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Canada bet big on immigration. Now it’s hitting the brakes.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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That's true, then. I wonder how much of the problem is down to immigration. On the one hand, it's more people, but the tax base also expands.
That's a really interesting question.
Many of the newcomers are students and they have to pay massive tuition. So they aren't contributing directly to taxes, but they are contributing a huge amount to Canada's post secondary institutions. Like 78% of total tuition in Ontario. The linked article has some pretty wild graphs. It's shitty because that money is being sucked out of newcomers' home countries to fund Canadian institutions.
Meanwhile, our GDP per capita has apparently been falling since 2017. I don't know how that relates to immigration versus our crappy productivity. Apparently our tax-to-GDP ratio has inched lower, so I assume our taxes per capita have also shrunk, despite the growing population.
Conversely, the spike in immigration has been in the last decade or so. A lot of the missing infrastructure takes longer to spin up: it's a decade+ to train medical staff. It's five+ years to train a teacher. Even planning and building transit can take a while. A sensible approach would be to plan for a growing population by getting more doctors/teachers/busses/houses ready before increasing the population, but it sounds like we didn't do that.
Nice data!
Plus, sometimes it's just for the prestige. I know of some that sign up for agricultural programs, but they're from tropical countries so almost nothing applies when they go back. On the bright side, these are the rich elites where they come from, so the really needy ones aren't directly effected.
I don't know if that's true for everyone:
That's unfortunate, although I do kind of wonder what the plan was after year 1.
It's true for most, having talked both to foreign students and foreigners who could never dream of being foreign students. It'd be dope if we actually just worked out a philosophy for how our universities should be funded.