The "LOLCANADA" thread...again

Are you a vegetarian? If not, do you only eat meat that you hunted?

To be clear, the context of the original quote was not me making any claim at all about hunting. It was just to note the structure of your argument against an imagined opponent pretended they were just drooling idiots who didn't know meat in a grocery store comes from animals was really, really stupid.

The program my son is in has been informed that their graduating class ('27) will be the last one. They've gone from 6 instructors two years to 4 and now as of last week, 2. This was a program that was 100% full every year with a waitlist that was usually 1-2 years long.

His cohort started with 24, 20 of which were internationals. There are 9 left from the original 24. Six are internationals.

Trade/technical schools are getting decimated across Canada in real time. And the government was TOLD that this would be the result of completely turning off the tap. They swung WAY past a middle ground that would have worked and this will be the result.

It's gonna be ugly in about a decade. Really ugly.

Exactly this. We needed a scalpel (mostly at the provincial level) to excise the exploitation that was happening for instance at places like conestoga, and got a hammer instead. There are going to be all sorts of little industries where people would normally get some technical diploma or whatever that is going to find itself in labour shortages in the future.

I don't question this. I don't know enough to question it. I will say though that while Conestoga might be the extreme, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a far more common issue than you think it is, at universities as well.

Perhaps if finding apprenticeships/training wasn't borderline impossible in Canada we wouldn't be facing this issue.

I don't question anything you say, but I reject the notion things will get ugly in about a decade. It's always a decade. It's always act now or the future is ****ed but we continue to borrow from the future without ever repaying it.

Can you give specific examples? I'm curious. Curious what little industries aren't currently investing in the 15% youth unemployment we have. Sounds like there is a large group of future employees to train yet we continue to be told this needs to be fixed with immigrants after a period of importing more immigrants than ever.

I’ve hired over 60 apprentices in the last 3 years for my projects. They’re out there IF you’re willing to move around while you’re young to get the killer experience that allows you to pick and choose the jobs you want to work later.

I say about a decade because of all those courses completely dry up (the new phenomenon) and there’s no influx of new talent, when guys like me start saying things like I’m retiring in the next 3-5 years, there are going to be major gaps across industries that are going to give HR teams nightmares.

They’ll be hiring seniors like me as contractors at exorbitant rates to buy time to go lobby government to put the programs back.

Technical schools were weirdly built on a house of cards that relied on international students to foot a large portion of the bill. Pull that away the way they did and we get what we’re getting and something has to be done to save the programs and the schools.

Stop making stuff up. Everyone knows lest comes from animals, stop pretending you are debating this drooling idiots incapable of figuring out what 4 year olds figure out.

Yet the politicians declare ill build 10,000 new homes having no clue that its tough to find labor.

The audit of Conestoga is really an outlier - this kind of financial profiteering is FAR from the norm and I've never really seen something quite like it. And the rumours were out much before the audit, basically they exploited regulatory loopholes that allowed for this explosion of international students over just a couple years while the ontario govenrment turned a blind eye, and critiques of for example the salary growth of the president were already out there. Again, this is not the kind of thing you regularly see at other public institutions. In contrast any institution I've been firstly all budgets and financials are publicly available (like you can look up my exact salary and travel spending etc for instance if I deanonymized myself) and sort of open grift is just not something I'm regularly seeing. I get that this story vibes with a sort of naive sense you likely maintain about higher education, but it really is much more appropriately considered an outlier than the canary in the coal mine.

The challenge is two things can be true at the same time. We can have both 15% youth unemployment (largely as yet untrained) as well as labour shortages in many industries across healthcare, social assistance, agriculture trades, trades in general, early childhood education, etc etc etc. There are all kinds of positions where a disproportionate portion of the labour ultimately stems from international people doing that labour, often with Canadian certifications and diplomas and full degrees. Indeed, it was under SEVERE labour supply pressures back in 2021/2022 that led to politicians of all stripes clamouring to bring in more people for the labour and the original overcorrections by the Liberals. And you were "right" at least in the directional sense that it was an overcorrection and indeed the Liberals have now significantly tightened again. But you are "wrong" because you overcorrect the far too far, trying to imagine you can just massive shut down this labour supply and somehow port it to low skill domestic youth and fix problems while in reality your policies would make the 2021/2022 labour supply crunch look trivial in comparison.

Something just isn't adding up and I'm not informed enough to figure out what this is. I constantly read articles about how hard it is to get into trades even though there is a labour shortage, combine that with anecdotal evidence(accept it or not) of people completing formal education but can't find apprenticeship and the math just isn't mathing.

You say you hired 60 in 3 years, I obviously believe you, but why does this go against what's being reported? I just don't get it.

I mean isn't this Canada in a nutshell. Everything is built on a house of cards, or actual housing market, the way we solve our issues. It's just import import import and deal with the consequences later.

I lived not too far away from one of the campuses in Kitchener. I know Conestoga is the outlier, I'm not challenging this. It was the outlier in literally everything. Our city and the surrounding areas were flooded with international students.

I won't challenge you on Conestoga being the outlier. I just don't know enough about this but again, would I be surprised if more institutions got audited and more money-mismanaging was exposed? No.

Nurses and teachers are being laid off in Ontario.... Just yesterday Ontario health announced lay-offs are coming. We're laying off Canadian nurses and teachers, while being told we need to import international talent because there are labor shortages. It's just not adding up.

I'm not going to argue the whole overcorrection and what not again. We'll never agree on a solution.

The ugliness is already starting. Clients have had the advantage of not competing for labour since around 2008. It's been a race to the bottom since then for how cheap can things be done. Contracts have been awarded, labor can't be found for rates the contracts were awarded on.

The incentives for apprentices to be trained are gone, most can't afford to take the time off work to go do training and we are about to see a huge gap in a experienced work force/management once more people start retiring.

This seems to be the driving factor behind this so called ''labor shortage''. A labor shortage self reported by the employers who aren't suffering from a lack of skilled workers but suffering from a lack of skilled workers willing to work for **** wages.

Can't find a nurse willing to get abused and puked on for $20/hr? Claim labor shortage.
Can't find an engineer to work for 50k/y while living in Toronto? Claim labor shortage.

It doesn't add up because you are completely wrong about the facts. Canada wide there is a very significant labour shortage in nurses (one of many, many types of healthcare positions).

What is also true is that some hospital systems in Ontario are drastically underfunded under conservative cuts and so some positions get cut reducing care to patients. But that there is a news story about nurses being laid off somewhere in the country doesn't change the general economy wide issue of labour supply shortages in healthcare. This is why the Liberals despite clamping down on a lot of immigration are still aggressively targeting healthcare for immigration.

Anecdotally, I have many friends who are nurses, and boy is it rough out there. It's so hard to hire (and attrition really high in some specialities) that you get stuck in this viscous circle of having to use ridiculous 2x and 3x overtime pay to get people to fill critical shifts because you can't find the labour for a permanent full time position. That's what 22% vacancies look like.

While I"m 100% on board that the provincial governments should increase the wages for nurses to fill those vacancies, an RN is making twice that much, if not more.

100%, it's proven H1B visas in the US were used to surpress wages. Bean counters are making decisions based off excel spreadsheets for the past decade rather than practical ones because cheap labor has been available and it's been a race to the bottom. It's going to get uglier until tax structures around labor vs investments are changed and incentives to train young people comeback.

What facts exactly am I wrong about when I cite that teachers and nurses are being laid off in Ontario?

Of course they are. The solution to everything that never seems to solve anything. Ford mismanages money and ****s hospitals in the process? Solve it by importing the third world willing to work for 60 cents on the dollar.

You are wrong in the implication that there isn't a massive, structural labour shortage among nurses. I just provided a list of facts showing that indeed there are. That a specific hospital lays off somebody doesn't dispute the economy wide labour shortages.

Nurses etc work in unions for a public hospital system. They all make the same wage, substantially higher than you seemed to guess. So no, an international student who trains to be a nurse in Canada makes precisely the same wage as a domestic student, it isn't 60 cents on the dollar. They do pay vastly more tuition though.

There are definitely positions at the lower rungs of the health care system who do relatively low skill undesirable work for low pay, such as in long term care. These people are indeed often disproportionally international as it is hard to attract domestic labour to these kinds of positions - they are sort of the equivalent of strawberry pickers and fish canners for healthcare.

Maybe the way to get your way through your reasoning block is this. Imagine everything you want was true. Millions of immigrant leaves. Almost none come in. We are hit with an immediate, and massive labour supply crunch. Under your idea, the government and employers could dramatically increase labour costs so all these undesirable positions are now paid well enough to attract domestic unemployed youth. This means our taxes are way up, and costs to our companies are way up. But what if you are wrong? What if you try this, and despite the obvious costs to the economy it is STILL not the case that domestic unemployed youth magically fill all these positions. What then?

I have said more than once I have no issues with properly vetted and controlled immigration. I've lived in Canada and specifically Ontario for 37 years, I know no better than my life being a melting pot of cultures. Grew up with Indians, Italians and Portuguese kids. Immigration itself has never been the issue. Just like international students for the longest time ever weren't an issue.

The issue is, to flip your question around, we did it your way, and we're worse off for it. All these ''issues'' mass immigration was supposed to address still exist. Our social social infrastructure is years(decades?) behind. Apparently the trades sector is about to collapse. I guess the one thing it did fix was that entry level jobs get to employ 35 year olds who will work for the bare minimum.

Regional caps, favor specific skill sets, desirable demographics, no up and down sponsoring and this is a big one, English proficiency, no one poor or needs to be on social services, favor wealth and bringing it over to Canada, entrepreneurs or job creators favored, zero tolerance for crime, close refugee or asylum seeking loopholes and overhaul the entire LMIA scheme.

Edit: and international students are not allowed to work off-campus.

Any of these demands seem unreasonable to you?

These positions aren't new and were done long before we opened up the boarders, what changed?

Just a simple google search tells you they make $30-$56 an hour $70,000 plus a year. They definitely work harder today than when I was young . The reality its a tough job with the explosion of mental health and opioid addiction. My sister has been in the hospital for over a year now and when I visit a Caucasian worker is a rarity not that they are all immigrants .

As for foreign students there should not be a cap but you should not be allowed to work off campus and if you cease to be enrolled you must leave . As well these students that graduate with the degrees that we need should be heavily recruited to stay

And Uke what is with Surrey BC every time I turn on Global BC someone is getting shot and killed

You didn't answer myquestion, but sure I'll take a stab at yours. This is a bit tricky, because much of your list are more about gradients not binaries, and a lot of stuff we already do. We already screen for English, we already target specific specific skill sets and demographics like working age people (unless you mean racial profiling?), family sponsorships are already fairly restrictive, extensive criminal inadmissibility rules, means testing, etc etc. It feels like what you are really suggesting is NOT an overhaul, but just slightly tweaking or strengthening existing bipartisan supported policies, like make that English test a little harder to pass or whatever, and honestly feels like it doesn't match up to your prior rhetoric. So I don't substantively disagree. If anything, the narrative I've presented which was that some of the rules had been slightly too relaxed (particularly on TFW) during the 2021/2022 labour crunch and agreed they should be tightened which they now have is aligned with what you are saying here. One can have versions of all of these things and still have the massive immigration to maintain population which would drop substantially were it not for immigration.

Why are you telling us this story about how many white people you see at the hospital? Weird.

We didn't open up the boarders (sic), maybe try again with a new question?

Well I am assuming lot of them are immigrants and we need them .
Though CDN healthcare is a total failure

Let's be clear your disgusting peice of **** with your back handed implications

Let's be clear as well I appreciate all the staff no matter their color, gender that treat my sister .

lol at the snowflake. I’m still confused why you shared your personal anecdote about how many white people you saw. Like just….why? It’s so ****ing weird.