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Adopt Our Canadian Values, Majority Says "Is it time for Canada to abandon its multiculturalism policy and insist that immigrants adopt Canadian cultural values?" (66%) 19837 votes Yes. (34%) 10151 votes, No; Total votes: 29988 (Globe and Mail, March 21, 2006) Not only is this a clear message that Canadians reject state-imposed multiculturalism policies by a 2 to 2 margin, but the voting, at nearly 30,000 was extremely heavy. Polls on recent days attracted only 20,000 (should Bob Rae lead the Liberals?) and 13,000 (the war in Iraq). Art Of The Scam In 2003, as the world struggled to come to grips with the threat of apocalyptic Islam, whole populations were sluicing through Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pakistan. That year, Canada would accept more than twice as many Pakistani refugees than the rest of the world combined. Yet at a immigration retreat in Oct 2000, "Federal immigration officials were warned almost a year before Sept. 11 that it was 'critical' to stop undocumented refugee claimants from entering Canada ... 'It is critical to establish the identity of people seeking to enter Canada and we have made a commitment to do so,' the internal document says. Up to 60% of refugee claimants have no documents or unsatisfactory documents [both tactics making it all but impossible for Canada to acquire repatriation documents if the claim is rejected -- assuming we can even determine their real country of origin. RCMP expert Fred Bowen has said that up to 90% of Canada's successful refugees paid smugglers to gain entry. Last August, David Harris, a former planner for CSIS, suggested that uncooperative refugee claimants should be issued with electronic monitoring bracelets, but nothing ever happens. To this day, Canada has dedicated immigration detention facilities for just 300.] As many as 30 claimants arrive at Pearson nightly, airport workers said. They are all fingerprinted, photographed and released. Security checks are conducted weeks later by the RCMP and CSIS. The staffers said that from 10% to 20% of the claimants arriving at Pearson and Montreal airports did not return their mail-in refugee kits. [What are the chances they will heed politely worded invitations to appear for a medical exam?] 'Warrants are issued for many of these cases,' the staffers said." (Toronto Sun, November 6, 2001) It's like a well oiled machine isn't it? In 2003, our Sri Lankan refugee acceptance rate was 76.3% -- as opposed to 2% in the UK and less than 4% in Germany. In a single year, 8,600 of these Canada-based Sri Lankan refugee claimants (tremulously awaiting "life-saving" determinations on their claims) would apply for travel documents to visit the country they'd allegedly fled in fear for their lives. In 2003, 317 Americans also filed refugee claims in Canada -- claims which no other country will even entertain. Whether bad faith claims are ultimately successful or not is beside the point: Once you've made landfall and phonetically sounded out the magic "I am a refugee" incantation it's for the Canadian taxpayer to meet your physical and emotional needs until you've exhausted the legal aid funded appeal process. (One convicted terrorist has done just that for so long, he now has Canadian-born grandchildren!). If all else fails, the last ditch Hail Mary play is to creep into a church basement, regardless of your own religion, and schedule a media blitz. One study found that, of 261 failed claimants who sought sanctuary in churches over a period of 20 years, 70 percent managed to stay. Just to be clear, a refugee claimant is not the same thing as a refugee. Refugees have been granted the right to live in Canada; refugee claimants are people who turn up at the border and say: "Open Sesame" In addition to an army of settlement workers, ESLinstructors, social workers, dedicated medical personnel, government-paid defence lawyers, advocates, activists and agitators, the IRB itself "is Canada's largest quasi-judicial tribunal. In its refugee protection division, about 200 political appointees make decisions on more than 40,000 asylum applications each year. Another 1,390 civil servants provide bureaucratic support." (Canadian Press, March 22, 2006) This phenomenon of traversing the globe in search of a soft landing was virtually unheard of before the 1985 Singh Decision: " A senior federal public servant and former deputy minister of immigration [he served the immigration department for 30 years], John L. Manion, warned the government when the Charter was still in draft that the proposed wording of Section 7 of the Charter (which granted fundamental justice to 'everyone' rather than only to 'Canadian citizens' — the term used in other sections of the document) would allow anyone on our soil, whether here legally or not, to use the provisions of the Charter to avoid removal. Manion was told at the time that his concern was unwarranted and his advice was ignored. Not long after the Charter come into effect, however, the Singh Decision was taken and Manion’s concerns was proven to be justified. In his words, it 'destroyed any real immigration control, and made Canada the laughing stock of the world, and the destination of too many footloose criminals, terrorists, and social parasites.' [In 2001] Manion estimated that the refugee claimants cost Canadians in the region of $2 to 4 billion a year. ... Before his party was defeated in the January 2006 federal election, Prime Minister Paul Martin went as far as to propose that the 'notwithstanding clause' article be scrapped completely. As the party that was in office when the Charter was drafted, moreover, the Liberals assiduously promote the idea that the document is sacrosanct and that any suggestion that parts of it may need to be revisited constitutes a veritable assault on Canadian values, including the rights of minorities." (Martin Collacott, Canada’s Inadequate Response to Terrorism: The Need for Policy Reform, Fraser Institute, February, 2006)
"Number of legal aid certificates issued for help in immigration matters in Ontario (some people may have received more than one certificate):
YEAR
# of
certificates
1995
11,265
1996
8,337
1997
5,767
1998
6,289
1999
7,075 (Capital News Online, Carleton University, March 23, 2001) Put another way, in a single four-year period, the cost to taxpayers exceeded $61-million. And since 60% of newcomers settle in Ontario, national costs were presumably somewhere around $100-million: A genuinely stellar achievement when credible claims are generally accepted without a formal hearing. "In 2000, over 90% of immigrants and refugees landed in Canada settled in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia. The overwhelming concentration of refugee claimants in these three provinces has forced them to bear most of the legal aid costs in the immigration and refugee area. ... The average length of refugee hearings has been longer in Ontario and British Columbia, which pay for actual time spent in hearings, than in Quebec, which pays a fixed fee for each case. Also, utilization of the expedited process, in which manifestly well-founded claims can be determined without a hearing, has been lower in Ontario and British Columbia than in Quebec. ... For instance, the average length of refugee hearings in Montreal, where lawyers are paid a flat fee for each case regardless of how much time they spend on the case, is almost 20% less than in Toronto and 33% less than in Vancouver, where lawyers are paid an hourly fee for actual time spent in hearings. [At the same time,] expenditures for translation and interpretation services represent over 16% of legal aid expenditures on immigration and refugee matters in British Columbia and Ontario. ... Required expenditures for expert assessments and reports from medical doctors and psychologists' are also a significant cost driver in relation to immigration and refugee legal aid." (Department of Justice, Immigration and Refugee Legal Aid Cost Drivers, 2002) Then guess what happens? "In light of the announcement in 2003 by the British Columbia government to cease funding for immigration and refugee legal aid, a federal-provincial agreement was signed in February 2004 to provide legal aid funding for 2004-2005 that included a reduction in the level of funding in British Columbia. In response to an expected decrease in legal aid services and an increase in the number of people who appear before it without representation in British Columbia, the IRB initiated contingency planning measures, which included information and orientation sessions for unrepresented claimants." (IRB Performance Report 2004-2005; Legal aid changes in British Columbia)
"Godfrey Baldacchino, the Canada research chair in Island Studies at the University of P.E.I., studied 320 people who moved to the Island from 1998 to 2003 to find out why they came and why they left. ... Most immigrants to the Island come from other provinces, not other countries ... the main source of new people for P.E.I. is Ontario. [Most outsiders head for PEI] in search of a better life, but if they leave, they do so because of a lack of employment. They also report that they feel discriminated against as people who come from 'away'. ... Many immigrants found Islanders to be friendly but in a superficial way and they did feel as though they were treated as outsiders." (CBC, March 16, 2006) Got that? If a Canadian moving a couple of provinces away hits a brick wall, well, what did he expect? But let an immigrant move 3/4 of the way around the globe -- outside his native country, language and cultural group, imprudently hoping that credentials thing will just kind of sort itself out -- and, if he falls on hard times, Canadians are bullies and bigots? Immigrant complaints about Canada are coming so thick and fast it's hard to keep up, but one recent indictment moans that having we have medicated, upgraded and educated them, newcomers are -- or, more to the point, appear to be -- moving on. The concern is not that they choose not to pay into the tax base that has been so instantly generous, but that Canada, The Finishing School is not doing enough for them. Again. A new Statistics Canada study "uses two different methods to study return and onward migration. The first method uses landings records that record all immigrant arrivals to Canada ... The second method uses the landings records and the longitudinal tax filing information and infers out migration by long term absences from the tax files. [More on that later.] It is clear that a substantial part of migration to Canada is temporary. The estimated out-migration rate 20 years after arrival is around 35 % among young working age male immigrants. About 6 out of 10 of those who leave do so within the first year of arrival which suggests that many immigrants make their decisions within a relatively short period of time after arrival. Controlling for other characteristics, the out-migration rates are higher among immigrants from source countries such as the United States and Hong Kong, and for those admitted under the skilled worker or business class visa. Among immigrants that arrived in either business class or skilled worker class about four in 10 left within 10 years after arrival. ... The business class group has a particularly short stay—almost 45% less than the family class." (Statistics Canada, Return and Onward Migration Among Working Age Men, March 2006) A cynic might conclude that those with the most to offer are least inclined to stick around remitting 60% of their income in taxes. So who does stay? Refugees, the family reunification crowd., an impressive number of those unable to speak either English or French -- in short, those heavily dependent on government transfers. What is worse is the underhand methodology of StatCan's guilt mongering study: Inferring that people have left the country simply because they fail to pay taxes is to disregard Canada's enormous grey economy. Twelve years ago, Statistics Canada estimated the underground economy at 25 per cent of the official GDP. Whether wangling noodles, driving hack for your cousin or body rubbing out a smuggling debt, immigrant enclaves are rife with off-the-radar employment. "The incidence of personal income tax filing for Canadians 20 years of age and over in 1995 was roughly 91%. The comparable figure for immigrants 18 years of age and over [was] 57%." (CIC, The Economic Performance of Immigrants: Education Perspective, May 1999) The Fraser Institute calculated the averaged income tax contributions per man, woman and child in 2000 at $4,543 -- the comparative averaged contribution per immigrant that year was $968, or $3,575 less. (Immigration and the Welfare State in Canada, September 2005) Recently, hundreds of millions of tax dollars have been diverted to bring foreign-trained brain surgeons and rocket scientists up to speed (curious that so many should overlook such an elementary step before circumnavigating the globe, but Great minds really do seem to think alike). Meanwhile, Canada's under-utilized immigrants monopolize a few select trades here -- taxis, convenience stores, nail salons, doughnut and pizza shops -- all businesses with disproportionately high percentages of cash sales and limitless opportunities to hide income. _______________________________
Year
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989 Comparison of tax avoidance behaviour -- immigrants and native-born males aged 25 to 30. Note: "Cdn" includes immigrants who landed 5 or more years previously. (Statistics Canada catalogue no. 11F0019MIE, no. 273)
As a very few voices of reason have tried to point out, the Baby Boom was a demographic blip that worked because an optimistic and homogeneous society was motivated to make it work. On the other hand, continuous, explosive population growth is the hallmark of the Third World. That said, it has been Ottawa's fondest wish to duplicate just that kind of growth, not by natural increase, of course, -- you'd have to instil a sense of optimism in people for that -- but through extraordinarily high rates of immigration. As primary beneficiary of these policies, Toronto today is a malignant tumour of gridlock, ruinous infrastructure, smog and mutual suspicion. A year ago February, the Ontario government revealed its Places to Grow "smart" growth plan. The conceit is to double the population with dramatically increased urbanization in already built-up areas such as "Brampton, Markham, Mississauga, Milton, Guelph, Kitchener, Newmarket, Barrie and Peterborough. ... Public Infrastructure Minister David Caplan [yes, he's Elinor Caplan's son] said the plan ... will accommodate the 3.7 million people and two million jobs expected to move into the area by the year 2031. [In best soviet tradition, the plan will] require regional governments to build 40 out of every new 100 residential units in existing urban areas by 2015. Set a goal of not less than 200 people and jobs per hectare in urban areas. Establish 25 'Urban Growth Centres' which will be targeted for even higher intensification rates." (Toronto Sun, February 17, 2005) Read that again and you will see that what Ms. Caplan's boy has in mind is masses of high density housing, near half of it government-owned. In a word, projects. Expand Jane-Finch until it meets up with Regent's Park in one continuous blighted corridor? While the implications seem to elude the infrastructure minister, it is obvious to some that corralling twice the population onto the same piece of real estate is a recipe for environmental and social toxicity: Shortly before Christmas, Ontario's environmental commissioner released a report challenging "plans to accommodate an additional 4.4 million people in Ontario over the next 25 years. 'The issue of population growth is an enormously significant public policy choice that has received little debate,' says the annual report from Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller. ... Ironically, the report [came] on the heels of an announcement by [then] federal Immigration Minister Joe Volpe that the ceiling for immigration [was to] be raised next year from 245,000 people to 255,000 and could go over 300,000 in the coming years. The environmental commissioner's report does not explicitly advocate curtailment of immigration, but it does take dead aim at the Places to Grow Act, passed [last] year by the Ontario Legislature. ... The tangent Miller pursues in this year's report is unusually controversial, however, because it runs counter to the received political wisdom — shared by all parties in the Legislature — that immigration is good for the province. There are strong echoes in the report of 'nativist' (or anti-immigration) sentiments [but notice how anticipated numbers just keep skyrocketing] The provincial Finance Ministry projects up to six million more people will call Ontario home over the next 25 years, most in the Toronto area. That's a 50 per cent increase over the province's current population of 12 million but there's been little debate about the 'enormously significant' issue, Miller said, noting that such forecasts essentially dictate how the province plans for land use. ... There's no compelling evidence that economic prosperity depends on an ever-increasing population, said Miller, who painted a grim picture of a sprawling, gridlocked southern Ontario choking on polluted air and unable to contain its own sewage and garbage. Raising the issue of population growth doesn't amount to an attack on immigration, but it's a serious problem no one wants to talk about, he said. 'It stuns me that the topic of sustainability and the future of our lifestyle and environment is a forbidden topic.' ... 'Why aren't we talking about the ramifications?'" (Toronto Star, November 1, 2005) He knows why, and if he doesn't, the Toronto Star could most certainly explain it to him: you can't talk about immigration in this country without being pilloried as a "racist" and hater of mankind Viva El Norte According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, "free-trade partner Mexico was the largest supplier of refugees to Canada last year with more than 3,500 claimants. [Of these,] 2,290 of the asylum seekers had their cases rejected and 700 never bothered to show up for hearings. [So, 510 apparently credible cases among 'more than 3,500 claimants' -- less than 14 per cent. As a result,] Immigration officers and police ... are probing two rings that use Canada as a staging zone to smuggle Mexicans into the U.S. ... Mexicans do not require a visa to travel to Canada [and, as an additional draw,] Mexicans who file refugee claims can obtain welfare and other benefits. They are placed in safehouses but, within days some are smuggled, to the U.S., where they continue to collect Ontario welfare deposited by electronic banking. ... Ontario community services spokesman Paul Doig said the province dishes out 80% of the cost of social services for refugees or just over $1 billion yearly. The city pays 20%." (Toronto Sun, February 13, 2006) Country Number of refugees Freedom House's democracy Name to Canada last year rating -- out of 140 countries Mexico 3,500 - plus 53rd India
850
Sri Lanka
930
Nigeria
600 Colombia 1,500 84th
Zimbabwe
700
Pakistan
750 Haiti
380 China
1,800 At the same time, "Canada is seeing a surge in the number of refugee claimants who say they are homosexuals and will be persecuted if they are returned to their homelands. In the past three years, nearly 2,500 people from 75 different countries have sought asylum on the basis of sexual orientation, according to information released under the Access to Information Act. ... The surge in applications is being driven both by bogus claims and a growing view of Canada as a haven for persecuted homosexuals, refugee experts say. The largest number came from Mexico, with 602, and Costa Rica, with 276—both democracies with thriving homosexual communities, annual Gay Pride Day parades and websites offering everything from gay weddings to gay tour operators. ... Michael Battista, a gay immigration lawyer, says many of the gay Mexicans he has represented are HIV-positive and have trouble getting jobs and medical care back home." (Globe and Mail, April 24, 2004) According to Canadian Council for Refugees 2005 figures, Canada's approval rating for Mexican refugee claims last year was 19%, down from 25% in 2004 and 27% in 200; India's approval rating was 25% last year, down from 27% in 2004 and 29% in 2003; Sri Lanka's was 67% last year, up from 64% in 2004 and 73% in 2003; Nigeria's was 41%, down from 50% in 2004 and 47% in 2003; Colombia's was 79%, down from 81% in 2004 and 2003; (no figures for Zimbabwe); Pakistan's acceptance rate was 40%, up from 35% in 2004 and 41% in 2003; (no figures for Haiti); and China's acceptance rate was 48% in 2005, down from 52% in 2004 and 61% in 2003.
Sing
Sing For Big Sister Ping HEALTH WATCH
What If They Stopped Lying To Us?
In an article detailing the unusually high prevalence of mental disorder among immigrants, the British Medical Journal posited two possible explanations: "The first is that people who are mentally ill are the ones most likely to emigrate; the second is that the stress of migration results in mental breakdown. ... The rate of schizophrenia in immigrants from West Africa aged 25-35 has been estimated at nearly 30 times that of the native British population. (BMJ, 1997; 315:473-476, 23 August) |