An open society, Canada’s best response to immigration • Hacker News Board

Re: An open society, Canada’s best response to immigration

#61

Post by soperj » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 6:46 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #35

soperj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Victoria BC. Tons of immigrants, most are ESL, no issues. Definitely not one of Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver/Calgary/Edmonton. Where are the issues exactly? Because I've lived in quite a few places here and don't know what you're talking about.

A city (town?) with many ferries a day going between it and Vancouver is not a typical rural Canadian location.

This was all in response to being outside the big 5 being terrible for immigrants, which is clearly wrong.

People go to Vancouver relatively infrequently. It's a hour and 45 minute ferry ride, but then there's basically an hour on each side getting to the ferry plus waiting in line for the ferry(which can be a very long time if it's busy). It's not something people here do regularly. I fly elsewhere more often than I go to Vancouver.

Also lol to town.

Re: An open society, Canada’s best response to immigration

#62

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 5:25 AM UTC

dirtyid wrote: post #31

jacquesm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in one of the major cities?

He said Vancouver below, I guess what you're insinuating that there is less acceptance and occasional vitriol in less diverse regions of Canada? I think even then Canada is broadly more accepting. At least personally, there's many anecdotes of racist incidents among my POC / immigrant friends who studied or worked in major urban centres in other western countries. It seems pretty rare in Canada and even then those in…

I'm not insinuating that, I'm flat out stating it. I've lived in Canada in several places and the amount of overt racism outside of the major cities is shocking.

Re: An open society, Canada’s best response to immigration

#63

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 12:49 PM UTC

cal5k wrote: post #25

jacquesm wrote: post #8

On paper Canada is near perfect. But in practice it is a country that is suffering so much from having to maintain continent size infrastructure on the tax base that would match a very small European country that the only way they are going to solve this long term without reducing the size of their territory or falling apart is to import very large numbers of people and hope to integrate them. So far they are quite s…

That's a popular misconception, but flatly wrong. Canada has the 10th largest GDP in the world. It's larger than Russia's and just shy of Brazil, a country with 209M people vs. 37MM in Canada. The vast majority of the country is within 100km of the US border, and frankly we've massively under-invested in critical infrastructure like high-speed rail. Our telecoms routinely claim that prices are the highest in the worl…

> That's a popular misconception, but flatly wrong. Canada has the 10th largest GDP in the world. It's larger than Russia's and just shy of Brazil, a country with 209M people vs. 37MM in Canada.

https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/

Brazil and Russia are not first world European countries. Germany, France and the UK are and have a very small fraction of Canada's landmass.

> The vast majority of the country is within 100km of the US border, and frankly we've massively under-invested in critical infrastructure like high-speed rail.

My point exactly.

> Our telecoms routinely claim that prices are the highest in the world because of the sparseness of the country, and yet our telecoms are the most profitable in the world. Same for our banks.

That is due to monopolistic tendencies and protectionism in Canada.

> No, Canada's real problem is its lack of self-confidence... we still coddle our banks and telecoms, regulating to protect them against foreign competition while failing to enforce competition laws that would prevent anti-competitive behaviour within the country. We seem to be afraid of competing globally on a level playing field even though this would make us better.

Precisely.

> It's a very frustrating place to be an entrepreneur, particularly if you have anything remotely resembling a libertarian bent.

I think it is frustrating for all Entrepreneurs, which is the major reason most of them move South of the border as soon as they reach a certain size (or are acquired).