it. I'm happy to support training programs. But I'm also happy to bring in skilled labour to fit an economic need and don't see why ya'll are so angsty about it.

Is this a serious question? Both domestic students and international students are, in general, really solid and both can learn the content. I'm generally in favour of an educated workplace full of the best and brightest who are trained and STEM is a nice chunk of the industry. If you barred the doors tomorrow, we would have massive population decline (as is, we are experiencing population decline last year even with the immigration levels you complain about). So I don't think of this as zero sum. I think our economy and society has been one with a big role for immigrants for decades and decades, will continue to be for decades and decades, and that it is particularly great if the people we focus on are those capable of successfully completing degrees in things like STEM as opposed to just low skill temporary workers, refugees, and unskilled family members of PRs.

I don't think of this as zero sum, and much more a rising tide floats all boats. We should want highly educated international students who are able to successfully complete degrees and enter high skill jobs that provide economic value for us. As a professor, I try to make sure that I provide pathways for success so that our international students can succeed because that helps them but it also helps us. I'll give an explicit example in my context. In first year courses, the curriculum is often based off the local BC curriculum. So if you come from somewhere else, those students often have a different curriculum and those have a mix of things where they are ahead of a typical grade 12 BC graduate and behind a typical grade 12 BC graduate. So I make support materials available to help people catch up in areas where they might be behind so they can find success in those courses. That is explicitly serving the interests of international students. But I don't think that is at all in tension of serving Canadian interest - no, I think that is a part of my job to provide a high quality education environment.

No, employers have to up their game, increase wages and make a better effort to attract skilled labour. In certain parts of the US Electricians are making 500-700k/year working on data centers. The highest a skilled tradesman would make in Canada as an employee is 150-200k if they were willing to be away 8-10 months of the year.

Right, or in other words, a labour shortage.

You might be right that the solution to the labour shortage is the wages need to increase if it isn't easy to attract talent. I'm certainly not against that! And if you're right that 200k is an upper ceiling that is a pretty damned low upper ceiling for an industry so I can see why young kids wouldn't want to go into that field. But it is silly to disagree with me that it is a labour shortage.

It is a self inflicted labour shortage, for the past 10-15 years employers have hacked and slashed every chance they got. It's a problem employers should be solving by the way the operate their business, not by the government importing cheaper labor like your are suggesting.

If you were to dramatically increase costs to employers (more salary, more paid training, more mentorship of people currently unskilled) that all might be great things, but it is worth noting that this increases costs to the employers. It makes projects less economically viable. If you're right that this can all be fixed with some, uh, cultural change in companies well I'm happy to be mad at greedy companies with you, but right now I care about the Canadian economy being more competitive and shooting off one avenue that can help with that labour shortage today seems a bit silly.

There were naysayers but Carney did it: Canada's military spending officially hits 2% NATO minimum target for the first time in decades.

I think Shifty described a lack of willingness to train local talent and the solution to that is not to continue to importing cheap labor. Which seems to be on par with what Canada has been doing for decades. Ignore its people and solve every issue related to labor shortages with ''import more and more'.

It is a serious question because most of your responses read like an educator who is looking for any reaches possible for a continuation of a system that seems unsustainable. I don't understand this constant need for STEM international students considering the unemployment rates for new graduates. Yes, international students suffer from this too but they're simply not my concern.

How many future doctors and nurses are you teaching?

Not when these highly educated international students take jobs from highly educated domestic students. Which seems to be the case. I'd be fairly upset as a recent Canadian graduate who is now in a **** job market competing with international students for entry level jobs that are becoming increasingly more non-existent. And worse, for entry level jobs that we have PLENTY of Canadian talent for. Which was already a problem 15 years ago.

Profit margins for contractors in the US and Canada are nearly identical: 5–10%.

What about the people in that economy? What about 40 years of stagnant wages?

It's quite honestly bizarre that your response to everything so far has been ''more immigrants''.

I mostly teach future engineers and scientists, doctors and nurses isn't my particular area. But I don't think this really matters. Yes we desperately need more doctors and nurses and this is very politically visible, but an educated STEM workforce broadly speaking is good for the economy.

There wasn't anything unsustainable the existing system. Like sure, when the province budgets around -18% drop and the real number is a 66% drop that creates acute funding problems leading to this transitory cuts in many universities and colleges that sounds like an unnecessary own goal. But that doesn't mean the system was unsustainable. We can easily translate to a system with higher tuition, or more tax payer funded transfers, or just less programs and availability for domestic services. Maybe doing it in one year is bad, but it can "sustainably" transition to that. But the system where international students overwhelmingly and disproportionality subsidize higher education has been a stable and sustainable thing for ages.

Maybe a better way to think of it is that higher education is an "export". It's not like where people pay Canada money and get lumber. It's people pay Canada and export education. So what we are really doing is kneecapping a big export industry for us.

I think you have the pressure exactly backwards. The majority of international students leave Canada after they graduate, about half do so almost immediately with the first year. Among that group that stay, they often find themselves outcompeted by domestic students all else being equal. And when you put it together, our economy still clamours for high skill labour.

Basically you have two choices:
1) Remove all immigration which will lead to precipitous population decline. Maybe that's what you want.
2) If you DO have immigration, then it makes sense to focus on the "best and brightest", and I would absolutely put people who are capable of earning a Canadian degree and working in a high skill Canadian job as exactly the type of people we want.

Contractors profits are a flow down by clients. Clients set the market for wages.

I think if you tried this you would have several things happen all at once:
1) Tuition spikes for domestic students and programs are cut. The government MIGHT swoop in with extra deficit funded transfers, but probably not. So you end up with more expensive education and so less educated domestic students and zero international students entering the labour force.
2) You've now lost a huge prior workforce of educated high skilled professionals. This dramatically increases labour supply issues across the economy, dramatically increases costs to companies to hire the remaining smaller labour pool.
3) Many companies are unable to fullfill positions leading to economic decline. Much of the economic value that immigrants employed in high skill areas did is now gone, simply unable to be replaced by domestic population alone.
4) Dramatic population collapse. This will start immediately, but because you are removing young people specifically, the effect of removing these people will be particularly salient for lowered fertility into the future. This reduces demand for the canadian economy.
5) Global competitiveness of Canadian companies tanks compared to peer countries that retain the ability to train high skilled international students.

I think the core problem with your position is the lack of moderation. I think there are valid criticisms of what happened with international students post pandemic, specifically a sharp rise in international students attending low quality, for profit, international student facing "diploma mill" type colleges. While I think the response has been an overreaction that without much thought ended up harming comprehensive and medical/doctoral institutions that were not at all part of this problem, I think there is a valid reason to turn down the dial in a targeted way.

My objection to you is that your arguments are essentially about turning the dial completely off. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. No, it's worse. You're cutting off your face to spite your nose.

theres no labor shortage. there's a wage and training shortage. if only you could train people to do jobs and pay them well. I dont see how that would hurt the economy. just corporations profit which your everyday person barely sees anyway. eventually if you stop letting the company's get cheap foreign labor they will have to train local canadians

contractors is a little different but immigrants don't fill these vacancy's anyway. They rarely go into this field. a huge reason for the housing crisis is not having enough workers to build them. and the people coming into canada are not helping. if the people coming in from India were actually able to build their own houses it would be a little different. even if we started developing the green belt tomorrow we wouldn't have the skilled workers

It's just directionally wrong. If it is a struggle today to train enough people, you can't just remove all the international students from the labour pool and expect this skilled-labour shortage to magically go away.

It's kind of funny seeing the lefty in the thread have to defend this, but ya'll realize that if you increase labour costs on canadian business they are globally less competitive right?

Just glancing at your employment data and forecasts, you're both right. Looks like you'll have a STEM worker shortage 5-10 years down the road even with the international students sticking around. But at the same time, there's a huge STEM entry-level bottleneck today with a lot of underemployment.