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Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

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Re: Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

#5

The world must end reliance on cheap labour or we're always going to have slums next to the factories that make our clothes. Can you have a population of 8 billion humans with something close to a modern lifestyle... we can try I guess

Obligatory Neal Stephenson:

“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery” ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Re: Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

#6
This looks like the result of an abuse of the foreign students visa as work visas, partly due to leftover pandemic era policy. In a typical government response, instead of actually fixing the loophole, they use the blunt weapon of cutting visa quotas, and then make generalized comments against foreign labor.

Re: Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

#7
> He will announce further changes soon to restrict students’ off-campus work hours

He just extended the “temporary” increase to the weekly hours limit 2 months ago…

And expanded it to a larger group of study visa students.

https://www.cicnews.com/2023/12/canada-extending-internation...

He doesn’t even need to start by changing anything, he could have started by doing nothing and let his own department’s exemptions expire.

Re: Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

#8

Easy fix. Simply increase immigration to a million+ people per year thereby driving down domestic wages and now voila we have cheap domestic labour.

A less easy fix, but one that's better for everyone is that we all just stop buying mountains and mountains of absolutely useless plastic and digital crap.

Sure we need lots of human labour to keep the world going round, but dealing with the obscenity of consumerism is where a better world begins.

These are the results [0], a kind of misery and 'poverty' (an 'affluenza') caused by unchecked material indulgence.

Surely we can address this culturally on the demand side?

[0] https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell...

Re: Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

#9
500k -> 1.1M foreign students since end of covid. Truely absurd. I hope this is 5th dimension chess to con Indians on false hope of PR to inject a few years of expensive international tuition to pay for covid response. Doesn't make sense to let them work and possibly send remittances back home (as if cost of living is not high enough) because that's what you get when you start brain draining more than those who can afford to buy citizenship.

Re: Canada Must End Reliance on Cheap Foreign Labor, Minister Says

#10

The world must end reliance on cheap labour or we're always going to have slums next to the factories that make our clothes. Can you have a population of 8 billion humans with something close to a modern lifestyle... we can try I guess

Obligatory Neal Stephenson: “When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zea…

Since AI can do three of those better now, I see a lot of pizza in our future.
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