This is Canada, a country that is sparsely populated, peaceful and not awkward, and has its own drawbacks.
Canada is a sparsely populated country with the second largest land area in the world, second only to Russia, but with a population of only about 35 million. More than one-fifth of Canada’s total population is born overseas, and even those born in the country have a very high proportion of parents who were immigrants from the previous generation. It is conceivable that Canada is a very typical immigrant country.
The earliest indigenous population in this country migrated from the North Asia across the Bering Strait (the ancient Alaska and Siberian continents did not separate) to the American continent since 14,000 years ago. Many Aboriginal descendants of Canada like to go to Mongolia to find roots. Many of them are black hair, dark eyes, and yellow skin. They are similar to the appearance of our Chinese people, and quite a few people have become descendants of mixed immigrants with European immigrants.
I have lived in Canada for 4 years and feel that the local environment is similar to that in the northern United States. Driving from Canada to the United States, there is no difference in scenery along the way except that the speed limit sign changes from miles to kilometers. Many retail organizations such as COSTCO and Wal-Mart are the same, and fast food restaurants are like McDonald’s, Starbucks, WENDYS, SUBWAY, etc.
The phenomenon of marriage between the United States and Canada is very common. Many of the couples or children in the white family hold US citizenship. Half of the airports in Canadian cities fly to the United States. The US Customs is also located in major airports in Canada. It is very convenient to fly directly to the United States to exit the station.
The difference between ethnic minorities in Canada and the United States is that Canada has a high proportion of Asians and the United States has a high proportion of Mexicans and Afro-descendants. The guns in the United States are rampant, and the management of guns in Canada is strict: individuals can buy guns, but they need to go through the police officer’s review process for one month; the guns to be bought need to be strictly limited to the two places of their own safes and shooting ranges, and the guns are carried from home to the shooting range. Also have to inform the police, unlike in the United States, you can take the street with you.
The peak and ebb of Chinese immigrants
With the continued colonial behavior of Europeans since the 16th century, Canada naturally formed a white-dominated society. It is only in today’s Canadian society that it is rapidly aging like Europe. In order to maintain the normal operation of society and the sustained economic growth, immigration has become Canada’s basic national policy. The Liberal government, now in power, plans to accept 1 million immigrants in the next three years.
There are more than 1.8 million Chinese immigrants in Canada. The first batch of Chinese who came to Canada was hired to repair the Pacific Railway. After the completion of the railway, many Chinese have been subjected to discrimination and bullying. In order to reunite their wives and children, they have to pay the government head tax, and life is very difficult.
The second batch of Chinese immigrants peaked before Hong Kong returned to China in 1997. Many Hong Kong people listen to rumors, quit their jobs, sell their houses, and immigrate to their homes. These Hong Kong people are not all adapted to the new life of Canada. Many people can only work hard and work hard. After seeing the economic development of Hong Kong after the return of Hong Kong, a considerable proportion of Hong Kong people have embarked on the road to return. This is the peculiar phenomenon of Hong Kong people with 300,000 Canadian citizenship in Hong Kong.
Before the 1990s, Chinese immigrants from Canada originated from overseas Chinese who were expelled and persecuted by the Vietnamese government in the 1970s, as well as Taiwanese and Hong Kong people.
The tide of immigration in mainland China originated in the late 1990s. At that time, the Chinese government opened up the immigration export policy in order to join the WTO and to integrate into the world trend, so that the Chinese can enjoy the same policy as the Canadian immigrants. Opportunity to compete for more than 200,000 immigrant quotas per year in Canada. The Chinese have topped the list for many years.
With the rapid economic development of China after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, many wealthy people have also begun to invest in immigration. At that time, the threshold for investment immigration was very low. As long as it cost $100,000 to invest in Canadian bonds, there was no need for English skills, which led to a large number of investment immigrants entering Canada.
The rapid growth of Chinese ethnic groups in Canada naturally leads to the alert of the Canadian Immigration Department. Canada advocates cultural diversity and does not want a single ethnic population to rapidly increase. Since 2013, a series of policies have raised the threshold for skilled immigrants and immigrant investors, limiting the number of Chinese immigrants per year (in 2014, they have lost to Indians and Filipinos), but reunited immigrants with Chinese students and Chinese relatives. The door has always been open.
Large climate differences, more livable cities
The Greater Vancouver area and Vancouver Island are backed by the Arctic cold currents and the Pacific warm current. The winter temperatures are rarely below the freezing point, and the number of days of snow and ice is not much; The rain of the leaching is not stopping, the sky is hard to see the sun for several weeks, and the weather in Seattle, USA, is two hours away.
Due to the global warming climate, large forest fires broke out every summer in the three provinces of Western Canada (three provinces in western Canada) and California. In the summer of 2018, there were more than 560 forest fires in BC (British Columbia) alone, and severe smog over the city of Western Canada lasted for several weeks. On the whole, however, there is no hot weather in summer in Canada, which is an ideal place to escape the heat; Katong will encounter heat waves in summer, but there are not many hot days.
The three grasslands in the central grasslands are very cold in winter, and temperatures of 20 to 40 degrees are common and last for several months. The heavy snow of half a year has caused a lot of traffic accidents, which has brought many difficulties to people’s lives.
In Ontario, Canada, except for the lower latitudes of Toronto and its southern regions, the winter temperatures are slightly better, and other regions, plus Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, are unusually cold in winter. Blizzards in the Atlantic province can sometimes reach 2 meters. It is precisely because of the cold climate and low employment opportunities that immigrants go to Canada with more people and more people. Many young college graduates went to the United States whenever they had the chance, and some people returned to their home country because they couldn’t stand the cold and loneliness. Therefore, the government’s immigration work cannot stop at a moment.
Canada has a time difference of 4.5 hours from Vancouver, a Pacific coast city, to Newfoundland, the Atlantic coast. The population is mainly concentrated in the area along the US-Canada border. First, because of the Arctic in northern Canada, most of the area is forested and frozen, and only the southern part of the US border is relatively livable. Along the US border, the population is concentrated in Ontario, Quebec, Canada, and BC and Alberta in Western Canada. Other provinces have a relatively small population.
The country’s largest metropolitan area is the Toronto area, with a population of about 6 million; the second is the same in the Greater Montreal region of Canada, with a population of about 4 million; the third is the Vancouver metropolitan area of Canada, with a population of about 2.5 million; Calgary, Western Canada The region has a population of about 1.2 million; Edmonton in Western Canada, Ottawa in the capital of Canada, Halifax in the Atlantic Province, and the metropolitan areas of Central Saskatchewan and Manitoba with a population of less than one million.
In the list of world livable cities published by The Economist, three Canadian cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary) have consistently ranked in the top ten.
Compared to most cities in Europe and Australian metropolises, Canada’s public transport system is as underdeveloped as most cities in the United States. The population density in downtown Canada is relatively low. Many cities have CBDs on weekends, just like ghost towns. The Canadian population is concentrated in the surrounding suburbs dominated by wooden houses.
Housing prices in two densely populated metropolitan areas – Toronto and Vancouver – have skyrocketed in recent years. These two places are also the preferred places for immigrants to settle down, and almost all flights to China are concentrated in these two cities. House prices in other cities have not risen and fallen compared to 10 years ago. House prices here depend entirely on supply and demand. The houses in densely populated metropolises are all fragrant. The Canadian media blame the Chinese for speculating on housing prices.
Economic over-reliance on commodities
The Canadian economy mainly relies on oil and gas, forestry wood papermaking, wheat rapeseed oil, animal husbandry, mining, potash, education, tourism, and aviation automobile industries. The manufacturing sector is concentrated in the Toronto-centric region of Ontario, with oil and gas mainly concentrated in central Alberta.
Oil is mainly in the form of oil sands in Canada. It is mined from the ground in mining and consumes a huge amount of steam to evaporate oil from the sand. Due to the huge carbon emissions, it has been protested by many environmental organizations around the world. .
Canada’s existing oil pipeline can only be transported to the single market in the United States and is forced to sell at a discount. The KEYSTONE XL expansion plan envisioned to cope with the growing capacity was vetoed during Obama’s administration in the United States until Trump took office and received restrictive approval.
The Canadian federal government approved the Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean Vancouver BURNABY port for the rise and prosperity of US shale oil and the current discounted sales due to reliance on the US single market. The East Asian market exports oil. Unfortunately, this pipeline was strongly opposed by the BC provincial government and some local residents. The BC governor threatened to use all local regulations to prevent the construction of this line, forcing the federal government to take the entire project from the owner Kinder Morgan. After buying it, it was able to remove the roadblocks set by the BC provincial government.
So far, the two pipelines have no substantial signs of construction. Increasing oil sand production capacity, in the face of very limited pipeline transportation capacity, can only be transported to the United States by train at a high price, greatly increasing transportation costs.
Although the oil sands reserves in Alberta reached 174 billion barrels, the oil sands industry, which has attracted the world’s oil and gas giants to gamble, has been madly sold because of the plunge in energy prices in recent years. Foreign oil and gas giants basically resold the original oil fields to the two oil sands giants of Canada, SUNCOR and CNRL, and evacuated the oil sands industry. The Canadian dollar is known as the oil dollar, and the Australian dollar is called the iron dollar. This is also the root cause of the sharp fall in the Canadian dollar exchange rate in recent years.
In 2017, China originally planned to negotiate with Canada to sign a China-Canada free trade agreement. Although the Canadian authoritative economist pointed out that the small economic powers and big powers in the world have signed free trade, they have always benefited from the small country’s economy. However, the newly ruling Liberal Party leader Trudeau cannot compare with Canada’s labor rights and interests. It is ruined by the employment opportunities of Canadian workers.
Selling education is profitable
Canada is known as an English-French bilingual country. In fact, French is only common in Quebec. Québec residents are mostly French descendants, and as a result, they have repeatedly had independent events. In order to appease the hearts and minds of French-speaking residents of Quebec, the Canadian government has set the same status for French and English, so that documents and speeches of all government departments are bilingual, as are public places. Government departments and airlines recruit employees with bilingual requirements.
Although 9 provinces and 3 districts are all English-speaking areas except Quebec, there are still many French-speaking primary schools, because parents of the English department understand that children receive French education from an early age and can apply when they grow up. Civil servant work. Canadian civil servants work just like the United States, and they are the most stable and most rewarding jobs besides doctors and lawyers.
Today’s manufacturing and other commercial organizations in Canada are highly competitive due to the integration of world trade, that is, those of the world’s top 500 companies are rolling apart. Canada’s world-class companies such as Northern Telecom and Blackberry have gone bankrupt. Bombardier, the “train and air plane giant” in Montreal, is also in a dilemma, relying on government bailouts to survive.
Because English has become a monopolistic language in the world of commercial trade and technology, Canada naturally and several other English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia have become the world’s most profitable countries for selling education. Every year, the publishing institutions of the world’s university rankings are held by British associations. Naturally, the universities in the four English-speaking countries have taken advantage of the advantages of time and place, and firmly occupy the front row of the rankings.
The welfare system is too late
Canada adopts a universal free medical care system, which is completely different from the medical system in which the United States mainly purchases insurance company policies. Free medical care is not free in the true sense. For example, Toronto and Vancouver, which are concentrated in immigration, need to pay monthly insurance to take measures to take pre-emptive measures for residents below the poverty line.
The separation of medicines is a common measure taken by Western countries in order to avoid the drawbacks of hospitals taking medicines. Drugs are also not covered by free medical care. Patients are asked by insurance companies to buy them at their own expense or at their own expense. The government has many rescue programs for low-income people. Even if they are low-income or non-income people without insurance, they can also get medicines through government aid programs, including some expensive anti-cancer drugs.
Australia is a system that coexists with public hospitals and private hospitals, while Canada strictly prohibits private hospitals. The government is worried that the emergence of private hospitals will attract a large number of outstanding public hospital doctors to quit, undermining the principle of fairness and justice that Canada is proud of. However, the full expectation of public hospitals has created problems of inefficiency and long queues. Usually, non-emergency B-ultrasound waits for 3 months, CT and colonoscopy waits for 6 months, and a knee surgery average hospital waiting time is 6 to 8 months. Of course, when the disease is life-threatening, the hospital will immediately diagnose and perform the operation. It is entirely up to the end of the disease to determine the queuing time.
Like Australia and Northern Europe, Canada is a country with high taxes and high welfare. When you are young and strong, your income may be taxed by nearly half, but when you accidentally lose your ability to work or age, the government will fulfill its commitment to return each of its abilities through its well-established welfare system. Low citizens. As the aging population grows, whether the government can maintain such a welfare system in the future will have to ask a big question mark.
At this stage, the legal retirement age in Canada is 65 years old. When the residents reach this age, even if there is no deposit before the birth, the government will also invest in the rescue. In Canada’s major cities, well-established public and private nursing homes have been established, but because of the growing ageing, the beds in nursing homes are far from enough, and some queues take several years. At present, the government encourages the elderly to stay at home, and there are professional service agencies in the community who regularly come to the door to drive a special nursing bus that can lift wheelchairs and send the elderly to major medical examination centers, clinics, hospitals, supermarkets, etc.
The shackles that tourists can see on the streets are basically drug-lovers, alcohol-loving, mentally problematic wanderers who refuse to participate in government relief projects. In fact, the government has a low-rent housing system. No matter how much you earn, you can apply for a queue if you pay 20% of your monthly income. The money you pay is not enough for ordinary utilities or property.
Canada’s minimum wage has gradually transitioned to 15 Canadian dollars per hour. It is not difficult to maintain a life. If you have a disease or disability, you can apply for a subsidy. The government grants subsidies according to the standard. From a few hundred to several thousand Canadian dollars per month. Wait. Every low-income family can raise more than 6,000 Canadian dollars of milk per year for a child until the child is 18 years old.
However, don’t ignore this country and have its own problems, such as drug abuse and legalization of marijuana. Members of Congress even advocated the legalization of heroin, and reports of young people dying of chemical drugs fentanyl abound.
The high welfare system has created a group of lazy people, which has damped the passion of people to work actively and the damage to the economic structure has become increasingly serious. The economy is heavily dependent on the export of bulk commodities, which has caused Canada to lose its ability to innovate in the manufacturing and high-tech sectors. The GDP growth rate has changed with the international market conditions of commodities, like the roller coaster.
This is Canada, a country that is sparsely populated, peaceful and not awkward, and has its own drawbacks.
