Well this is nice to see, normally I get accused of being a Liberal shill because of how frequently I bring up the Conservative Party’s historical contributions to our current issues lol. There’s a lot of chronically-online Conservative supporters who interpret any criticism or questioning of their record as outright support of the Liberal party.
As far as being anti-immigration, I’m not. I have, however, been concerned about the expanding use of these non-permanent resident programs for a long time, particularly because it seems like the government (starting with Harper and continuing under Trudeau) has been using them to keep the labour market saturated, which is bad for people born in Canada, and even worse for immigrants. To some extent express entry for PR has been used for the same purpose in more specialized jobs.
There’s also a significant problem with an industry of fraud that’s been allowed to flourish, with a lot of the LMIA-based jobs posted on Job Bank being a scheme to sell extra CRS points to people who are ultimately trying to get PR status, but in the mean time, they have to work a job and have most or all of their wages kicked back to the employer. Michelle Rempel-Garner has been beating the drum about this for the past week, but none of this is new either, the entire scheme is laid out in pages 33-35 of this RCMP report on human trafficking in Canada which was published 15 years ago. Successive governments have promised to fix these programs but accomplished nothing.
The problem isn’t with immigrants, it’s with immigration policy being set based on corporate lobbyist interests or short-term political objectives. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program and International Mobility Program have been used to support a business culture that refuses to invest sufficiently in equipment, training, working conditions, and wages. The international student program has been used, particularly in Ontario, to soak up more revenue from young foreign students to allow under-funding of postsecondary institutions by the provinces, while also freezing domestic tuition. If you want to know more about why the foreign students themselves are getting the worst deal of anyone, have a look at this article published in the Walrus a few years ago called “The Shadowy Business of International Education”.
First of all, it’s super cool to see a content creator in the lemmyverse. Second of all, although I haven’t watched all your videos, the image you portray through your chosen titles and thumbnails show you’re pushing a basic neoliberal agenda. Lots of focus on jobs, economic performance, government debt, and scary topics like government stability and immigration.
Maybe you’re a progressive leftist who’s using this as clickbait, but my gut feeling is that if that was the case you’d be called a communist not a “liberal shill”.
I appreciate your criticism of the TFW program, definitely valid. I think I would probably say the same of most of your videos since you seem eloquent and well supported by facts. My concern is about the overall neoliberal message created by the topics you choose to explore and the effect that has on society drifting towards fascism instead of good progressive humanist development.
Also no leftist would find being called a conservative “refreshing”, and we all know how the centrist position works in practice. So I suspect you’ll continue to find it refreshing as I continue to believe you’re a conservative pushing a neoliberal agenda.
It’s refreshing because I try to avoid a partisan bias in my videos, mainly because I think both the Liberals and Conservatives have created these problems for us over the long term. On most platforms, because the Liberals have been in power for a while, this tends to lead to backlash from conservatives who think I’m saying that if things aren’t 100% the fault of the Liberals, we should just keep voting for them. So, to see people elsewhere thinking I’m pushing a conservative agenda means I’m probably striking the right tone in terms of not favouring either of the two parties that control all of federal politics.
There’s a reason I don’t want to favour either of those parties, and it’s not because I’m simply trying to create an appearance of being unbiased, it’s because I think both parties have failed regular working people, through their persistent focus on short-term economic metrics and an over-adherence to economic orthodoxy, which presumes that maximizing total profits is the same as maximizing quality of life.
The main thing I try to do in my videos is get people to set aside the partisan culture war bullshit and start understanding the root causes of problems, so we can better advocate for policies that work for us. Neoliberalism - which is promoted through the policies of both parties - has produced more profits, but the benefit of those profits is not being accrued by the people who do the productive work to create them. The delusional, out-of-touch nature of these policies can be seen in the emergence of terms like “vibecession”, where economists have been confused as to why households feel strained even though macroeconomic indicators are looking good.
The connecting thread through my content, particularly in my stuff on housing, is that excessive financialization, and the overall use of monetary tools as “solutions” rather than real productive action, is siphoning wealth away from working people and towards people who already have vast amounts of wealth. Something I’ve mentioned before is that the much-touted “largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history” when boomers eventually pass away isn’t going to be from parents to children, it’s going to be from parents to their creditors. This all flows from something I started suspecting from looking at data all the way back in my teen years, which is that wealth inequality has been persistently increasing, and increasing wealth inequality invariably leads to decreasing quality of life. As I’ve continued to look at the economy over the past twenty years, I think the main conduit that this happens through is increasing financialization and deregulation of the financial industry, which absorbs a great deal of profit in the economy while effectively producing nothing.
This is the stuff that normally leads to me being called a communist (which I’m not), so I’m still working on how to address these topics more directly without having half the viewers immediately shut off their brains and stop listening. I don’t think the solution is to redistribute wealth so that everyone is exactly equal regardless of what they’re doing with their life, it’s to change the rules of a system that’s currently set up in a way that constantly redistributes wealth upward and makes it more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. As you can probably imagine, finding a way to broach this subject without immediately being accused of being a raging commie hack is a tough nut to crack. But I’m working on it.
He’s literally criticising Pierre in this video. Would rather debunk his points with facts instead of just saying Conservative anti-immigrant garbage. He is far from conservative.
Conservative anti-immigrant garbage. Look at the rest of the videos, always criticizing liberals and ndp, never criticizing conservatives.
Absolute fearmongering trash, nobody is as scared of everything around them as tough conservative men.
Well this is nice to see, normally I get accused of being a Liberal shill because of how frequently I bring up the Conservative Party’s historical contributions to our current issues lol. There’s a lot of chronically-online Conservative supporters who interpret any criticism or questioning of their record as outright support of the Liberal party.
As far as being anti-immigration, I’m not. I have, however, been concerned about the expanding use of these non-permanent resident programs for a long time, particularly because it seems like the government (starting with Harper and continuing under Trudeau) has been using them to keep the labour market saturated, which is bad for people born in Canada, and even worse for immigrants. To some extent express entry for PR has been used for the same purpose in more specialized jobs.
There’s also a significant problem with an industry of fraud that’s been allowed to flourish, with a lot of the LMIA-based jobs posted on Job Bank being a scheme to sell extra CRS points to people who are ultimately trying to get PR status, but in the mean time, they have to work a job and have most or all of their wages kicked back to the employer. Michelle Rempel-Garner has been beating the drum about this for the past week, but none of this is new either, the entire scheme is laid out in pages 33-35 of this RCMP report on human trafficking in Canada which was published 15 years ago. Successive governments have promised to fix these programs but accomplished nothing.
The problem isn’t with immigrants, it’s with immigration policy being set based on corporate lobbyist interests or short-term political objectives. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program and International Mobility Program have been used to support a business culture that refuses to invest sufficiently in equipment, training, working conditions, and wages. The international student program has been used, particularly in Ontario, to soak up more revenue from young foreign students to allow under-funding of postsecondary institutions by the provinces, while also freezing domestic tuition. If you want to know more about why the foreign students themselves are getting the worst deal of anyone, have a look at this article published in the Walrus a few years ago called “The Shadowy Business of International Education”.
First of all, it’s super cool to see a content creator in the lemmyverse. Second of all, although I haven’t watched all your videos, the image you portray through your chosen titles and thumbnails show you’re pushing a basic neoliberal agenda. Lots of focus on jobs, economic performance, government debt, and scary topics like government stability and immigration.
Maybe you’re a progressive leftist who’s using this as clickbait, but my gut feeling is that if that was the case you’d be called a communist not a “liberal shill”.
I appreciate your criticism of the TFW program, definitely valid. I think I would probably say the same of most of your videos since you seem eloquent and well supported by facts. My concern is about the overall neoliberal message created by the topics you choose to explore and the effect that has on society drifting towards fascism instead of good progressive humanist development.
Also no leftist would find being called a conservative “refreshing”, and we all know how the centrist position works in practice. So I suspect you’ll continue to find it refreshing as I continue to believe you’re a conservative pushing a neoliberal agenda.
It’s refreshing because I try to avoid a partisan bias in my videos, mainly because I think both the Liberals and Conservatives have created these problems for us over the long term. On most platforms, because the Liberals have been in power for a while, this tends to lead to backlash from conservatives who think I’m saying that if things aren’t 100% the fault of the Liberals, we should just keep voting for them. So, to see people elsewhere thinking I’m pushing a conservative agenda means I’m probably striking the right tone in terms of not favouring either of the two parties that control all of federal politics.
There’s a reason I don’t want to favour either of those parties, and it’s not because I’m simply trying to create an appearance of being unbiased, it’s because I think both parties have failed regular working people, through their persistent focus on short-term economic metrics and an over-adherence to economic orthodoxy, which presumes that maximizing total profits is the same as maximizing quality of life.
The main thing I try to do in my videos is get people to set aside the partisan culture war bullshit and start understanding the root causes of problems, so we can better advocate for policies that work for us. Neoliberalism - which is promoted through the policies of both parties - has produced more profits, but the benefit of those profits is not being accrued by the people who do the productive work to create them. The delusional, out-of-touch nature of these policies can be seen in the emergence of terms like “vibecession”, where economists have been confused as to why households feel strained even though macroeconomic indicators are looking good.
The connecting thread through my content, particularly in my stuff on housing, is that excessive financialization, and the overall use of monetary tools as “solutions” rather than real productive action, is siphoning wealth away from working people and towards people who already have vast amounts of wealth. Something I’ve mentioned before is that the much-touted “largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history” when boomers eventually pass away isn’t going to be from parents to children, it’s going to be from parents to their creditors. This all flows from something I started suspecting from looking at data all the way back in my teen years, which is that wealth inequality has been persistently increasing, and increasing wealth inequality invariably leads to decreasing quality of life. As I’ve continued to look at the economy over the past twenty years, I think the main conduit that this happens through is increasing financialization and deregulation of the financial industry, which absorbs a great deal of profit in the economy while effectively producing nothing.
This is the stuff that normally leads to me being called a communist (which I’m not), so I’m still working on how to address these topics more directly without having half the viewers immediately shut off their brains and stop listening. I don’t think the solution is to redistribute wealth so that everyone is exactly equal regardless of what they’re doing with their life, it’s to change the rules of a system that’s currently set up in a way that constantly redistributes wealth upward and makes it more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. As you can probably imagine, finding a way to broach this subject without immediately being accused of being a raging commie hack is a tough nut to crack. But I’m working on it.
He’s literally criticising Pierre in this video. Would rather debunk his points with facts instead of just saying
Conservative anti-immigrant garbage. He is far from conservative.