r/CanadianVisaReform

One side treats almost any criticism of immigration levels as “racism.” The other directs anger at individual newcomers who had no role in designing the system, and legitimate economic grievances get turned into hostility toward ethnic groups.

Both end up looking in the wrong direction.

The real decisions were made by governments and employers.

For decades, we have been dismantling the conditions that made a stable life possible for ordinary Canadians: secure work, affordable housing, decent purchasing power, bargaining power, and the reasonable expectation that if you worked hard you could build a home and raise a family.

Then we act surprised when birth rates collapse.
Instead of asking why younger Canadians increasingly cannot afford the basic milestones previous generations took for granted, we are told that declining birth rates have created a “labour shortage,” and that the answer is to keep expanding the labour supply.

That gets cause and effect backwards.

A labour shortage is supposed to be uncomfortable for employers. That is the point. If workers are scarce, businesses have to compete for them. They have to raise wages, improve working conditions, train people they would otherwise overlook, invest in productivity, or automate work nobody wants to do.

We have increasingly allowed employers to avoid that adjustment.

Canada built a system that gives businesses access to a large pool of temporary and permanent labour, including workers who can be unusually vulnerable because their ability to work and remain in the country may be tied, directly or indirectly, to their employer.

The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery has warned about exactly this problem in Canada’s temporary foreign worker system.

That should have been a national scandal.

Instead, we keep treating access to more labour as the default answer whenever employers say they cannot find workers at the wages and conditions they are offering.

The result is a system where employers are protected from the consequences of labour scarcity while workers absorb the consequences.

Housing gets harder to afford. Wages buy less. Infrastructure falls behind. Younger people delay families or give up on them altogether.

Then those consequences are used to justify continuing the same model.

Canadians cannot afford to form families. Birth rates fall. The population ages. And suddenly the political answer is that we have no choice but to import more labour.

That is not some immutable law of nature. It is a political response to conditions that policy helped create.

And there is another consequence that people do not want to talk about.

When people are under sustained material pressure and feel completely powerless to change the institutions responsible for it, their anger does not always remain rational or well directed.

It gets simplified.

A newcomer becomes the visible symbol of an immigration policy they did not write. An SEA guy walking down the street becomes a stand-in for Ottawa, employers, landlords, labour-market policy, and everything else someone feels they have lost control over.

That is how economic conflict becomes ethnic conflict.

Pointing that out is not excusing racism. Someone screaming racial abuse at a stranger is still responsible for what they are doing.

But simply lecturing people about tolerance while refusing to confront the material conditions underneath that hostility is not enough.

At some point it becomes its own form of structural violence: preserve the system that is hurting people, refuse to discuss why they are angry, and then moralize the ugly conflict that follows.

The migrant worker being exploited and the Canadian worker watching their bargaining power and standard of living deteriorate are not natural enemies.

For the most part, they are being squeezed by the same arrangement.

That is why immigration reform should be both pro-worker and anti-exploitation.

Reduce immigration to levels that housing, infrastructure, and labour markets can actually absorb.

End employment structures that make migrant workers vulnerable to coercion.

Aggressively prosecute LMIA fraud, wage theft, and worker abuse.

Make employers compete for workers instead of continually giving them access to a larger labour pool.

Invest in Canadian workers, productivity, training, housing, and the conditions that make it possible to build a family and a stable life here.

And stop presenting the destruction of those conditions as an unavoidable demographic crisis that ordinary Canadians are expected to solve by accepting permanently higher population growth.

The people fighting over the scraps did not design the system.

Literally every big chain like walmart, tim hortons, mcdonalds, a and w, shoppers drug mart. Its all temporary foreign workers or international students. like literally 99%. I walked through the Walmart in deerfoot meadows yesterday and there were homeless Canadians, People passing out on fentanyl and nodding off in the isles. and the work force was 100% foreign workers. Canadian families everywhere look like they haven't purchased new clothes or been properly eating in years. the system is completely broken, these corporations need to pay for what they are doing and there needs to be a change immediately. The Canadian workforce is being replaced and you see it in real time its so disturbing.

Saskatchewan companies charging foreign workers to work in their establishment? Say it ain't so.

So the tickets to Canadian citizenship are:

1. Pay $40,000 to a strip-mall college, work full-time in a low-wage job, and earn a PGWP to work in a low-wage job.  Stay until you have PR.

Or...

2. Pay $40,000 to a restaurant for an LMIA job, make $38/hr and pay the boss back $20/hr in cash effectively making it a low wage job.  Stay until you have PR.

Since the PGWP have been drying up, go to option #2.

(Note: Some are even doing #1 AND followed by #2 after #1 doesn't work out.)

Only 10 employers in Prince Edward Island have been found non-compliant with the temporary foreign worker program, according to federal data. Experts this number reflects only part of the problem, as they frequently hear from workers about ongoing exploitation. Temporary foreign workers in Canada are often vulnerable due to closed work permits that limit their ability to leave abusive or unfair workplaces, with issues such as illegal recruitment fees and poor conditions persisting despite oversight.

Truly shocking to see how Trudeau knew full well ALL the problems of the program way back in 2014. This is as close as you can get to an out-right confession, he must have known the likelihood of disaster with the COVID era changes to the program.

Link to archive: https://archive.is/tUvDV

Highlights:
"it drives down wages and displaces Canadian workers."

"Most concerning, the program has grown dramatically in regions facing high unemployment"

"Liberals proposed a motion to conduct a full Parliamentary investigation into the program and propose solutions to remedy instances of abuse a year ago"

"Abuse is not rare. It is far too common, and it must end immediately."

"I believe it is wrong for Canada to follow the path of countries who exploit large numbers of guest workers, who have no realistic prospect of citizenship. It is bad for our economy in that it depresses wages for all Canadians, but it’s even worse for our country."

Canada.ca

TLDR: What can we do to bring back speech and increase moderation? I ask if the purpose of the sub has changed because it used to be a very open space and now it seems be be neutered in a sense.

When you go to create a post or comment, if you decide to follow all 12 rules of this sub it is extremely difficult to even have a discussion.

The amount of flagged or banned words listed seems to be directly conflicting with our largest talking points.