Quotulatiousness

November 2, 2024

Maxime Bernier on Canada’s immigration crisis

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This article has been posted at the Telegraph in the UK and mailed out by the PPC here in Canada, so I guess it’s okay to share it here:

Newsflash: Canada is in the process of falling apart.

No, it’s not because Quebec is once again threatening to hold a referendum on separation, although this may happen again in the coming years.

Our country is experiencing a series of crises because of the deliberate policy of mass immigration instigated by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government soon after its election in 2015.

Last year, Canada’s population increased by almost 1.3 million people, or 3.2 per cent. This was the fastest annual population growth rate since the post-war years. The difference however is that this was not caused by a baby boom, since 97 per cent of the growth was due to international migration, mostly from Asia and Africa.

This includes not only immigrants per se – or “permanent residents” – but also so-called temporary foreign workers, foreign students, and asylum seekers. Although supposed to be temporary, the last categories have in fact become pathways to seek permanent residency.

Because of this, housing in Canada has now become completely unaffordable. Young couples who want to have children just cannot afford to buy a home with a nice backyard where they can raise them any more, with the result that our birth rate has dropped dramatically.

Our hospitals, social services, and infrastructures are being overburdened by this massive demographic tsunami.

Immigration is often justified by its supposed positive impact on the economy. But productivity and wages have been stagnant for a decade in Canada, as cheap immigrant labour is favoured by employers over capital investment and automation.

Canadian politics has been mired for months in scandals over foreign interference, in particular China and India. India has been the largest source of immigrants to Canada for several years. Last week, Canada and India expelled diplomats over allegations by the Trudeau government that Indian diplomats have been involved in attacks against Khalistani militants in our country, including the murder last year of one that India considers a terrorist.

Because of mass immigration, Canadian politics is more and more focused not on actual Canadian issues, but on ethnic, religious, and foreign issues and wars, with establishment politicians spending an extraordinary amount of time courting the votes of minority ethnic groups in suburban marginal ridings.

The third most important national party, the New Democratic Party that has kept the Trudeau minority government in power, is headed by Jagmeet Singh. A Sikh by background, he initially declined to condemn Talwinder Singh Parmar, the mastermind responsible for the 1985 bombing of an Air India plane in which hundreds of Canadians were killed. However Singh did change his stance when a Canadian inquiry concluded that Parmar was definitely behind the outrage.

For his part, the leader of the Conservative Party and very likely our next prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, is known for donning national or religious dress as he panders to members of various communities.

In 2018, as a then Conservative Member of Parliament, I posted a series of tweets that denounced what I called Trudeau’s “cult of diversity” which, I contended, would lead to the Balkanisation of Canadian society, and potentially to violence.

Almost daily scenes of Muslims attacking Jewish institutions, Sikhs burning the Indian flag, and Ethiopian factions fighting each other in the streets of our cities, have proven me right.

Publicly attacking these woke dogmas wasn’t allowed at the time in Canada though, and it provoked a huge outcry. Even my leader and colleagues in the Conservative Party denounced me, which led me to resign and launch a populist right-wing party which is broadly the Canadian equivalent of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

If you believe that more diversity is always good and always enriches your society, then it’s logical and inevitable that you will end up importing lots of people with incompatible values and attitudes from around the world, including religious fanatics and even terrorists, who can’t possibly integrate in a country with a European, secular Christian heritage.

That’s what we’ve been doing for years, and that’s why everything that historically made Canada what it was is rapidly being destroyed. I know there has been a similar trend in the UK and other European countries, but Canada went way further down this road.

Canada’s demise started when what was already a very diverse country (with Indigenous, French and British founding peoples, and many different regional cultures) fell for this radical version of multiculturalism instead of tempering it with a focus on shared values and attitudes, pride in our history, and in the achievements of Western civilisation.

Now, not only are our democratic institutions, our economy, and our social peace and cohesion, falling apart, but so are our very identity and reason to exist as a country.

All these trends are so overwhelming that, unable to deny the reality any more, the Trudeau government finally announced last week that they would be gradually lowering their immigration targets in the coming years instead of continuing to increase them.

Although this is a massive U-turn for this government, it is far from being a sufficient reduction, and a lot more will need to be done to repair the damage. Otherwise, I don’t believe Canada will survive the 21st century.

I’m only buying tools HERE

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 1 Nov 2024

https://tooltrader.net

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The mirage of Trudeau’s mediagenic gun control efforts

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

To hear the Prime Minister talk about his gun control strategy, it’s been a stunning success. Many police chiefs’ responses thoroughly denounce this as, at best, self-serving spin:

As police unions pillory federal gun bans for doing nothing to address skyrocketing gun crime, an Ontario police department revealed this week that virtually all its crime guns are now illegal imports from the United States.

“Approximately 90 per cent of (the) firearms that we seize are directly traced back to the U.S. And I can say in reality the remaining 10 per cent are likely also from the U.S.,” Peel Regional Police Chief Nishan Duraiappah said at a Monday press conference. The 10 per cent referred to guns that have been modified or had their serial numbers removed, making them harder to trace.

Duraiappah was announcing the results of Project Sledgehammer, the breakup of a gun smuggling ring that included the seizure of a shipment of so-called “giggle switches” — black market devices that can turn a regular handgun into an automatic machine pistol.

But during the press conference, police revealed that both gun crime — and the number of illegal guns in the community — is unlike anything they’ve ever seen.

The Peel Regional Police cover an area immediately to the west of Toronto that includes Mississauga and Brampton. Duraiappah said that only 10 years ago, if a criminal in the Peel Region wanted an illegal gun, “it was doable, but it required a lot of work.”

Now, Peel Police are seizing an illegal gun about once every 30 hours — an 87 per cent increase over the year prior. Illegal guns are now so ubiquitous that they often show up in unrelated investigations, such as an impaired driver having one in his glove compartment.

“The availability of firearms has just saturated the community,” said Duraiappah.

This has all occurred in tandem with a nationwide spike in gun crime, including fatal shootings.

Earlier this year, Statistics Canada published 2022 data showing that “firearm-related violent crime” was at the highest rate recorded since they started tracking it in 2009.

The Short SA.4 Sperrin; Britain’s Back-Up, Back-up Nuclear Bomber

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Ed Nash’s Military Matters
Published Jul 9, 2024

No, I have no idea how you pronounce “Gyron”.

(more…)

QotD: UBI discourages low-income workers

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Not only does it have a high cost, UBI drains the labour force by discouraging work and boosting leisure time, says one big-picture study

Earlier this month, a cross-border team of North American economists published the results of a landmark study, probably the best and most careful yet done, of how low-income workers respond to an unconditional guaranteed income. Not so long ago this would have been a plus-sized news item in narcissistic Canada, for the lead author of the study is a rising economics star at the University of Toronto, Eva Vivalt. The economists, working through non-profit groups, recruited 3,000 people below a certain income cutoff in the suburbs of Dallas and Chicago. A thousand of these, chosen at random, were given a thousand dollars a month for three years. The rest were assigned to a control group that got just $50 a month, plus small extra amounts to encourage them to stay with the study and fill in questionnaires.

That randomization is an important source of credibility, and the study has several other impressive methodological bona fides. If you have an envelope to scribble on the back of, you can see that the payments alone were beyond the wildest dreams of most social science: most of the money was provided by the AI billionaire Sam Altman. But the study also had help from state governments, who agreed to forgo welfare clawbacks from the participants to make sure the observed effects weren’t obscured by local circumstances. Participant households were also screened carefully to make sure nobody in them was already receiving disability insurance. (Free money doesn’t discourage work among people who can’t work — or who absolutely won’t.) And the study combined questionnaire data with both smartphone tracking and state administrative records, yielding an unusually strong ability to answer difficult behavioural questions.

The big picture shows that the free cash — a “universal basic income” (UBI) for a small group of individuals — discouraged paying work, even though everybody in the study was starting out poor. Labour market participation among the recipients fell by two percentage points, even though the study period was limited to three years, and the earned incomes of those getting the cheques declined by $1,500 a year on average. There is no indication that the cash recipients used their augmented bargaining power to find better jobs, and no indication of “significant effects on investments in human capital”, i.e., training and education. The largest change in time use in the experiment group was — wait for it! — “time spent on leisure”.

Colby Cosh, “Universal basic income is a recipe for fiscal suicide (for so many reasons)”, National Post, 2024-07-30.

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