Ottawa reveals plan to welcome 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025
OTTAWA - The federal Liberal government has unveiled plans for a massive increase in the number of immigrants entering Canada, with a goal of seeing 500,000 people arrive each year by 2025 as it seeks to address a critical labour shortage across the country.
So here's my issue with that. Where are they going to live? And where are they going to get medical services?
Canada does have a shortage of working age people right now and obviously importing skilled labour from abroad is one solution to that. But - this is MASSIVE amounts of immigration. Which would be one thing if we had enough homes to house them or medical facilities to treat them or even schools to educate their kids.
But we don't. We are already facing a serious shortage of homes, rent prices are already sky high, and even after the so called 'crash' home ownership is still vastly out of reach for the greater majority of people.
We only build about 250 k homes a year and many of those involve ripping down existing homes to build higher density or because the old home is getting to the end of it's life. So it's not even a 250 k home NET increase. And we currently have a shortage. And we're going to bring in 500 k people? Which doesn't include our own local people who are coming to the age where they'd like to look at moving out and either renting or buying. And it doesn't include things like foreign students while they're studying (tho many might become citizens LATER they're not included in 'immigration' numbers while they're students). It also doesn't include temp foreign workers OR the fact that many new homes will be used for Air b&b type lodgings.
Where the hell are all these people going to live? They ain't gonna be settling down in the small prairie towns or small towns of northern bc or the like. They're mostly going to be in the already crammed major metros.
And our medical systems in MOST provinces are a disaster - and we can't find enough doctors and nurses etc to deal with what we've got. So ... where are we magically going to come up with enough medical professionals to deal with an extra 500 k people? Per YEAR? I"ve read that a doctor seeing patients full time (no emerg or hospital or clinic duties) can handle about 1500 patients max. That means we're going to need about 350 new doctors MINIMUM every single year - where's that coming from? And that doesn't include specialists and surgeons and so on - we would need over a thousand new doctors and specialists annually. And we don't even have enough now.
