DigitalGhost

I think if a country is going to encourage large scale immigration then the least it can do is make sure it's less well off citizens are well provided for.

To be fair though, Canada seems to do better at that than most. The more prosperous Australian cities are pretty much a lost cause at this point and we all know what London is like.

spouse of scouse

I'm interested to see the comparative data you're basing those statements on.

dbd33

Eh? Isn't the point of having immigration increased prosperity? The immigrants are there to fund society, not to drain from it and while misfortune may strike anyone the idea of provision for poor immigrants defeats the point of having immigration in the first place. Certainly we came on the basis that, in hard times, we'd go home. As immigrants we're peripheral to Canadian society, not participants in the sense of having the option to take from it.

scrubbedexpat091

Would be an interesting comparison if anyone has the data, or knows how to compile said data....



This website says 2016 median weekly rent in Sydney is $395 AUD$ since we don't pay weekly in Canada, I just $395*4 to get $1,580 per month which is $1,520 CAD, and that website says the median household weekly income is $2,099 per week. (is everything in Australia done by the week.....)

Sydney median monthly rent = $1,580
Sydney median household income- 2,099 per week

Median household income Vancouver 72,662 per year (2015 seems most recent)

Median 1 bedroom in June 2020 seems just around 2,000 a month.


Just of the cursory look I did, seems median family in Sydney is better off compared to a median family in Vancouver?

DigitalGhost

I think the cost of living in Sydney and Melbourne is higher than in Vancouver although I could be wrong there.

Chinese Investment in Australian Property Market

It's well known that non-resident property investments in London and a few other UK cities is also rife, particularly by Chinese and Russian buyers. In the case of London, this has caused price increases in an already massively overpriced and under resourced market. The only thing the UK government have done to combat this has been to "encourage" the FSA to clamp down on obvious financial fraud.

The most Australia has done has been to add an 8% levy on offshore buyers to prevent them from buying up property in NSW, obviously mainly in Sydney.

By comparison, BC has a 20% tax plus 2% levy on the final value of the buyer is paying no income tax in any province.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china...stralia-2018-6

Obviously none of these measures are a silver bullet though. I think so far only NZ has come close to that.

DigitalGhost

The immigrants aren't to blame. The problem is those who seek to capitalise on them. When you have a large and continuous number of newcomers from overseas, it drives up demand for rental property in the larger cities because that's normally where people will go. If you're a new immigrant and possibly with no local contacts and/or limited English, it makes sense for you to head to somewhere like Toronto or Vancouver first where you're more likely to either meet others from your community or find job openings. This makes short-term lets a lot more expensive.

I've recently been looking at short-term rents in Toronto on AirBnB and there's one guy who is renting out what looks like a fleet of condos downtown but his profile is registered in Dubai. I'm quite sure he's not the only one doing that and you only have to look at the number of crappy basement apartments in Toronto to see the bigger picture. Those exist to either exploit new foreign arrivals or locals who unfortunately can't afford anything better.

dbd33

I know this. I'm an immigrant. As are many of the people exploiting the current wave of immigrants. The reason countries want immigrants is that they start off poor and exploited and then they lie and cheat and bully their children through school so they can buy a flophouse or a string of illegal apartments and become the establishment. They have the drive the locals do not. Making life easy for immigrants means no more kids studying 20 hours a day at the convenience store counter, no more games developers working those 20 hours a day for an effective rate of ten bucks. The whole point of having immigrants is that they're disposable and, of they get sick or injured, they'll go home and not burden the host country.

<glamorous success story alert>

We came here with a pool cue, a pair of skis and the clothes in which we stood. Our child in Canada is shopping for a first house at around $2m. You get from one to other by learning exploitation and using it effectively. From the perspective of the host country that means inspiring the immigrants to move up by making conditions harsh for them but not impossible to escape; agricultural work camps go too far. Society should aim to have new immigrants in damp apartments with bugs for 50% or so of their income. Oh and no coats, the ambition to make enough for a coat in Canada is inspiring.

Most immigrants fail, of course, most who can afford to go home. That may be a personal tragedy for them (or not, maybe they just didn't like it and they were obviously doing well enough to have air fare) but as a matter of policy, that's how it should be,.

DigitalGhost

I'm detecting just a hint of sarcasm there.

I think the advent of sites like AirBnB and HomeAway has made this worse though. You can now manage an entire short-term rental empire from the other side of the world and without even needing a local phone number. Even Craigslist, Kijiji and the like made it difficult to get away with doing things like that. Like with most things in a capitalist society though, for every guy making a huge profit, there's at least one other guy being screwed.

dbd33

Well, yes, and Canada is a more aggressively capitalist society than the UK. I think that gets missed here sometimes. Fail to make enough money in Canada and you will be extracting your own rotten teeth.

The housing thing isn't specific to Canada though. I grew up in London on a street where new immigrants started out. Waves of immigrants had arrived, made their money and moved up. Some had not succeeded so there was a social history of immigration on the street, the failed Jew, the failed Irish, the failed Greek the failed West Indian. At that time there were Indians and Pakistanis who were yet to fail, they've since been supplanted by a new wave of Poles and then Chinese and now Romanians. Most of the houses are HMOs, no different to, say, the apartments on Sherbourne in Toronto. Each wave, of course, initially made a living by stealing catalytic convertors.

In Canada they needed Cobol programmers so I said I was a Cobol programmer. If they'd said gold miners, I'd have said I was one of those. There's nothing to Cobol programming so I was able to "rob the job" of the person at the next desk and then the desk after that and get a chunk of their rate. They went home. As an immigrant I had nothing to do in Canada except work and drink and steal catalytic convertors so I worked six days a week many hours a day. That's what immigrants are imported to do, take grunt jobs, like bricklaying or application development and pound away them. People who like or are interested in the host country are less valuable because they'll work less.

I think there's a blindness abut immigration often displayed on this site. It's the same kind of blindness that Conservative voters have, the voter may become the next Bono, fabulously wealthy, concerned only with tax avoidance, and be glad to have elected a crook like Johnson but the voter is more likely not to be rich and to be better off under a government that really supports the NHS. Similarly, people who haven't emigrated all seem to think they'll be living in a ski lodge answering the occasional email when, in fact, they're more likely to be in some dreary suburb shut in a room most of their waking hours wondering why the ceilings are all so dirty in Canada.

DigitalGhost

I've seen threads on here where people have discussed a disability or long term illness and generally the advice given has been that you would be better off in the UK under those circumstances. It's strange though, Canada is often painted as some sort of socialist haven and I think that's mainly because it actually has a social safety net at all, unlike its more densely populated and powerful southern neighbour.

There are other areas where Canada has maintained a level of socialism that the UK hasn't though, most notably the cushy salaries and employment contracts given to people in the civil service and public sector. Obviously many of those jobs require you to be a Canadian citizen though and therefore immigrants will rarely qualify.

spouse of scouse

I'm still interested to see the data that leads you to state that 'Canada seems to do better....than most' to 'make sure it's(sic) less well off citizens are well provided for', and that 'the more prosperous Australian cities are pretty much a lost cause at this point'.

dbd33

I have a disabled child who lives in Europe because she aged out of the social provisions in Canada.

You are correct in thinking that the only comparison made here is with the US. People will argue that, for example, the former Conservative leader, Schnurr?, Schnarr?, is a reasonable figure because he's less corrupt than Trump and less bigoted than Stephen Miller. Both of those are true but he's still a religious nutjob with his hand in the till.

I think that, in both countries, unelected and unaccountable advisors to the government are highly paid for jobs of dubious worth. Cummings is the prime example. That's simple corruption.

I don't think that ordinary public employees in Canada are particularly highly paid but that's not why they take such jobs. Case in point, a couple I know graduated in the same class. One went into private industry, one into a government job, five years or so later the first makes about three times as much money as the second. He has, however, worked six or seven days a week for five years taking a total of ten days off other than the Sundays. She has had three years off for maternity leave, doesn't work weekends and has paid holidays and can take the statutory holidays. So long as one can live on the income from a government job, or has a partner with a proper job, hardly having to work is a spectacular benefit.

DigitalGhost

Stuff like that will always be the case though. The earnings are almost always higher in the private sector but like Dan Aykroyd said in Ghostbusters "they expect results".

scrubbedexpat091

Varies alot in Canada depending on your province.

The federal government does have CPP Disability and the Disability Tax Credit, but the federal government's threshold is very high bar to meet, so lots of disabled are not able to access the federal benefits, and if if one does get the DTC, CRA does their very best to kick people off the tax credit.

So because of the high threshold the Canadian federal government has in place for disability qualification, the disabled end up mostly on provincial programs which vary greatly province to province, Ontario, Quebec and BC are the top 3 when it comes to the amount they provide, ON I believe is the highest, BC provides up to $1,183.42 per month to a single person who is disabled, if your a single parent you will receive up to 1,609.08 per month. They say up to, because those amounts also include the maximum housing allowance supplement which is $375 per month for a single, but if your disabled and homeless, they take away the $375 housing portion or if you live with family and don't pay rent they will often remove the housing portion as well.

(The housing amount hasn't been raised in like 15 years, and not even sure 15 years ago you could find housing for $375 per month, but unless in subsidized housing, your not getting anything for $375 and often paying 100% of disability to rent isn't uncommon in BC, most prioritize housing over anything else.) Most people also will never secure a subsidized unit because the demand greatly exceeds supply, and most of the province in BC has little or no subsidized units, the units are concentrated in Vancouver and Victoria regions, which is why the disabled, homeless etc concentrate in these 2 regions even though they are the most expensive, people go to where the services they need are located.

These top 3 provinces disability amounts are below the poverty level.

BC does allow (don't know about ON or Quebec) the disabled to earn 12,000 per year before they claw-back, so a disabled person who can work part-time and earn 12,000 a year can make 26,201.04 in a year, which is technically above the poverty line, but I think the poverty lines are way out of date with reality considering the cost of housing these days.

If your in Atlantic Canada and disabled, well your gonna get very little support if you don't qualify for CPP disability as those province provide very little support to their disabled citizens.

US disability is dealt with on the federal level through social security, the amount one gets varies depending on lifetime earning before becoming disabled, the 2020 average is $1,250 US$ per month (1,600 CAD$)

In the US a disabled person is also going to get food stamps in pretty much any state, so they will help offset the cost of food, where in Canada there is no such program.


How this compares to other countries I dunno, but this is the reality in the US/Canada neither country excels in helping their disabled. Maybe others familiar with other countries can add some comparisons.


The general population aka voters don't care about the poor or disabled, so its not really a hot political topic, so politicians can ignore it or in bad times even cut back disability and not face massive backlash from voters come election time. Same with mental health, if they have to cut healthcare cutting back mental health services will ruffle less feathers so first to suffer in cuts, I am actually quite worried about the BC election next year, if the NDP and Green's can't keep their slight lead and BC Liberals come back to power, well I fear BC Liberals will cut back on disability to balance the budget, one thing BC Liberals don't like is the poor and disabled.

scrubbedexpat091

Looking at online cost of living calculators, appears Sydney is about 20% more expensive, and Melbourne about 5%, so Melbourne is probably most similiar to Vancouver.

Perth appears 7% cheaper vs Vancouver.

It's really just the housing that makes Vancouver expensive, if housing was realistic prices for local wages, Vancouver could be a pretty nice city to live in.

BC in general though is the same, very few places that offer employment and affordable housing, anywhere there is employment is high cost of housing these days.

Places like Quenel are cheap for housing, but high crime, drug use, and low employment options.