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?
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.
Being low skilled matters because they aren’t doctors or nurses, and tend to be fast food workers or uber drivers. Whether they were doctors in their own country is irrelevant, as this is a problem with the mass immigration policy regardless.
They also tend to require more government support than the taxes they contribute since Canada has a highly progressive tax policy. So we had capital shallowing, wages were depressed via diminished wage pressure, and now we have a failing social safety net and failing food bank system.
In April 2022, the federal government announced
changes to the TFWP that would ease hiring caps for low-wage workers, remove hiring
restrictions based on regional unemployment and extend work permits (Employment and
Social Development Canada, 2022). Additional measures were announced later in in 2022,
including a possible 18-month extension for post-graduate workers whose permit did or
would expire between September 2021 and December 2022 (Immigration, Refugees and
Citizenship Canada, 2022).
Calling anyone who disagrees with answering the Tim Horton’s lobbyists calls for cheap labor a racist is how we got here, the neo-liberals have been weaponizing language. So sure the housing shortage is caused by regressive and sprawled zoning laws, high developer taxes, greenbelt, etc, but in the end immigration should be tied to housing completions, and you’re a fool who hates poor Canadians if you disagree.
Our healthcare system was already going to shit during Harper.
Well I go by wait times generally. They were reasonable during Harper.
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?
Mass low skilled immigration really didn’t affect wait times you think?
Or insane things like this:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/thousands-of-canadians-to-start-receiving-invitations-to-apply-to-sponsor-parents-and-grandparents/
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.
Being low skilled matters because they aren’t doctors or nurses, and tend to be fast food workers or uber drivers. Whether they were doctors in their own country is irrelevant, as this is a problem with the mass immigration policy regardless.
They also tend to require more government support than the taxes they contribute since Canada has a highly progressive tax policy. So we had capital shallowing, wages were depressed via diminished wage pressure, and now we have a failing social safety net and failing food bank system.
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/sdp2025-8.pdf
Calling anyone who disagrees with answering the Tim Horton’s lobbyists calls for cheap labor a racist is how we got here, the neo-liberals have been weaponizing language. So sure the housing shortage is caused by regressive and sprawled zoning laws, high developer taxes, greenbelt, etc, but in the end immigration should be tied to housing completions, and you’re a fool who hates poor Canadians if you disagree.