milnews.ca said:
And one solution to that will be getting more Canadians to work in mining town coffee shops and pick fruit/vegetables.
And IMHO therein lies the big difference. The much-maligned immigrants everybody seems to be so afraid of will take those jobs. (ie: my Portuguese family when they first came to Canada). They will clean toilets, park cars, pick apples and tobacco and dig ditches. Yes, they will live three families to a house. But, you know what happens to most of them?
Their kids go to school, and learn, and adapt. And before you know it, they're living out in the suburbs in three-car garage houses. Don't believe me? I'll offer several examples of very successful immigrant groups (non-white and often non-Christian):
-Chinese;
-Indian;
Japanese;
-Korean;
and Philipino.
In fact, far from disrupting and destroying Canada, they have increasingly become a major part of the Conservative Party voting base. Tory: not Liberal. Read
"The Big Shift" to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
Now, while these groups arrived in Canada, and started at the bottom, and climbed up, who was sitting on the porch whining about the
"damned immigrants taking our jobs", until it was time to get off their asses and go pick up their welfare cheques? And guess who's still there doing that, and will be doing that when the next batch of immigrants arrive?
Are there immigrants who don't pull their weight, or don't assimilate after two generations? Yes, there are. Are there immigrant criminals who should be deported immediately? Probably. But, IMHO, these always have been and always will be a minority.
Nobody can claim to have "built this country" because we aren't done yet.