★ Canada Needs Immigrants?

Canada Needs Immigrants?

Canada Immigration Forum (discussion group)

Subject: Canada Needs Immigrants?

This is from http://www.canadaimmigrants.com/forum.asp; Makes much sense to me. After reading all of the posts in this site and some other sites, I decided not to immigrate into Canada. I got the immigration and was researching before coming, didn´t find much good reasons to be in Canada. May be for others, Canada would be home, but definitely not for me.
The original post:
Hi everyone,

Now that previous poster mentioned ´pyramid scheme for new blood´, I think that visitors to this website should know also a bit more about Canada Pension Plan, what it means for our future as well as how is it related to current immigration policies and our plight.

"The CPP is a key pillar of Canada´s retirement income system" and "The plan is financed by compulsory contributions from workers and their employers and interest on accumulated plan reserves" ( quotes from gov´s website).

Well, The Eighteenth Actuarial Report calculates the value of accrued pension benefits (what we will need) at $487 billion and Plan assets (valued at cost) at $43.7 billion (what we have now) as of December 31, 2000. In short, there is a hole in this great ´Plan´ of around $440 BILLION.

Now there is a lot of upbeat rhetoric´s in the same Report such as "However, the future financial health of a plan funded along the lines of the Canada Pension Plan is better measured by the evolution of the projected growth rate of assets and liabilities." Key word in this sentence is sadly not the ´future´ as one would hope but ´projected´.

This means that in practice Plan needs a continuously growing supply of a new labor to pay for retirees. If the supply stops growing, or grows too slowly, the scheme´s promises are defaulted.

To be sure, this Ponzi-like pension scheme looked attractive at the time it was conceived and there were 8 or 10 people working for every retiree, but once birthrates start to fall and only one or two people are working for every retiree, the only way a retiree´s pension can be paid is if workers´ contributions represent a huge percentage of their earnings.

Canada´s fertility rate at the moment stands around all-time low of 1.5% (2002) with people having less and less children or having them in their late 30´s or early 40´s (our case). A minimum replacement rate (needed just to keep the population at the same level) is 2.1%!

This combination of outstanding liabilities in CPP and aging and diminishing population has been responsible for the government´s decision to increase immigration levels as ONLY viable source of population increase. In short, our new homeland never needed qualified and hardworking immigrants with good knowledge of English and French as it claimed in various brochures, it just needed fresh supply of labor to keep economy going and Baby Boomers´ pensions coming.

The US operates almost the same pension scheme, only called Social Security, but the difference is that US has highest fertility rate in the industrialized world, large number of legal immigrants (7.6 million came to the U.S. from 1991 to 1999) and large number of illegals (government estimated in 1996 that an additional five million immigrants were in the U.S. illegally). All those factor help our neighbours maintain more positive outlook towards the future retirement.

Our future looks less rosy. With expected huge number of fresh retirees in the near future it will take even higher number of newly taxable workers to maintain standards of living (as it takes several gainfully employed to support one retired). This explains why CEO of RBC Group asked for immigration levels to go up to 400,000 a year. They are needed to prop up the ailing economy, serve as taxpayers, and will also help business to drive prices up and wages even more down. Yes, drive wages even more down.

I hope that this will help all to better understand the nature of this country and why the current policies in place will always be maintained despite occasional claims, usually from politicians during the election time, that much better immigration and credential system is coming soon. Canada has no other choice.
Thanks to everyone who contributes to this board.
K.S. Montreal, Quebec.

MY BEST WISHES TO ALL PERPSPECTIVE IMMIGRANTS ANYWAY.
BLAIN

[14-11-2006,22:27]
[**.152.223.52]
Blain Robson