That's how US media would like to portray Canada (socialism bad!), but we're doing just great over here and making pretty decent decisions for ourselves. We don't get everything right at first, and we're way behind on our green transition, but we'll get there in the end.
This new tax complements our CanCon rules [1] which help protect Canadian artists.
As a Canadian, I'm super curious about the recent frequent comments about Canadian policy on HN.
I'm as Trudeau-fatigued and concerned about productivity as the next person... but I think high immigration is something most folks in Canada see as good, and couldn't guess what the connection between housing and CanCon / streaming regulation is.
I'm really curious to understand if the folks commenting so stridently are Canadian and hold some passionate views, or are maybe getting a particular info stream about Canada.
> I think high immigration is something most folks in Canada see as good ...
That's what many Canadians will express in public, just to keep their lives easier by avoiding false accusations of "racism"/"bigotry"/"xenophobia", by avoiding potential job loss or employment-related sanctions, by avoiding other forms of harassment, and so forth.
In private, and especially with people they trust not to attack them, the sentiment is often very different. They're well aware of the various negative impacts that immigration is causing, and has long been causing, to Canada and Canadians.
Well; that's certainly not my experience living in a Canadian city... with high housing prices and lots of immigration.
Not seeking to put you on the spot. I imagine there's a lot of variation in how people see things everywhere. But I'd certainly disagree with you. I appreciate the economic and cultural benefits of living in a growing, multicultural country. And I suspect given the number of people flocking to this city I'm not alone.
Has it really been causing? Or is it their perception, fuelled by those who profit from sowing discord?
In my country there is high (and rising) anti-immigration sentiment, despite the fact that immigrants don't commit more crime than natives, and are net contributors to social security.
> but I think high immigration is something most folks in Canada see as good
I think this was absolutely the case right up until every last city/town in Canada started experiencing skyrocketing housing costs in the last few years, and now many cities have absurdly low vacancy rates. Broad consensus (to me) seems to be that we need to at least pause or dramatically lower our targets while we catch up in building.
When there's headlines like "Investors own 77 per cent of new condos in Waterloo region" going around, there's something deeply wrong and people are going to be pissed about it.
maybe the wrong composition of immigration, but too much? Not if you want to retire some day and need some help from the next generations. Our natural birth rate is not going to do it...
It's time we all pull our heads out of the sand and admit that the lavish elder-welfare programs of 20th century are simply untenable. They were only workable because of a quirk of demographics (the baby boom), but that's over now. It's gone. And it's not coming back.
This fact is clearly inconvenient for progressives, who want nothing more than to go on playing Santa Claus. But the only solution you all have to offer (mass immigration) has the teensy-weensy downside of inevitably leading to the cultural obliteration of the West. It's a ghoulish and unserious option, which is why increasingly vocal majorities oppose it throughout the western world. The more you all push for this insanity against the will of the people, the greater will be the damage and the harsher the inevitable backlash.
State pensions are anything but "lavish". The social security welfare state predates the baby boom you speak of and also exists in countries which never had it. Below replacement rates are a problem, yes, but that can be solved if you work towards not making "having children" be a luxury not affordable for the proles.
On your other topic, let me point you to a certain western country which has always had a torrent of immigration from all around the globe and has not had the cultural downfall and obliteration in fire and flames that you vaticinate: a certain United States.
Nit-picking words is the lowest form of rhetoric. They're unaffordable, as you well know.
> The social security welfare state predates the baby boom you speak of and also exists in countries which never had it.
True and entirely irrelevant.
> Below replacement rates are a problem, yes, but that can be solved if you work towards not making "having children" be a luxury not affordable for the proles.
You people "working towards" your goals is what got us here in the first place. If you all had any way to raise birth rates, it would have happened somewhere by now. But you don't. Getting rid of your "work" is likely the best thing we could possibly do to raise birth rates. Vastly reducing the benefits of Social Security, for example, would make having children much more attractive. If you rely on your kids to take care of you in old age, suddenly you can't afford not to have kids. This is how it worked for all of human history, by the way, until you all started farting with the incentives.
> On your other topic, let me point you to a certain western country which has always had a torrent of immigration from all around the globe and has not had the cultural downfall and obliteration in fire and flames that you vaticinate: a certain United States.
This is an old argument which made sense historically, but has taken a serious beating over the last 20 years. For more than two hundred years, America boasted a unique political culture, born of the frontier, which was proudly individualistic, decentralized, and enterprising. But that culture is being obliterated as a direct result of mass immigration. Polling data show that heritage Americans continue to support the old ways (free markets, limited federal power, low taxes, free speech, gun rights, etc), while recent immigrants and their children are far more likely to eschew the frontier spirit and embrace the nanny state (in other words, they support their old ways, not ours).
This new tax complements our CanCon rules [1] which help protect Canadian artists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content