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I don’t have the exact statistics on hand, but from various reports it seems as though there’s a substantial (and increasing) proportion of Canadians retiring and Canadians are having fewer children. Once retirees exit the work force, there will naturally be gaps in the labor force. Who fills those gaps? What’re the economic consequences if those gaps aren’t filled?

Canada’s Express Entry immigration system prioritizes young, healthy, skilled and/or qualified people.

To me it seems Canada needs both to be able to continue to function effectively: immigration and housing (and healthcare, access to education, municipal services, green spaces, etc.)

Healthcare in Canada is another catastrophe in the making at present.

Qualified is a stretch. Seemingly qualified without performance goals nor measurements of kpi would better encapsulate the situation. There are excellent permanent resident that I am in awe of, and there are fraudsters who do nothing when employed and get fired a couple months in a new job, rinse and repeat.

The Canadian government has been targeting increased immigration for the past several years [0]. There has been a lot of bipartisan lobbying in support of this by the Century Initiative [1]. Imo the Canadian immigration system is a pretty streamlined system that the US could take a couple pages from, while also keeping the INS's strong background checking infrastructure. Sadly I know a number of people who abused the system (fake asylum claims, fake documents), but Immigration Canada doesn't seem to take background checks as seriously as the US.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-14/trudeau-p...

[1] - https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/

But if the population growth is a problem, why?

In Canada immigrants vote for the Liberal party who are currently in power. It doesn't take long before many of those immigrants forget their past and vote against their best interest for the Conservative party.

The Libaral party (which is actually the moderate of the three parties) pushes for immigration.

Immigrants are a source of cheap labour to be exploited. There is a real shortage of jobs here that pay a living wage.

Immigration raising the population is good for the housing investors who want to see prices continue to climb. Many of our politicians are either real estate investors or have ties to real estate investors.

Canada is a huge country but most people live along the southern border. Services and infrastructure even a few hundred kilometers north are bare to non-existent. Much of the land in Ontario, for instance, is flood plane, conservation controlled, native land or greenbelt farmland which cannot be divided (until a mega rich development company somehow manages it). This means crowding.

Most people think Canada has no corruption and is stable, well that is not really true. Corruption here is just at a much higher level.

> In Canada immigrants vote for the Liberal party who are currently in power. It doesn't take long before many of those immigrants forget their past and vote against their best interest for the Conservative party

I suspect these folks know what’s in their own best interest, and the problem is instead that you fail to perceive that brown people aren’t all the same and don’t all have the same interests.

Yep! There are a lot of other internal concerns at least among Punjabi Canadians back in BC. One interesting thing I saw though was that Jats tended to lean Liberal or NDP, but Chamars tended to lean Conservative. We have our own internal politics from the insurgency in the 1980s-90s that never got resolved and continue to fester.

> In Canada immigrants vote for the Liberal party who are currently in power. It doesn't take long before many of those immigrants forget their past and vote against their best interest for the Conservative party.

The GP rayiner himself, immigrated from Bangladesh, was liberal and has now forgotten his past to oppose immigration now and vote conservative.

> There is a real shortage of jobs here that pay a living wage

This is a strange sentiment to hear about a country that has among the highest GDP per capita and HDI in the world. What countries would you describe as having an abundance of jobs that pay living wages?

The average median household income is ~$75k the average house in Canada is $700,000

Mostly because despite the massive growth in population and immigration, there isn't the equivalent in housing or jobs. Salaries still suck back in Canada, and if you're a White Collar Canadian citizen, it's better to just work in the Bay Area or Seattle indefinetly on a TN Visa (clearly you can see which part of Canada we used to live). The US can easily absorb the amount of immigration Canada is seeing, but a country that has around 10% of the US's population and a GDP that's around 5-10% of the US can't

> But I wonder if they can in the long term avoid the fate that’s befallen Anglo and French Canadian.

What long term fate? Being displaced?

>If population growth will strain scarce housing resources, why not just cut immigration? It seems like a knob you can turn to make things balance?

Many consider any limit on immigration a human rights abuse. Others who pretend they consider immigration restrictions a human rights abuse want to keep importing cheap labor to drive down wages.

Because Canada is woefully underpopulated and the South Asians basically create a massively disproportionate amount of our wealth. It would be the dumbest fix to the problem considering building new housing is easy.

The South Asian aspect is false. Desi Canadians tend to be blue collar. Chinese Canadians tend to be way more white collar than us.

That doesn’t mesh well with the fact that the average Indo-Canadian family makes $90k, way above the national average.

> The weekly earnings of men in five other designated visible minority categories were not significantly different from those of White men, while the weekly earnings of South Asian men were 2% higher [0]

Also, [1]

[0] - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220126/dq220...

[1] - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210521/cg-b0...

Also, South Asian numbers tend to be slightly higher simply due to our community's bias towards living in cities with a strong community presence.

And coming from my lived experience as a Punjabi North American, our best and brightest ain't coming to Canada - it's a backup option. Go to Sector 17 in Chandigarh or the Jalandhar Bus Depot, and you'll see rows upon rows of IELTS coaching centers and immigration coaches that'll help you find a way to get fudged work documents or high school diplomas for 3-4 Lakh or help get you asylum documents. If you were good enough in Punjab to get into a medical program, accounting program, or engineering program you'd move to Delhi or Chandigarh to work. If you're some loser numbskull who failed high school or didn't get into a half decent college, you take the Kaneda route.

On a completely side note how does an Indian apply for asylum, feels like it would be very hard to prove hardship in India.

There was an ethnoreligious insurgency in Punjab back in the 1980s-90s [0] that also leaked into Canada with the Air India bombings, some journalist assasinations, and the future Premier (Govenor) of British Columbia getting beaten with an iron rod. There is still institutional knowledge about that in Canada, plus Police in India do still do forms of brutality, plus Gurdawaras and Sabhas still play a major role in elections in Canada - piss off the wrong Uncle and an entire Gurdawara may vote for the Conservative Party or the NDP or whoever for city elections, Provincial Parliament, or Parliament instead of you. Add to that if you "donate" to the right MLAs or Activist orgs in Punjab, you can get a referal that said person was an activist who was threatened by Militants or Landlords or Oppositions Parties or Police. A relative of mine did that in the early 2000s even though they had a decent white collar government job in Chandigarh (a very developed city in North India). Even if you get to Canada and your asylum is rejected, you can still sneak over the border and work in one of the various Indian restaurants. Lots of the cooks and servers in Punjabi owned restaurants did that here in California. We have our own social and community structures through Gurdawaras, Mandirs, Masjids, and Clans.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurgency_in_Punjab