You’re monomaniacally stuck on blaming immigrants. Every problem in this country you bring back to immigration. Immigrants to blame for unemployment, to blame for housing, to blame for healthcare. Every other thread I’ve interacted with you, same shit.

You correctly blame the neoliberals for fucking us over. You correctly identify conservative zoning policies as a cause. But then you never dare look upstream. Never actually challenge the economic basis that created these problems. You accept that economic basis, and always you still go back to blaming immigrants. This “cart before the horse” analogy is precisely telling of the kind of nativist politics you’re peddling. Ever look downstream, never upstream.

You claim to be speaking for the poor Canadians, but that’s bullshit. You don’t really care, not where it matters. Because in your brain if the bad immigrants go away, then we’ll go to the good old days, right? When poor Canadians supposedly did not have to compete with bad immigrants for scraps. See your problem is the competing part, not the scraps part.

So while you do go some way towards identifying the problem, you just don’t have the courage to name its source. You just fixate on immigrants. So all you do is either carry water for the Maple MAGA or maybe you’re one of them.

What a problematic framing you got there.

On a discussion about wait times, how does “low skilled” matter? It looks more like a racist/classist dog whistle to me. But since you went there… the increased immigration to Canada in the last decade was not “low skilled”, it included people of all sorts of skill levels, including for example the many many many people that came to Canada on study permits and who are by definition not “low skill” and are by definition in an up-skill trajectory. Among the new arrivals many were in healthcare providing professions. I personally know of an Italian doctor who left after a year and of a Tunisian nurse who drives a cab. That our archaic credentials recognition system is unable to put them to work is not their fault. The solution is not “less migration” but “faster integration” from the airport to scrubs.

Not to mention of course that many of the new student arrivals would love to go into the healthcare professions, if given the chance. But our system actively discourages people from going to med school for example, with elitist fees and with non recognition of credentials from other countries. If we wanted we could have translated a part of the “mass migration” to a “mass training of doctors and nurses”.

Your question is also disingenuous. Whether “mass immigration” had an effect and whether it had the decisive effect matters, especially if the real question that matters is what do we do to fix waiting times (and not the ick that “masses of unskilled brown people and their grandmothers” seem to be giving you). Because then we get into real question of what among the causes of long waiting times we can address with what policy levers. Chronic underfunding and underinvestment, chronic underpayment, overwork and burnout of workers, a pay-to-play education system that excludes people from the medical profession, an archaic credentials recognition system that wastes the abilities of immigrants, union busting and back to work legislation, a badly designed primary and preventive care system. But those are boring things that don’t have an easy scapegoat like “immigrants bad”.

And we are also ignoring the elephant in the room here that is … the COVID-19 pandemic, that either killed a bunch of healthcare workers outright, or gave them long term disabilities, or burned them out when the Poilievrite crowd turned on them because of vaccine misinformation. The people that complain about immigrants the loudest are the same people who were yelling at doctors and nurses outside hospitals just a few short years ago. Oh we have not forgotten what the Right did to healthcare workers.

Speaking of COVID-19 and yelling at people. The most iconic pandemic era right wing movement was the “truckers” convoy. On the one hand, the majority of truckers were South Asian immigrants and were vaccinated. On the other hand, the loud obnoxious idiots in Ottawa who were also screaming about white genocide and mass migration were a small minority of mostly white truckers. What a perfect case study of who treats healthcare responsibly. The vaccinated immigrants who just wanted to do their jobs or the unvaccinated xenophobic diagonalists chilling under police protection in inflatable hot tubs who wanted to copy MAGA and overthrow the newly elected Trudeau government to stop being “replaced” by immigrants.

…

The problem with thought stopping bullshit bullets is that they are tweet sized but debunking them takes up time and effort.

AIPAC is in the US.

Fun fact, the materials needed for an renewables-electric based economy are not single use consumable, the way hydrocarbons are. So if anything, the best use of our current petro-economy is to …build the renewables-electric based infrastructure. Not to mention that “Canada holds some of the largest known resources of rare earths globally”. Maybe if instead of subsidizing oil and gas or spending ridiculous amounts of money on becoming an arms exporter, we funded research and development in renewables technologies we could actually develop home grown technologies of scale?

Maybe because the current crisis didn’t happen overnight? We are witnessing the culmination of decades of neoliberal underfunding and enshittification and of smothering the healthcare worker education pipeline, including putting unreasonable barriers to the recognition of foreign trained healthcare professionals?

Our healthcare system was already going to shit during Harper.

Olivia Chow has just announced Toronto will do it. And also we have a whole shadow system of thousands of food banks that are currently under immense strain. It is really not that far fetched.

Blablabla but China blablablabla

So long as unions are unironically woke.

Fuck yea.

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This is the first time in a long time that I have been truly inspired by the position expressed on so many points I care about.

That’s exactly what Lewis represents for so many of us. The ideas of common sense unapologetic democratic socialism is the Canadian mainstream. We have been holding out noses for so long it’s surprising to remember what clean air smells like.

I think Tenille shone very brightly throughout the race. She’s definitely a rising star in the NDP for all the right reasons. I’m so glad she and Avi were sitting together and she was the first on the stage with him.

Let’s goooo

Healthcare is a provincial responsibility.

It denies that right to thousands of people who already legally made a claim. Their human right to seek asylum is being denied.

How would you like it if you had taken all the legal steps to apply for asylum and then a government comes and retroactively decided that, “no, your application never even happened, fuck you”?

And then, let’s be clear. Even if 80% (a percentage I pulled out of my ass to look “high”, it could well be much less than that) of the 19,000 applications that are likely to be impacted were going to be rejected anyway, that means that 20% of them are legitimate cases. That would be 3800 people who are genuine refugees for whom Canada will just trample over their legitimate right to asylum. The MS St Louis that Canada famously forbade from unloading Jewish refugees fleeing from the fucking Holocaust had about 900 passengers, about 200 of whom ended up in gas chambers. Those 900 people are a stain in Canada’s history. And now we are just cancelling the applications, without any recourse, of many times over their number. We should have learned the lesson of MS St Louis.

Gee if only there was a way to tell who is seeking asylum for good reasons and who isn’t. Maybe some kind of process where you can apply and then the government can examine the application on its merits and make a decision? Oh wait.

“People” were not blaming immigrants, the right wing propaganda machine was. Immigrants pay taxes, start businesses, innovate and create wealth. The anti-immigration rhetoric risks making Canada a right wing shithole country like the US.

Bullshit. The government is wasting millions on defense, on oil and gas tax exemptions and subsidies, and on a whole host of other wasteful and pointless programs to benefit the capitalist class. Seeking asylum is a fundamental human right under article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If claims have gone up, 10 times, hire and train more staff to handle them. There are communities in the Maritimes with staggering levels of unemployment, and the Trump tarifs are making us shed jobs. So the government could at the same time uphold Canada’s moral standing AND give employment to Canadians.

Shameful. Seeking asylum is a fundamental human right under Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Canada has voted for and signed. This supposed centrist government is literally trampling on the fundamental human rights and on Canada’s own treaty obligations.

Shame shame shame shame on the minority Liberal government for proposing it and for any party that enables them to pass it.