The big meanies

Another hit song being written by the usual suspects for "Justin & The Vote Wh*res
BS Band" as the dust barely settles.

Diane Francis wrote a column back in the 1990's on the cost of family class immigration, with emphasis on elderly immigrants and their subsequent drain on the health care system. It was ignored for the most part, too politically incorrect to even be discussed in polite Canadian society.

Anecdotal evidence only, but anyone who doubts the veracity of claims that elderly immigrants are clogging the HC system with a lifetimes worth of untreated health issues, need only attend a few of the walk-in clinics on Scott Road in Surrey,B.C.

It's high time we toughened immigration requirements,and not just in this area. Canada can no longer afford to be boy scout to the world,as we give,give,and give some more until it hurts,while other Countries just take.

Paying your freight isn't the evil the progressives make it out to be. Try to emigrate to Australia or New Zealand. You have to prove that you have the financial where with all to fully fund yourself, including medical. Hell, just to visit there you need a visa and a paid return ticket to wherever you came from.
Since you may still collect CPP when you retire and leave the country, why can't you require immigrants to have whatever credits in their former country's social safety net transferred here.

These stories are written by the same people who complain that wait lists for surgery are too long.
I've been involved in day lists of cataract surgeries in which the majority of patients spoke little or no English and had been in the country less than five years -- this at a time when the waiting time for cataract surgery was several months. I've also treated immigrant patients who have come straight from the airplane to the cardiac intensive care unit. It should be onerous to bring sick, elderly parents into this country. Heaven knows it's onerous for the Canadian taxpayer to pay to look after them.

I would prefer Canada is a welcoming place rather than socialist.

Heck, we have a medicare system and a welfare system that supports some of the worst deadbeats in the world. Some regions of the country use EI like it was their second job. So it's kind of ironic that Canada has no problem forking over money to lazy deadbeats who lived in Canada and shouldn't need income support, while people who arrive in Canada from hell-holes with a work ethic and not a penny to their name are barred from the same programs. Heck, we have a program in Vancouver called Insite where we pay for Canadians to inject themselves with drugs. But Granny from Bangladesh, she doesn't get a cent for ten years. What compassion.

The truth is, we should let people in, or not. We should not have these kinds of half-Canadians, people who live in Canada with only half the rights as everyone else.

I'd rather there wasn't all this vast welfare wealth transfer and we kept the tax/premium money in our pockets, but seeing how it is unlikely to change(as long as there are venal leftist politics in play), tough changes need to be made quickly. The system is unsustainable as it is now.

Those who have never payed into the Ponzi scheme or not payed long enough to equal their draw on the system should either be disqualified from benefits or have to take limited payouts commensurate with their premium payment totals. Meanwhile the wefare core fund should be working in the market to gain enough interest to cover payout deficits and inflation. It's the only way to run one of these things so it actually works - but the Libranos have abused the social welfare system (as well as immigration) for their political advantage so much so that the system deficits may never be balanced. They were too busy buying votes with welfare/subsidy/entitlement give-aways to understand that you cannot continue to top off social safety net deficits by raiding revenues from other sources. Comes the day when the draw on the system is greater than the revenue input - then it collapses - as in a major depression or economic melt down.

Meaning - when the crap hits the fan and a majority need to claim benefits it won't be there. We got a hint that the Harper finance dept is aware these lush social safety net programs are unsustainable when they hinted that they would not cover bank deposits over $150K. You can be assured that if a crisis occurs, your CPP, Pogi, public health care and other direct subsidies will evaporate over night - and they know it.

I find it totally disingenuous of the current government to pretend all this social welfare they are overseeing/maintaining is sustainable - it's not and they should be cutting them back and passing the cost saving on in reduced income taxing. But still they play the Ponzi game - just making slight inconsequential adjustments.

Good for the Harper government.

"More onerous" would seem to be more good news for the honest, hard-working, overly taxed Canadians who pay all these infiltrators' bills.

Why should elderly immigrants arrive on Canadian soil and enjoy all of the benefits -- often more as new immigrants -- than elderly Canadians who've contributed all their lives to the benefits they (often scantily) receive? Why should newcomers to Canada jeopardize the health care and other benefits of our young people and their families, who will be paying in perpetuity for newly arrived immigrants' health care and benefits?

Simple arithmetic makes it clear that this can't go on.

Read this explosive 'article,' How to Get Into Canada by Himy Syed, an Islamic banker:

Are you looking for the land of milk and honey, where you can have a
much better life without even working? Then you are looking for
CANADA. h/t BCF

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/can.general/KfJb2lpA6Sg/discussion

I found it too onerous to read the Globe and Mail so I cancelled my subscription ... seven years ago.

Curious.If I leave tommorrow,and rescind and cancel my "citizenship" in Canuckistan,can I come back the next day as a welfare leech? Disregard the fact that I worked my butt off as a SAR/FE,and have a nice little nest egg.Maybe if I grow a beard and hollar Allah Akbar?

Perspective.

Keep in mind the most influential lobby group within the Liberal Party(and the Mulroney Conservatives before them) for decades was most of the immigration lawyers working in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Add in the mainstream media favouring third world culture and politics over ours and you have the present situation.

Thirdly, there is an international "conspiracy" that takes advantage of any immigration policy loopholes and have been doing so for some time.

Good for the Conservative government. For too long has Canada been merely a place to come for short term safety or better medical care. We should be bringing in immigrants because they will be of value to the economy or can pay their own way. If new immigrants want their parents here they should be required to have the money in the bank to support them for up to five years or more.

You can have mass immigration, multiculturalism and a welfare state.

Pick two.

As a taxpayer i can't afford to pay all the taxes required so that elderly immigrants can show up and start booking hip surgeries. I know the leftie morons aren't able to comprehend the math involved in adding up the costs of immigrant health care in relation to the amount of how much the rest of us have to work and pay in taxes to support that. Maybe if the left weren't mostly parasites they would understand why real people with real lives and jobs and careers and families are pissed off. But the left knows that if they flood Canada with freeloading parasites like themselves and promise them everything that they will vote for whoever will give them the most largesse. Immigration then turns into a way for the most useless and incompetent political parties to import voters and increase their chances of seizing and maintaining power at all costs. It doesn't matter to the average leftist that it will ruin the economy or increase crime and terrorism. As long as they can be in charge and take the property, rights and freedoms away from those they hate they believe they can create a Utopia for themselves. Funny that they haven't thought far enough ahead to realize there will be no one to pay for it all once they've bankrupted Canada.

I've never read the New Oxford American English dictionary but my understanding has always been that onerous, tougher and burdensome are basically synonyms. With this definition, "more onerous" doesn't make a lot of sense in any context (unless you are using a very loose definition of oppressive). What I'd like to see is the New Oxford American English dictionary definition of "oppressive".

I'm going to hazard a guess at the risk of looking stupid. Oppressive, in the political sense, often implies something that goes beyond the pale or is unjust. However, oppressive can be used to describe much smaller indignities, such as "oppressive heat."

Before reading this article, I would have said that it is more onerous to walk to the store than it is to drive. I generally use the word in much the same way that Brian Harmon (half jokingly, I think) uses it above. I'd like to know if I'm wrong.

None of this changes the crucial question: Whether or not more onerous or tougher requirements for immigrants to settle their parents or grandparents are a good thing. I just can't believe anyone would be fooled by that section of the article.

Welcome to Turtle Island.

whaddabout Jack Layton mudderinlaw , is she off the welfare rolls yet and on to old age pension .

the first family of entitlements, his pa was a gubmint man , jack a gubmint man , his wife a gubmint women , his mother in law a subsidized housing recipeint , with jack and olivia in tow . and his son is a gubmint man.

only the CBCpravda would call this his "many accomplishments" on the take from cradle to grave. sick

Seems that no matter how asinine the news clowns get ... there are still plenty of people who take what they say as fact.

I suspect the G&M changed it from 'onerous' to 'tougher' after someone pointed out that the louts who generally read the G&M couldn't apprehend the term.

Still and all, the government has been telling us for years that immigration is necessary to replace legacy Canadians who aren't having enough children.
It is therefore reasonable that new immigrants at least be of child bearing age, otherwise they are replacing our culture instead of just the population.
The chances of grandpa and grandma immigrant adopting Canadian culture are slim to none.

And why is questioning the sustainability of social programs out of bounds?

I don't think there's any short term policy fix for this class of problem. It's more related to general attitudes than legislation. And we'll remain screwed until the left is purged from schools and media.

While my grandfather was visiting his birth country he fell seriously ill and was initially refused serious treatment despite remaining a citizen. Although he had left the old country 35 years previously and became Canadian, he received excellent treatment once the hospital administration became aware that he'd previously served in their army. So some individual looked at a situation and made a reasonable judgement call on the spot. I can't ever imagine such a thing happening here in our egalitarian, bureaucratized, anti-military feminized culture. If he'd been a Canadian vet ex-pat in one of our hospitals he would have died on a gurney in a hallway among drug addicts and foreigners.

The original rationale (using the term loosely) for medicare was that working Canadians shouldn't have to worry about huge hospital bills from sudden major illnesses which could strike anyone seemingly at random. But it wasn't about paying these bills for people who showed up in their retirement years who had never worked in or contributed anything to Canada to begin with.

As I said yesterday in Reader Tips, while commenting on the long-form census issue: "It's not really about policies that help anyone, it's about bums-in-cushy-government-job-seats for the liberal elite, and about spending tax money, come hell or high water. It's about social engineering, nothing more." The same ultimately applies to medicare.

scf @ 5:37 p.m.: "We should not have these kinds of half-Canadians, people who live in Canada with only half the rights as everyone else."

These are not genuine "rights". There is no right to live at the expense of others. For any program based on such a rogue concept of rights, we should be thinking of how to wind it up. A major reason why the Supreme Court's Insite ruling of 2011 was such a monumental disgrace was that the Court interpreted s.7 of the Charter of Rights to mean precisely that one does have the right to live at others' expense.

max @ 1:03 a.m.: "And why is questioning the sustainability of social programs out of bounds?"

Because if people start questioning, they might figure out that the programs are indeed unsustainable. Then the parasitical liberal elite's bums-in-cushy-government-job-seats program will be in jeopardy.

Whoa looks like the G&M comments went horribly wrong!

The annual cost to the taxpayer to settle immigrants is 24B per year. The single biggest expense in the budget year after year. This is more than the Indian Industry sucks up each year, about 8B, more than Quebec sucks up each year, around 8B, and more than the annual operating budget of the Canadian Military, less equipment purchases. Canada lets in an aggregate of around 600,000 to 800,000 immigrants each year and every year. 300,000 front door immigrants, 200,000 Temporary Foreign Workers and another 200,000 plus foreign students. None of these people leave and they all get free to them entitlements. Yet Canadians are told each year that Healthcare is in crisis. It is in a crisis of our own making. Why do governments not face reality and put all categories of immigrants on one aggregated list. Is it because Canadians would flip if they woke up to this fact. Of the 300,000 legal immigrants allowed in over 200,000 are dependents and not the primary immigrant they are mostly all here for the free entitlements. And stupid Canadians can not figure out why so much of your income is taken in taxes. As to the old argument about Canadians on welfare and lazy, we can't get rid of them, but why allow in so many leeches and bums to add to the rolls, we can do something about that, don't let them in and if you do remove all entitlements except for those actually working here for a min. of 10 years and narrow who is family class to husband, wife and immediate children under 18 years of age. Do not admit any others unless they post a bond to cover all expenses and no free entitlements. Healthcare costs are the single biggest expense of every Provincial government. Now approaching 50% in some cases. Far too many allowed into Canada each year.

More often that not, when there's a story about government waste on a grand scale, it makes the front page. Not so in this case. No surprise.

I also couldn't help but notice that even Mr Kenney, at least as far as I could tell, didn't reveal actual numbers but spoke in percentages. It would be far more instructive for his ministry to provide real numbers (how many people) and how much are they costing in social benefits. I applaud Mr Kenney for finally targeting this scam which has been bleeding the country dry for decades, but he should really go all in.

And as for the comments about the impact on the healthcare system, you don't know the half of it. Had people not been allowed to bring in the elderly and the sick, there's be no wait times or at least substantially reduced times. I worked in a low immigrant area; nevertheless our dialysis department treated almost entirely elderly East Indians. They came to Canada solely for that treatment, and everyone knew it.

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"nik says... I too had patient arrive at the hospital straight from the airport."

i have a paramedic friend who has, more than once, made the international flight to emergency room run. apparently, it's a favoured tactic to avoid immigration intake. seems there are miraculous recoveries shortly after the ambulance arrives at its destination.

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In a similar vein, wasn't there a court case in Ontario some years ago where the government (think provincial, could have been civic) sued immigrant sponsors for the costs of sponsored relatives who had landed on welfare? As I recollect, the government won.