Meanwhile, the 40 richest Canadians grew their wealth by $95B
Just to put that in perspective, that’s enough to pay around a $1 million dollar annual salary to each of these 84,000 lost jobs, or to pay $100,000 salary and still keep 90% for themselves.
Are they rich enough yet? Or do they still need more?
All for taxing the rich more, but you’re conflating wealth and income here.
Enough is never enough
I dont think its as simple as that, because if you start dishing the money out inflation rises and you erode what you’re taxing. Maybe on the gold standard it worked something like that, but that was a half a century ago now.
Maybe the gold standard had the right idea then, or at least a more right idea than we currently have. When your head has been underwater for half a century, maybe it’s time to accept that the water isn’t really that deep and you’ve been swimming the wrong direction all along. If it takes a complete economic implosion and redesign to realize that billionaires and soon trillionaires are not in fact superior superhumans who deserve all the world’s worship, as painful as that process may be, perhaps it is becoming necessary. And I don’t know how long we’re going to keep going before we all admit that it is necessary, but I think I am ready to admit that it is necessary.
I couldn’t agree more. All these printed money bailouts for every failed asset bubbles erode minimum wages and salaries.
Though a non-hard money is historically a left leaning ideal.
Oh thank goodness. At least they’re okay.
I know. Here I was worried about how the oligarchs may have to tighten their belt like the rest of us.
Maplesaga coming in hot with some morphed form of degenerate racism.
You can always tell people living with no coast.
Tripling immigration, when Canada is raising interest rates to cool the job market, leads to a surplus of workers and inevitable high unemployment. Is the race a factor at all in this equation, would a white immigrant not lead to the exact same surplus of labor?
Fuck you maplesaga
I care about the poor, who have been destroyed financially. Who do you care about, the landleech filling 30 to a basement? Tim Horton’s?
lol Tim Hortons
The head of the LMIA scams.
The government says the measures are necessary in parts of the country where businesses are struggling to find the people they need.
“Canadians must always be first in line for available jobs, but in some rural regions employers are facing persistent labour shortages,” said Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu in a statement included in the news release outlining the measures.
We have people, clearly, as our jobless numbers show. People want to work. The woman quoted in the article feels desperate.
So the only other explanation is that they aren’t offering proper compensation.
It’s exploitation.
deleted by creator
Could be. On the other hand, I agree with the article.
Which part? They’re not stating any opinion, just reporting facts.
What Zahra says. I think she’s right. I could be wrong, I don’t have evidence I can use to support my position.
I do think immigration is the main cause of the unemployment crisis, mass immigration while the Bank of Canada raised interest rates was always going to cause mass unemployment.
During Covid they did stimulus and QE, which caused the 8% inflation. If you see the Phillips curve you’ll see that causes a labor shortage in the short term. This is a natural part of an economy, and wipes out the wealth inequality caused by asset appreciation via bargaining power for wages, if you rememeber the “quiet quitting” phenomenon a few years back.
The Federal government then did mass immigration, 1.4 million a year, tripling immigration over 3 years. They also allowed students to work 40 hours. This decreased labor pressure and lowered wage growth.
The Bank of Canada then raised interest rates to cool the job market. Now we have cooled wages, less need for workers, and an inevitable surplus of workers. All this was also done when we had a preexisting housing shortage, so rents and housing prices dramatically increased as well.
I sorta get what you’re saying but you seriously need to change your angle, and yesterday. It’s not immigration that caused this, it was poor planning. We need immigration for a lot of reasons but governments being incredibly lazy about affordable housing projects, attacking workers’ rights, and allowing foreign companies like US-based energy companies to rat-fuck our environment just to siphon away our assets on the cheap are all way bigger issues making us poor.
The Liberal government is a conservative one, only margainally better than the Conservatives. They even tried to break the Air Canada strike and we are all lucky that those workers held their ground. They are allowing energy companies to rip out our resources without any environmental reviews for five years and they will, as usual, do nothing to punish them when they inevitably do awful, damaging shit in the process. They fired 40,000 people in time where getting a job is a hard enough when al’ they really needed to do was tax wealthy people and corporations. They won’t even let us have fair elections despite their promise from 2015 which they threw out upon learning that they’d probably never win again if we had real choice and they couldn’t bank on scare tactics anymore.
We have lots of empty housing which goes unfilled because it doesn’t help drive prices up if everyone has a place to live and there’s less competition. Weak or non-existent affordable housing programs also allow private developers to take money and land and do nothing truly valuable with it. The same thing works with jobs as companies would rather overwork who they have than risk taking on someone for higher wages and setting that precedent. This is what capitalism is, a society where capital is the goal, not the betterment of the society itself.
You’re mad, and you’ve got a big stick but for the love of god please stop hitting yourself with it.
Citation on the empty homes? Why would they let a home sit empty and lose thousands in rental income. We also have vacant home taxes of 1% Canada wide called the Underused Housing Tax.
Canada is mainly zoned for single family homes, hence the massive number of 1 bedroom condo. Blaming “greedy developer” is a cop out, especially as developer taxes increased thousands of percent, so clearly municipals are also suckling at the teet of the shortage and further fueling prices.
As far as why its not 4% annual population growth thats causing the massive shortages and spike in rents, you’ve not convinced me. What’s the actual rationale as to why tripling immigration wouldn’t lead to this obvious conclusion? Why was Eby screaming at the Feds to slow it down as infrastructure can’t keep up?
Here’s an article about vacant land, and another about vacant homes. Do you know why diamonds are expensive? It’s an artificially inflated market, where the diamonds are held in warehouses and hoarded there, forcing a lower supply. It doesn’t actually cost that much to just hold onto these places, especially since they’re assets which only only ever really go up in value, and 1% is a pathetically low tax compared to the money they get by jacking up the prices of their other properties.
Infrastructure definitely can keep up, but it involves building sensibly, and doing the things we already know work instead of barrelling forward with the same old bad decisions because we’re all scared of change. It means we have to start seeing more cities in Canada being built like Montréal and finally just admit that cities built like Ottawa are inefficient. You yourself just said that that Canada has a lot of single-family homes and yea, especially when it’s just single-use zoning that fucking blows!
We need the immigration, and like I’ve already said it’s god-awful planning and a complete unwillingness to actually take control of the situation that brings any difficulties. You’re asking a lot of questions but you seem to really not want to think about the fact that there are a bunch of people who don’t really have your best interests at heart, and those people are the wealthy and their mouth-breathing sycophants.
Thank you for the link, I do agree we could keep up with growth if zoning wasnt so regressive in Canada. The problem is definitely municipals and perverse incentives to block density.
Of course with a limited amount of new supply, due to density, high developer fees, and slow bureaucracy I do stand by that it was a fact immigration exacerbated the shortage. The government should have dealt with the vacant homes first, or tied it to housing starts in some way.
As far as the wealthy, they benefit from mass immigration, it decreases wages and increases demand. They are begging for it, as Carney literally says all the time.
I’m not going to say that the wealthy don’t benefit from immigration but we can see that the bigger issue is how laissez-faire these centrist and conservative governments(functionally the same for all it really matters) are when it comes to protecting our rights. The minimum wage comstantly dragging behind, shipping our money out of the country(foreign aid and stuff is fine, though), and refusing to tax the wealthy so that the tax burden is on the working class are far bigger issues that can all be address without a need to physically build up stock of things like housing, which we could have a lot more of very quickly if we built more sensibly.
I work in the architectural field and obviously have a fire for good urban planning and can comfortably say that this isn’t an improvement that needs to be measured in decades if we actually tried at all. It would also be a huge boon for jobs, and with better workers’ rights we could see a lot more people willing to do said jobs, too. I’m having a hard time at the moment and one thing keeping me out of looking towards a trade is how poorly those fields are often treated(the pay isn’t as good as it looks, either, fyi).
And going off that point, the wage pressure thing is tricky because it doesn’t matter if their are a trillion people in the country if only ten of them can operate a crane or do surgery. Those ten people would still have the ability to apply immense pressure, right? The immigrants we bring come with a huge variety of skills and often need to take equivalency courses so much of the pressure they apply in their first few years is on manual labour jobs and the like, even if they come with a bunch of other skills.
Everything is highly nuanced, but the one certain thing is that our Liberal/Conservative government see-saw has not been serving us on the simple things like a wealth tax and a real minimum wage increase. Our local governments are also screwing renters and commuters(zoning and transport, namely). We moan about not being able to afford things and then shoot ourselves in both feet when presented with opportunities to actually address those issues directly and man, honestly, I’m getting so tired of it.
Ah you’re the type that wants a government run grocery stores and such. Things are too expensive so we need more government is your view summarized.
Sure bro the supply of workers has nothing to do with demand for labor or the rate of pay. Im sure that as soon as they get a.i. sorted they wont reserve course. You better wake up and start noticing.
It is entirely supply and demand for labor, that was my whole point. We increased supply of workers while interest rate hikes lowered demand by mechanically slowing money supply creation, what am I missing?
Is it that difficult to grasp?! You’re missing the part where the people in charge of this “natural” process have their thumbs on the fucking scale.
Don’t cherry pick economic theory to make this yet another “blame the workers” bullshit story. Supply and demand are economic constants in a microeconomy for theoretical modelling purposes, not a quotable to explain why things are the way they are.
As soon as you start adding in stuff like real people with real, non-economic needs, the model breaks in the real world.
See, for example, the Finnish approach to housing that reflects social needs rather than economic outcome for model that doesn’t end up with us plebs all on the bottom.
So you think you can just dump workers into a country and it has no affect on housing demand or wages?
I was also somehow blaming the workers for being to numerous, is that what you mean? I was intending on blaming the government, as they appear beholden to corporations pushing modern forms of slavery.
So you think you can just dump workers into a country and it has no affect on housing demand or wages?
That’s not what I said. You aren’t following what I and others are saying.
When you say stuff like “it’s entirely supply and demand for labour”, you are replaying talking points of that same government and those same corporate interests, who both use language around housing like it’s something people can just stop wanting by framing it as a commodity.
Our issues aren’t based on population changes one way or another, they exist squarely because we treat housing as a commodity and as a financial vehicle. There is effectively enough housing for everyone, it’s just been placed out of reach for many.
Supply and demand explains the price of lemons in a place that can’t grow lemons. It does not work for housing, which is a hard requirement of social stability, that’s why we can’t treat housing like we treat buying and selling lemons.
Slow down and read what is being said to you, and for your own peace of mind, stop interpreting criticism as a personal attack.
Our issues aren’t based on population changes one way or another, they exist squarely because we treat housing as a commodity and as a financial vehicle. There is effectively enough housing for everyone, it’s just been placed out of reach for many.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/canadas-growing-housing-gap-1972-2022.pdf
Heres a citation with statistics that says that youre wrong, that housing completions greatly lagged population growth. Do you have any proof of your assertion that there is enough housing, and that there is no shortage?
If there was a large supply relative to demand then rents would have been shrinking when population was rising, we have a 1% tax on vacant housing and a low vacancy rate.
So I respectfully disagree with your assertions, based on these statistics.
Nice theory you got there, shame it doesn’t bear out in practice. In normal labour conditions workers have no leverage over employers to demand higher wages because workers have to take any job available in order to avoid homelessness and hunger. Workers demand for jobs is inelastic. Only in labour shortage scenarios workers have leverage to demand higher wages. But even then industry consolidation counteracts that because large corporations not only have price setting market power in the consumer market but also in the labour market. This is why the only consistent way to create similar leverage for worker in the labour market is unionization. Wages have never grown significantly enough to chip away wealth inequality except in the presence of strong and wide unionization. This is the main reason why increased labour productivity decoupled from wage increases since the 70s and 80s, when union busting started picking up around the world.
Rapidly increasing labour supply can make wages worse but that’s not the main driver as there have been periods where wages have both been increasing with significant immigration and also others where wages were stagnant without significant immigration.
Sure I’d say unionization is eroded by mass immigration and capital shallowing, wouldnt you?
No I wouldn’t. I would say unionization is eroded through various union busting strategies as practiced as far back as the 19th century. The incentives to bust unions operate on individual firm level and do not require any other macro level phenomena to explain. Firms bust unions because unions increase wages and higher wages reduce profits.
Canadian government does PLENTY of union busting. Firms and government are completely aligned on this.
Government does everything it can to keep canadian wages low to attract business. Corporations are more likely to
investextract from Canada if the government of Canada undermines fair negotiations and writes back to work legislation every time and stomps all over its citizens’rights.The AC union fought back and ignored back to work orders. They had huge support among Canadians. They were then quietly taken out back and shot by the Canadian government and its arbitration.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aircanada/comments/1r7jj82/arbitration_over_for_flight_attendants/
Perhaps increased job competition can motivate workers to unionise to defend wages and employment. On the other hand, a larger labour supply makes it easier for employers to replace uncooperative or striking workers, weakening bargaining power.
I personally see a large unemployment now as the Phillips curve inverted with high interest rates, and I now clearly see the wage suppression which erodes unions. But we can agree to disagree I guess.
I do think sometimes high skilled workers can increase productivity and increases per capita living standards, but we moved away from that under Trudeau to hide falling GDP, and to quell a wage price spiral that benefited workers and hurt asset holders who benefited from the asset price inflation of covid stimulus and QE. Productivity is what matters here though, which determines whether it helps rather than hurts existing laborers.
This doesn’t seem like a logical argument for today.
Unemployment is either a too many workers or too few jobs issue.
Of course both can happen at the same time and that is to a degree what’s happening here.
The most significant shock to the Canadian economy in the past year is the trade war with the United States. This would be the primary reason in 2025 and 2026.
The immigration from years ago exacerbates the issue but Carney’s government has scaled back significantly in the past year.
Youth unemployment is up to 14.1% because cost of living has caused people to delay retirement and automation tends to snap up entry level jobs first.
I would look at this information and blame US trade policy primarily. Then maybe Trudeau for poor planning though doubt he could have anticipated the Canada US relationship turning sour.
Without immigration, Canada’s population is in a state of involution which is considered fairly incompatible with the idea of a growing economy. Canada and many Western countries are extra fucked because of the population skewing towards elderly.
Carney is slowing immigration likely because he’s anticipating Canada’s economy to stagnate or shrink in the short term. He’s not a miracle worker, the best he can likely do is limit the pain from the US’ betrayal but it’s going to be fairly improbable to create a win from the situation.
Housing is a factor. It’s a bit asinine to invite people over when your housing market is a hot mess but Trudeau did it anyways.
Canada is going to need to bolster its housing situation, healthcare system and other social institutions for the betterment of its people but also to be an attractive destination for immigration or risk losing its standing as a middle power (especially with the US no longer in its corner).
Well we had a large demand for workers when inflation was high, because there was a lot of new money supply created via cheap borrowing and QE. That money floods the economy and leads to shortages in labor. It also leads to rising asset prices as things are bid up, housing and gold are a good example.
But as we raise interest rates employment falls, as money supply is sucked from the economy. Now the employment shortage has reverted to the mean. Saying its automation seems silly when we can see the money supply growth, and its doing exactly what it meant to, you sound like Elon Musk trying to shill an LLM.
The people we brought in were less educated, as per the Trudeau himself, hence its not creating new industries or exports. Which is what countries typically due, attracting high skilled immigrants that efficiently increase exports and productivity, and lead to higher per capita standards of living. Which we had the reverse of this, as per capita GDP fell and Caroline rogers is ringing the alarm bells on productivity:
I’m not sure why you’re looking at Canada in isolation when the tariffs introduced by Trump have been the biggest shock to the Canadian economy in the past year. It seems that you really want to attrubute this to immigration / inviting temporary foreign workers (beyond Canada’s capacity) and, while that is a factor, I think Canada having its bestie (who gobbled up 70% of its exports) stab it in the back is a more logical explanation as to why unemployment has rise recently.
Immigration is going to be crucial to Canada’s growth story especially based on current local population trends. Canadian universities like UofT, McGill, UBC have already signed agreements in countries like India to create centers of excellence/innovation campuses in emerging markets with more favorable demographic skews (ie. more young participants in the workforce vs retirees) and it would be ill thought out of Canada to not offer those that attend these transnational education institutions preferable conditions to immigrate to Canada.
Per capita GDP has been falling for a decade. We had the second to last per capita GDP in the 38 countries of the OECD the last decade. Its been a problem long before tariffs.
Mass immigration into a housing shortage benefits who? Definitely not renters or non-asset holders, so what kind of regressive policy is it?
I’d be fine with it if we built the housing and infrastructure first, and there was a real labor shortage caused by more than just inflation.
100% of your problems could have been solved if we had max cap networth and 100% taxes above that cap.
Ya maybe, if you could stop investment from fleeing Canada; only because it would drastically raise inflation and interest rates, which would make mortgages far more expensive. Of course anyone with a large mortgage would be made poorer.
