Thread by @TrashRadio_

What the hell is going on in Canada?

A thread:

Canada is a nation owned by a handful of oligarchs, perhaps a dozen families, which pretends it is a function democracy. No joke, effectively one or two billionaires hold a monopoly interest on a variety of essential industries in each province. Patterson in BC, the Richardsons

in Saskachewan & Manitoba, Irvings on the east coast, the Westons with their monopoly over groceries, the Rogers and Shaw families with telecommunications, etc etc etc

The nation is a two party system, with both the Liberals and the Conservatives working for these families.

For the past 30+ years they've traded who is in office whenever the public gets fed up, but each successive government has expanded the exploitative programs of its predecessor regardless of ideological branding. I'll get into 𝘸𝘩𝘺 at the end of this

The country is wholly reliant now on a housing and consumer debt bubble which is the singular primary driver of the GDP and wealth generation and one of the worst inflated in the developed world, economically it is otherwise stagnant. A great number of people make shit wages but

don't need to worry, because they bought a house twenty years ago and the house now earns $100k/year in value like clockwork - from which they can withdraw a HELOC loan to live more lavishly than they would otherwise. Wages haven't moved in decades, while the house someone grew

up in has increased in value from $60k to $1.2 Million in only 25 years - with no improvements done to it - this house is in a small, isolated town in the interior of the province with no remaining economy other than tourism and logging.

The government is unwilling to do

anything change this situation, both because they have their fingers in the pie and because wiping out homeowners with a housing crash would at this point destroys the nation's economy like a nuclear bomb

You can see the problems here, I'm sure

Canada's population is rapidly aging, however due to the cost of living and lack of housing availability, nobody is having children. This threatens the holy grail of Growth Economics. If the economy stagnates, those oligarchs I mentioned start losing profits. Their pension funds

and other services risk insolvency - the only soltuion is to tell the boomers to fuck off (politically impossible) or to massively boost the population to try and fake the GDP growth per capita

Following the pandemic, they saw the first serious increase in wages in years due to

the lack of workers as the labor market experienced the same reshuffling as it has anywhere else

The solution from their federal government to that wage negotiation power has been swift and brutal: mass immigration at any cost with the goal of aggressive wage suppression and

ensuring consistently upward-spiraling rents/housing prices. A one bedroom apartment in Vancouver in 2016 could still be found for around $800/month. Today that is $2,100/month. Rents outside the lower mainland do not drop dramatically, however economic prospects sure do, so the

affordability gap actually worsens the further you go from the major cities

Over the past year the Canadian government increased annual immigration to between 1.45 and 2.2 million people when you count international students, temporary workers, and refugees. This is one of the

highest, if not 𝘁𝗵𝗲 highest rate of per-capita immigration in the world. Vastly outpacing the USA

This is one reason Justin Trudeau put "post-national country" window dressing on this so its easier to accept and hopefully go from the front to the back of people's minds

The majority of these millions upon millions of immigrants are not skilled workers, and Canada no longer applies its skills-based immigration stream approach and are now largely importing raw and often uneducated laborers from developing nations. This has resulted in severe

strain on the medical system, a they also do not recognize any foreign medical degrees and engage in heavy protectionism of wages in that field by allowing 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗲𝘄 domestic med school graduates a per year

Last year, the federal government removed any working restrictions

on international students (numbering 800k last year, to suppress wages), removed most market restrictions on the "Temporary Foreign Worker Program" and increased the allowable number of them by six figures (to suppress wages). And so on and so forth. They are now handing out

visas on a "just apply" basis to both tech workers and skilled trades, to try and kill wage negotiation power in the last few remaining pockets of good wages in the country

This isn't 𝘁𝗵𝗲 reason for endless immigration, but it certainly is 𝗼𝗻𝗲 of the most pressing of them

I would like my homies, fellow operators, constituents, and friends from up north to take a look and see if I'm talking sense here

I'm not from there but from up there, only visited twice. What I've heard and read and seen - this is the only conclusion I can confidently draw

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