Pink Slips for Green People: Dump Dion

I hate to say I told you say, but I told you so. “Heureusement, ici, c'est le Bloc!” Otherwise we would be looking a Conservative majority. Save for the Quebec language debate, not much went right for the Liberals. It was hard to conceive of them running having run a worse campaign. Their ads were pathetic, their messaging was pathetic, their election readiness was pathetic, their platform was worse than pathetic and of course Dion’s English was pathetic. Their failure to use any wedge issue was inexplicable. Boy do the Liberals look stupid for having punted away the Afghanistan issue. Headlines screaming that the Afghan mission is massively over budget heading into the last week just as the markets collapsed might provided the Liberals with a bump going into the last week. In every region of the country the Liberals were hindered by Dion and his carbon tax. Dion appeals to no one accept a few Liberal bloggers. The sooner he goes the better and believe me he will go. The only question to be answered is Dion the worst Liberal leader of all time. Quite possibly he is.

Seat Predictions

Large numbers of former Liberal voters in urban Ontario and BC will vote Green. The NDP and Liberals will see a slight uptake in support in Quebec as Conservative voters migrate to the Bloc to replace Bloc supporters migrating to the NDP and Liberals in Montreal.

The Conservatives will make gains in Winnipeg, the Lowermainland, and the 905.

Liberal looses in Northern Ontario are the NDP’s gain.

The Conservatives will loose their stranglehold on Quebec City to the Bloc

With the electorate unhappy and uninterested, the number of Canadians voting will reach historic lows

Voter Turnout

58%

Popular Vote

Conservatives 34.5 (-1.5)
Liberals 27 (-3)
NDP 19 (+1.5)
Bloc 10.5
Greens 7.5 (+3)

Canada

Conservatives 138 (+14)
Liberals 75 (-28)
Bloc 53 (+2)
NDP 40 (+11)
Independents 2 (+1)

BC

Conservatives 23 (+6)
NDP 9 (-1)
Liberals 4 (-5)

Alberta

Conservatives 28

Saskatchewan

Conservatives 12
Liberals 1 (-1)
NDP 1 (+1)

Manitoba

Conservatives 10 (+2)
NDP 4 (+1)
Liberals (-3)

Ontario

Liberals 37 (-17)
Conservatives 50 (+10)
NDP 19 (+7)

Quebec

Bloc 53 (+2)
Conservatives 6 (-4)
Liberals 14 (+1)
NDP 1 (+1)
Independents 1

New Brunswick

Liberals 4 (-2)
Conservatives 5 (+2)
NDP 1

Novo Scotia

Liberals 5 (-1)
Conservatives 2
NDP 3
Independents 1 (+1)

PEI

Liberals 4

Newfoundland

Liberals 5 (+1)
NDP 1 (+1)
Conservatives 1 (-2)

NWT

NDP

Yukon

Liberals

Nunavut

Conservatives (+1)

(Liberals -1)

Conservatives: seat pick ups

1) Conservatives pick up Newton North Delta from Liberals
2) Conservatives pick up Saint-Boniface from Liberals
3) Conservatives pick up Nunavut from Liberals
4) Conservatives pick up Brant from Liberals
5) Conservatives pick up Huron-Bruce from Liberals
6) Conservatives pick up Richmond from the Liberals
7) Conservatives pick up Newmarket Aurora from Liberals
8) Conservatives pick up West Nova from Liberals
9) Conservatives pick up Madawaska-Restigouche form Liberals
10) Conservatives pick up Mississauga South from Liberals
11) Conservatives pick up Oakville from Liberals
12) Conservatives pick up Winnipeg South Centre from Liberals
13) Conservatives pick up London West from Liberals
14) Conservatives pick up Mississauga Erindale from Liberals
15) Conservatives pick up Halton from Liberals
16) Conservatives pick up Fredericton from Liberals
17) Conservatives pick up Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca from Liberals


1) Conservatives pick up West Vancouver from Greens

1) Conservatives pick up Vancouver Island North from NDP
2) Conservatives pick up Surrey North from NDP

Liberals: seat pick ups

1) Liberals pick up St John's South Mount Pearl from Conservatives

1) Liberals pick up Parkdale-High Park from NDP

1) Liberals pick up Papineau from the Bloc
2) Liberals pick up Ahuntsic form the Bloc

NDP: seat pick ups

1) NDP pick up Churchill from Liberals
2) NDP pick up Nickel Belt from Liberals
3) NDP pick up Algoma-Manitoulin Kapuskasing from Liberals
4) NDP pick up Thunder Bay Rainy River from Liberals
5) NDP pick up Sudbury from Liberals
6) NDP pick up Welland from Liberals
7) NDP pick up Kenora from Liberals

1) NDP pick up Thunder Bay Superior North from Conservatives(Liberal win 2006)
2) NDP pick up Vancouver Kingsway from Conservatives(Liberal win in 2006, Emerson)
3) NDP pick up St. Johns East from Conservatives
4) NDP pick up Oshawa from the Conservatives
5) NDP pick up Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar from Conservatives
6) NDP pick up South Shore-St. Margaret's from Conservatives

Bloc: seat pick ups

1) Bloc pick up Jonquière-Alma from Conservatives
2) Bloc pick up Louis Hebert from Conservatives
3) Bloc pick up Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles from Conservatives
4) Bloc pick up Beauport-Limoilou from Conservatives
5) Bloc pick up Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean from Conservatives

What needs to be done to Save the Furniture

1) Keep Dion in Quebec and tell him to speak French and only French. I do not want to see him speaking English on any news clips. Every time Dion is heard on English speaking television or quoted in an English speaking news paper, the Liberals loose votes.

2) When attacking the Conservatives in English, have Ignatieff or Rae do it.

3) Go after the female vote. God knows they have lost men. Stress that the Conservative Daycare plan has not produced a single daycare spot.

4) Bring up social issues. As I said thousand times before, this is the Conservatives Achilles Heel.

5) Layton has described Dion as "A man of principle and conviction”, and May has also said similar things about Dion: That being the case, why the hell are the Liberals not using these quotes?

Harper and the Debate

Harper did not come out of this unscathed. For example, what is left of his environmental platform is in tatters. It is too bad one of his opponents did not deliver the coup de grace by pointing out that just as emissions in Canada have risen over the last 20 years emission intensity has gone down.

However, given the number of shots he took on the economy, Harper came out relatively well on that account and his get dumb when it comes to crime plan was more or less given a free pass. Harper kept on saying that crime is up in “some” places and amazingly no one had the foresight to say “yes it is, but it is down in the vast majority of places.” Furthermore, May was the only one to point out how odd it is that Harper would consider sending somone, who is not considered mature enough to vote or drive, to jail for life. It was too bad May did not take it further. Not only are 14 years not allowed to vote, or drive, but they are also not allowed to decide whether to quite school, decide to marry, drink alcohol or consent to sex with adult. It takes a great deal of chutzpah on Harper’s part to on the one hand raise the age of consent to 16, or as the Conservatives like to say “age of protection”, and on the other hand claim that 14 years should be held to the same standards as adults when it comes to criminal matters. It also says a lot about the Conservative world view.

Of course the main reason that the major opposition parties were not able to mount an attack on Harper’s get dumb when it comes to crime platform was that they refuse to address the root cause surrounding the only kind of crime, viz., drug related crime that is going up and will continue to go up. I do not mean poverty; that was mentioned. No serious discussion of drug and gang related crime can take place without first acknowledging that what fuels drug related crime is the amount of money involved in the drug trade and the lure of money is the main reason why poor young men and teenagers come to be the foot soldiers in the drug trade. Not to put too fine a point on it but gang bangers to do commit drive bys for shits and giggles. They are on the job when they commit these acts. Pace the politicians, these are not meaningless random acts.

I surmise that part of the reason that May remained silent on the subject of legalizing marijuana, for example, was the political fallout of NDP’s version of Cheech and Chong.

English Leaders Debate: May Set the Tone

May was breath of fresh air and kept Harper on the defensive all night. Dion and Layton were terrible and Harper told so many lies of omission I lost count. Duccepe was an after thought, albeit a charming one. More later.

Seat Projections

Two things will determine whether the Conservatives end up with a majority. 1) How much of the Liberal vote in the 905 migrates over to the Conservatives? 2) How badly damaged are the Conservatives by Harper’s attack on the arts community and his get dumb when it comes to crime plan in Quebec?

My prediction as of right now.

Canada

Conservatives 151 (+27)
Liberals 75 (-28)
Bloc 45 (-6)
NDP 35 (+6)
Independents 2 (+1)


BC
Conservatives 26 (+9)
NDP 7 (-3)
Liberals 3 (-6)

Alberta

Conservatives 28

Saskatchewan

Conservatives 13 (+1) Liberals 1 (-1)

Manitoba

Conservatives 10 (+2)
NDP 4 (+1)
Liberals (-3)

Ontario

Liberals 39 (-15)
Conservatives 50 (+10)
NDP 17 (+5)

Quebec

Bloc 45 (-6)
Conservatives 14 (+4)
Liberals 13
NDP 2 (+2)
Independents 1

New Brunswick

Liberals 4 (-2)
Conservatives 5 (+2)
NDP 1

Novo Scotia

Liberals 5 (-1)
Conservatives 3
NDP 2
Independents 1 (+1)

PEI

Liberals 4

Newfoundland

Liberals 5 (+1)
NDP 1 (+1)
Conservatives 1 (-2)

NWT

NDP

Yukon

Liberals

Nunavut

Conservatives (+1) (Liberals -1)

Conservatives: seat pick ups

1) Conservatives pick up Newton North Delta from Liberals
2) Conservatives pick up Saint-Boniface from Liberals
3) Conservatives pick up Nunavut from Liberals
4) Conservatives pick up Fredericton from Liberals
5) Conservatives pick up Brant from Liberals
6) Conservatives pick up Huron-Bruce from Liberals
7) Conservatives pick up Richmond from the Liberals
8) Conservatives pick up North Vancouver from the Liberals
9) Conservatives pick up Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca from Liberals
10) Conservatives pick up Newmarket Aurora from Liberals
11) Conservatives pick up West Nova from Liberals
12) Conservatives pick up Madawaska-Restigouche form Liberals
13) Conservatives pick up Mississauga South from Liberals
14) Conservatives pick up Oakville from Liberals
15) Conservatives pick up Winnipeg South Centre from Liberals
16) Conservatives pick up Kenora from Liberals
17) Conservatives pick up London West from Liberals
18) Conservatives pick up Mississauga Erindale from Liberals
19) Conservatives pick up Brampton West form Liberals
20) Conservatives pick up Oak Ridge Markham from Liberals

1) Conservatives pick up West Vancouver from Greens

1) Conservatives pick up Vancouver Island North from NDP
2) Conservatives pick up British Columbia Southern Interior from NDP
3) Conservatives pick up Surrey North from NDP
4) Conservatives pick up New Westminster-Coquitlam from NDP

1) Conservatives pick up Brome-Missisquoi from Bloc
2) Conservatives pick up Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine from Bloc
3) Conservatives pick up Haute-Gaspésie-La Mitis-Matane-Matapédia from Bloc
4) Conservatives pick up Montmorency-Charlevoix-Haute-Côte-Nord from Bloc

Liberals: seat pick ups

1) Liberals pick up St John's South Mount Pearl from Conservatives

1) Liberals pick up Parkdale-High Park from NDP

1) Liberals pick up Papineau from the Bloc


NDP: seat pick ups

1) NDP pick up Churchill from Liberals
2) NDP pick up Nickel Belt from Liberals
3) NDP pick up Algoma-Manitoulin Kapuskasing from Liberals
4) NDP pick up Thunder Bay Rainy River from Liberals
5) NDP pick up Sudbury from Liberals

1) NDP pick up Oshawa from Conservatives
2) NDP pick up Thunder Bay Superior North from Conservatives
(Liberal win 2006)
3) NDP pick up Vancouver Kingsway from Conservatives
(Liberal win in 2006, Emerson)
4) NDP pick up St. Johns East from Conservatives

1) NDP pick up Gatineau from the Bloc

Bloc: seat pick ups

1) Bloc pick up Jonquière-Alma from Conservatives

Dion Disaster: Some Hard Truths

For weeks many Liberal bloggers have been clinging to Nanos. However, Nanos has the Conservatives at 40% now and it is time that every Liberal acknowledge some hard truths.

1) The green shift a disaster.

2) Dion is a disaster.

3) The Liberal platform is mix of boring platitudes and policies that have been announced before and have not captured the imagination of the Canadian people.

4) If the Liberals stay the course, they will be wiped off the map. There is likely nothing that could stay off a Conservative majority now, but that is what makes a late hail marry worth it.

5) The Liberal ads suck. The negative ads are not specific enough and the positive ads are a complete waste of money. Go negative and do not let up.

6) If the Liberals hold the Conservatives to minority, they could dump Dion and elect Rae or Ignatieff leader and the party will survive. If the Conservatives take a majority and Rae and Ignatieff pack in, the very future of the Liberal party could be in jeopardy.

MSM and Objectivity

Paul Krugman once quipped that should Bush claim the earth flat the following headline would appear the next day “Shape of the earth: opinions differ”. His point was that a false version of objectivity holds sway over the MSM and this has a profound affect over the quality of news coverage. The media sees it as their job to report how opposing political groupings view an issue all the while withholding judgment on the issue itself. This sometimes gives news coverage an Alice in Wonder Land character. Take the recent controversy about “putting lipstick on a pig”. Rather than simply dealing with what Obama said and the absurdity of characterizing such a comment as a smear directed at Sarah Palin, spin doctors were brought in on both sides to give us their interpretation of what was implied when Obama uttered said comments. We do not need an authority to tell us the meaning of a mundane saying. Call a spade a spade and then show us that spade.

Another problem is that just because one side is able to appeal to legitimate authorities does not mean that the media should seek out some huckster on the other side, in the name of “balance”, and pass him off as being equal in statue and yet this happens all the time. This has allowed the right to assert that there is serious debate when a learned consensus exists. There is no debate about the merits of Darwinian theories of evolution as compared to Intelligent Design. There is no debate about whether climate change is occurring. Learned opinion about Insite is not spilt and learned opinion is not spilt about Harper’s criminal justice plans either.

On Crime: Conservatives say it is uninformed opinion that counts

Anthony Doob, a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto "it looks like some grade school dropout wrote this thing."

Nicholas Bala, a specialist in youth crime at Queen's University in Kingston, "significantly bad social policy."

Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University "It's really very much a commitment to the American model. In America they have crime rate that's three-and-a-half times higher than ours and they put five times as many people in jail. That doesn't seem to me to be a very workable equation”

Ross Hastings, University of Ottawa criminologist, and co-founder of the Institute for the Prevention of Crime: "This is more of a politics of crime rather than it is a reasoned, evidence-based response to the problem of crime.”

Angela Campbell, who specializes in children and the law at McGill University's law faculty. "hard-line, law-and-order approach that is very simplistic and doesn't look at the social nuances that lead young people to criminal behaviour."

With their get dumb when it comes to crime plan panned by experts, the Conservatives argued that what really counts is what the uninformed where saying.

Jim Bob: The victims of crime should determine the punishment: they are the most objective

Jane Doe Tory: I hope those little #%$$# rot in hell

Grumpy old Guy: When I was young, kids knew their place.

Old guy from the Simpsons: that’s a paddling.

Sarah Palin: 14 year olds are not only enough to consent to sex, get married, drink alcohol, drive, join the army and vote, but if they commit a crime they need to be held to the same standard we would hold a adult to.

Your Average Canadian According to Harper

Liberal Platform

I had hoped for more, but the hopelessly temperamentally conservative Liberal party of Canada gave me what I expected. Dion acts as if Robert Stanfield was a Liberal icon and not Trudeau. The Liberals are not even promising to ban hand guns. I will hold my nose and vote Liberal, but only because in my riding the only two parties with a chance are the Liberals and the Conservatives. If the Liberals loose, and there is no reason to believe that they will win, I will be calling for Dion to be ousted as party leader as soon as the results are in.

Dion needs to go after the God, Gays and Gun crowd

The old adage has it that Canada is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Dion seems to have forgotten this. He seems to have forgotten that calling someone a social conservative is just a polite way of calling them a moron. In past elections the Liberals have had Stockwell Day, Randy White and Charles Mcvety. This election Dion has not introduced anything that will cause the nuts to break free from their handlers. We social liberals are itching for the opportunity to beat the rhetorical tar out of social cons. Dion needs to give us that opportunity.

Save what you can

Stuff Dion in some room and tell him outside of the debates he is not allowed to talk English again in public. Speaking of the debates, 100% of Dion’s energies should be focused on them. Let Rae and Ignatieff do the talking from now on

Stop wasting money on useless leadership ads. Dion is unsalable. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. The Liberals must go negative. Under no circumstances can Dion be shown in an ad or his voice heard.

The Green shift is unmediated disaster. Stop talking about it.

Promise to ban hand guns. This will help them with urban women.

The election is lost. It is all about keeping Harper in minority territory. On the subject of minority, mention the prospect of a Harper majority at every chance.

Conservatives promised to slay the Surplus

Conservative candidate Cindy Silver: December 8 North Shore Outlook "Continuous federal surpluses are a sign, not of economic health, but of over-taxation.”

Chuck Strahl “Canadians know that the surplus comes from over taxation.”
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:v_OTC4oJYs8J:www.chuckstrahl.com/view_page.php%3Fid%3D527+stephen+Harper+over-taxation+surplus+&hl=en

Jay Hill “For Conservatives, a surplus is an error known as over-taxation”
http://www.jayhillmp.com/news/weekcol/2004/Nov172004.htm

Conservative candidate Mike Wallace. “Paul Martin has no credibility in fiscal matters - by overtaxing Canadians he has run massive budget surpluses year after year”
http://www.mikewallace.ca/

Conservative candidate Jim Flaherty: “The total federal surplus (over-taxation) was 63 billion during the last eight years.”

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:8svPdM_x0jwJ:jimflaherty.ca/docs/GST.pdf+stephen+harper+surplus+over-taxation+&hl=en


Now where have heard this surplus = over-taxation talking point before? Think think think. Oh yes, it was part of Republican Party platform back in 2000. “Budget surpluses are the result of over-taxation of the American people.” Needless to say, having turned record surpluses into record deficits I think it is safe to say that the Republicans have, indeed, succeeded in slaying the surplus and now the Conservatives are poised to follow suit.

Green Shift is a Unmediated Disaster: Change Course

Call it what you will, the Green shift has been an unmediated political disaster that is now the Liberals cross to bear. That said, the Liberals are not condemned to press with only this policy. They need to change the channel and the only thing that is going to accomplish this is to wide into the cultural wars in a big way. Do not worry about what the hinterlands may think. It is too late to think about winning the election. The best the Liberals can hope for now is hold on to what they have in Canada’s major cities. My personal favorite is promising to legalize marijuana, but this will likely fall on deaf ears. Promising to introduce euthanasia is not nearly as bold but might buy the Liberals a few days grace from the green disaster headlines.

Change Course

The Liberals need to stop putting lipstick on Liberal pigs. The Green shift is abject political failure. They need to focus on other things and not just the Green Shift. They also need to stop making Dion the face of the campaign. They need to emphasize team. Yes this runs counter to usual campaign orthodoxy, but Dion is a clear liability. Every time he speaks the Liberals loose people to boredom or worse. The less he tries to speak English the better for him and the Liberals. Park him in Quebec and tell him to limit himself to French as much as possible. Assign each region a designated spokesperson or spokespersons. Put Rae in BC, Ignatieff in Ontario and Brison in the Maritimes for example. Next, fluffy short on specifics ads about the green shift will not arrest Harper’s march to a majority. The Liberals need to produce hard hitting political ads that are long on specifics.

The hopelessly conservative Liberal party of Canada

The Toronto Star Thomas Walkom is right. http://www.thestar.com/FederalElection/article/495706 The Liberals are entirely undeserving of the name “progressive”. What exactly is progressive about Dion? On paper he is no more progressive than Gordan, right of Attila the Hun, Campbell? Dion punted away the Afghan issue, has been silent on health care, seems to have shelved any plans for early childhood education and has not opened any new fronts on the cultural front. If he wants to inject any kind excitment into his campaign, he best throw us a bone or two.

Green Bore: ZZZZZ

What the Liberals need to do, other than getting Rae and Ignatieff to take some of the load off Dion, is they need to revamp their Green Shift talking points – or better yet switch the subject to something else, but alas that is just not going to happen. Anyway, saying that you want to tax more of what we do not want and tax less of what we want more of is fine as far as it goes, but one can not fill 5 minutes of speech mindlessly outlining such a “simple” plan. The biggest strike against the Green shift is not that the Conservatives have managed to paint it as a tax grab and they have been partly successful in that regard. No the biggest strike against the Green Shift is that it bores people to tears and they find its self appointed salesman hopelessly dull.

How to avoid a full on Dion disaster

Go negative in a big way.

run ads painting Harper as a mean spirited bully and promote viral internet ads doing the same

Attack Harper’s economic record repeatedly

Promote something other than the Green Shift. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Liberals own the environment or that environment is the issue.

Goad social conservatives into a major fight by promising to introduce something that really pisses them off

Promise to ban hand guns again

Get Rae and Ignatieff out in front of the cameras. Dion’s English has improved, but not enough.

Sask. and Alberta are lost causes --- forget about them.

Barbara Yaffe on Conservative Immigration Reforms: Wrong as Always

I am not a Barbara Yaffe fan and nothing in her recent column on immigration changes that. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/columnists/story.html?id=1404512e-d7eb-4f6a-a6a9-93ba78a71fb5

Yaffe: At present the country has a backlog of 925,900 permanent-residence applications. If unaddressed, the backlog is set to grow to 1.5 million by 2012, which would force newcomers to endure a decade-long wait.

There are is not one massive line, but many lines as there are embassies and consulates. How long someone takes to get processed does not depend upon how many people are applying to immigrant to Canada world wide but among other things how many are applying at a particular location. It may take someone in Warsaw 1.8 years to be processed, but someone in Bogotá over 16 years.

Another thing is that Canada puts a quota on the number of people taken in at each local. In other words, to present the problem as if Canada were processing people as fast as they could but we lack the right number of tellers is wrong. Those bottlenecks that do exist, exist because the government wants them to exist.

Yaffe: The current system requires applications to be handled on a first-come, first-served basis.

This is not true and Finley is either lying or ignorant when she says otherwise. As Guidy Mamann of the immigration law firm Mamann & Associates notes the immigration minister is not required by law to process applications as they come in.

“In an interview last week with CTV’s Mike Duffy, Finley confirmed that our backlog now stands at about 925,000 applications. The government maintains that the Minister needs these powers to cherry pick applicants who are needed here on a priority basis. She was asked by Duffy, if under the present system, the department was able to fast track, say a welder who was desperately needed in Fort McMurray . Finley answered “The way the law stands now we have to process the oldest application first. If that person is number 600,000 in line we’ve got a lot of applications to get through before that”.

This is simply not true. Our current legislation states that the federal cabinet “may make any regulation ... relating to classes of permanent residents or foreign nationals” including “selection criteria, the weight, if any to be given to all or some of those criteria, the procedures to be followed in evaluating all or some of those criteria… the number of applications to be processed or approved in a year” etc. In fact, in the case of Vaziri v. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Federal Court held in September 2006 that our current legislation “authorize[s] the Minister to set target levels and to prioritize certain classes of PR applicants” without even a
regulation being passed. Accordingly, Finley has more than enough power under our current legislation to make virtually any changes that she wants subject to the Charter.”

Yaffe: Impartiality is well and good, but entry to Canada is a privilege and the humanitarian end of the process is addressed through the family and refugee classes of immigration, which Finley has pledged won't be affected.

Canada needed all the economic immigrants it can handle. What it does not need is refugees and family class immigrants. Indeed, while much has been made of the fact that immigrants are lagging further and further behind, once you look at it by category it becomes apparent that only skilled principle applicants earning anywhere close to what their Canadian peers are earning and skilled principle applicants are the only category of immigrants that are working in numbers that even approach the Canadian average.

"At 26 weeks after their arrival, 50% of all immigrants aged 25 to 44 were employed. This was 30 percentage points below the employment rate of about 80% among all individuals aged 25 to 44 in the Canadian population. ... At 52 weeks after arrival, the employment rate among prime working-age immigrants was 58%. This narrowed the gap to 23 percentage points. At 104 weeks, or two years after arrival, the employment rate among prime working-age immigrants was 63%, 18 percentage points below the national rate of 81%. ... Immigrants admitted as principal applicants in the skilled worker category had an even better record for employment. At 26 weeks after arrival, the gap in the employment rate between them and the Canadian population was 20 percentage points. By 52 weeks, this had narrowed to 12 points, and by two years, it was down to 8 points."

http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/051013/d051013b.htm

If you tease out the numbers, 55% of non principal skilled applicants in the 25 to 44 age group are working after 2 years! As Conservative bill does not do anything to reduce the number of refugees and family class immigrants, but instead purposes to favor certain kinds of economic immigrants over others, it is completely useless.

Yaffe: Why on earth would the federal government not pick and choose, based on the economic needs of Canada , those it allows to enter Canada ? It's essential that those chosen possess skills to contribute to Canada 's wealth in no small part because Charter rights are accorded to newcomers the moment they make landfall. They're given immediate rights to avail themselves of taxpayer-funded social programs.

The Conservatives have talk a good game about the need to bring in doctors and PhDs, but this is all really just a smokescreen for allowing the provinces to bring guest workers --- many if not most of them far from skilled. Currently Alberta, for example, is hopping to fill the following positions through immigration: Front desk clerk, short order cook, baker, maid, assembly line worker, server, buser, bellhop, valet, and cafeteria worker, laundry attendant, pet groomer, general labourer, and hair dresser. All that is required of such would be immigrants is that they score 4 or 24 on the language assessment. In other words, they can still be functionally illiterate and still get it in. Never mind the fact that in many cases such demands amount to little more than a request from business that government assist them in quashing growing labour unrest, e.g., in the oil sands, such thinking is short sighted in extreme. Just look at Europe. There is ample evidence that armies of disenfranchised workers, whether they be illegal or guest, are a recipe for disaster. It is great way to, create an underclass, suppress wages, encourage black marketing, increase xenophobia and racism. Of course, great swaths of guest workers turn out to be anything but and as soon as the economy experiences a downturn they are trampled under foot and to add insult to injury are generally resented for being so unfortunate. Again look at Europe. A European like backlash is possible and this would make all but politically impossible to increase the number of economic immigrants coming to Canada at a time when it is imperative that we do so.

Yaffe: The expectation is that the government will now speed the processing of economic class immigrants with skills deemed to be in demand by provincial governments and major employers.

Business is more concerned with gaining access to cheap labour than putting Canada on a firm footing. Insuring that cleaning companies in Whistler are able to import Filipino women to work as cleaners is not a pressing issue. What is a pressing issue is the fact that Canada needs to get much younger.

The average Canadian in 2004 was 39.7; in other words Canada is one of the oldest nations on earth. However bad things are now things promise to get a lot worse. The percentage of Canadians over 65 is set to go from 14.7 now to 27.6 in 2050. If the situation was ever allowed to get this bad, the economy would be in sharp decline, the federal government would surely be in deficit, and virtually ever public entitlement program would have collapsed or would be close to it. Public health care system would surely have collapsed under the demands placed on it.

Part of the problem is that average immigrant to Canada (37.1) is not much younger than the average Canadian (39.7). The situation is akin to baling out a boat by moving water from one part of the boat to another. The average immigrant to Canada needs to be under 30 and Canada should aim to let in 500,000 plus economic class immigrants a year.

Canada, of course, is not alone in having to deal with aging population. Some European countries have it even worse.

"World Bank projections show that the working-age population of the present EU will drop from 230m now to 167m by 2050, a fall of 63m. Most of this is concentrated in the 12 current euroland countries, where working-age population is projected to drop from 186m to 131m. The worst-hit individual countries are Italy , with a 15m, or 42% fall, from 36m to 21m, followed by Spain and Germany. Britain is not immune but fares relatively well. The World Bank projects a 5m fall in working-age population, from 35.2m to 29.9m In general, though, Europe's position is dire. As Lombard Street Research writes: "The last demographic shock on a similar scale was the Black Death of the late 14th century. Even two world wars did not stop Europe 's population rising by nearly a fifth in the first half of the 20th century."

If Europe continues on as it is, the median age in Europe will go from 37.7 today to 52.3 by 2050!
As professor Charles Kupchan notes,

"today there are 35 pensioners for every 100 workers within the European Union. By 2050, current demographic trends would leave Europe with 75 pensioners for every 100 workers and in countries like Italy and Spain the ratio would be 1 to 1."