This Country Wants Immigrants, But Can It Afford Them?

Which G7 nation has the fastest growing population of all? It's not the United States or Germany, they're not even close, it's Canada and while the

country

has made

this

type of growth a priority largely through immigration, including a large number of temporary workers and international students there. there are signs that your once well-regarded safety net is not living up to expectations: you have shelter, you have food, health, things like that, we have a pretty good reputation in that area and I think Canadians are proud of that, but hope is also. that by building that type of system you will have the type of resilience that when unexpected shocks occur, the system will also be able to adapt to that good.

Sometimes it seems like Canada's accessible healthcare system has become a little broken. promise, it almost seems like Canada is breaking some of the implicit promises that were made to

immigrants

, that it is trying to attract people who come here, they think Canada is going to be a certain way and it turned out that it has been much more difficult . For many of

them

we have consciously made the decision that we want to have a strong immigration policy for a number of reasons, including the fact that, like many countries in the world, our birth rate is falling, we are a really big

country

, there is no There are a lot of people here, that means the social safety net is very expensive.

There is no doubt that the large number of people arriving in Canada right now is putting a strain on the system. There have been decades of underinvestment in housing. having people buying houses so as not to occupy

them

, all of that drives up prices while supply is slow, and on top of that, you add a large number of people coming in and you get

this

perfect scenario in which the force is felt in everyone. The aspects, the number of people living in emergency shelters in Toronto is about 9,000 a night, double what it was a decade ago, if you don't have housing, if you don't have a roof over your head, it's very difficult to address. other issues like unemployment, food security or abuse problems, drug abuse problems, they give you a curfew, he copies the food, but they give you good food and tell you what to do now, here you have an individual life, people They can live alone, they can live. among the people who understand them, oh, there's tons of housing here, buildings that are being used and stuff, and um, they're just empty, so the city can't sit there and say there's no housing, most of people can't

afford

to buy a house in Toronto, that means there are a lot more people who need to rent and it's the rental segment of the market where you really see these strains on the system.

Arushi is one of those tenants and is one of the more than a million international students. study, work and volunteer in Canada, that incredibly high number of transplants means it's much harder to get housing as higher numbers of international students have been a quick fix for Canada's underfunded colleges and universities as They pay around five times more in fees than domestic students. When I came to Canada, whether it's my friends, my classmates, or any of the international students, there is a terrible housing situation. My first place I lived was between $400 and $500, it was just a place where it wasn't quite there.

I built just one room, there was no kitchen, there was just a table where you can cook something and that's it, and one of the things that attracted me the most to Canada was because yes, a safe place because you don't have to worry about work and life. The country is unreliable compared to other countries. There are so many things that I think any international student has to go through. There are no job opportunities for many students. I see my friends who are suffering even for $5. Do you think your friends who are also international students want to stay in Canada?

Are you? Nobody

wants

to stay. Most international students I met don't want to stay at Canadian food banks like Sidom, where arushi volunteers have seen an increase. In people who can't

afford

basic goods, including many of the international students who work here, the industry is growing, we never expected this industry to grow and almost 27,000 people a month in all the different programs, that doesn't stop, no You can see the end and the food. Insecurity is not limited to just one region of Canada, even in Calgary, which is one of Canada's last large affordable cities. Food insecurity is a problem and rising food prices are putting a significant strain on people's budgets.

I spoke to the Calgary Food Bank and they said they served 33,000 people in December, up 40% from a year ago, so it's a really big problem that a lot of people are facing, even Canada's healthcare system is struggling. has been affected by population changes, especially in cities, Canadians are grateful to have access to a free health care system, they pay for it through taxes of course, but if they come out of surgery they won't have a bill waiting for them in In terms of numbers, approximately one in five Canadians does not have a regular family doctor. my family doctor.

You are a general practitioner, if you need access to a dermatologist or cardiologist, you need to be a true family doctor, so family doctors are critical in the system as front-line first responders here in Quebec, we don't have the highest doctor nor the lowest for the population. proportion, but this is where you will find the greatest shortage of family doctors. We are reaching record levels of immigration into Canada right now. Family doctors did not follow the fact that many doctors are retiring today and young doctors are looking for a better working life. balance my name is Dr.

Mark rooper I am a family doctor or general practitioner here in Montreal for the last 35 years a single payer system is attractive in several ways there are very few problems when it comes to billing patients, we don't actually bill to our patients, we directly build the single peer, which is a branch of the government that is paid for by state taxes, it is never really a consideration when we care for our patients and our billing is very efficient and very fast. There are difficulties in the Canadian system, and in some areas 94% of the population has a family doctor, but in some regions of Montreal the proportion has dropped to 55%. 55% of the population with a family doctor in a Single Payer system with no other option you have many diabetics who do not even know they are diabetic or hypertensive who do not know their hypertensive so this has created in downtown Montreal a crisis of healthcare earlier this year one in 40 people across the country were on study abroad Visa Mark Miller Canada's immigration minister announced in March that the nation would reduce the number of temporary residents by 20% over the next 3 years or approximately 500,000 people, it remains to be seen if that is enough to reverse the decline in quality of life.

The work of staying true to the promise of Canada's safety net is very much a work in progress in many ways, nation-building is still something of a thing. that's happening here, that's why it's so important that we get these policies right, there's still commitment to these social programs, it's a matter of funding them efficiently and I guess quickly enough that we can keep up with everyone. of these new strains in the system h