The Canadian economy grew at twice the rate of its American counterpart in early 2011, posting its fastest rate of growth in the past year.
Statistics Canada released figures on Monday showing real gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 3.9 per cent during the first quarter in Canada.
South of the border, real GDP grew only 1.8 per cent during the same time period.
[…]Also of concern are the balance sheet issues the U.S. faces as a whole, with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty recently telling CTV’s Question Period that the debt and deficit problems there “are significant.”
[…]Output was up for nearly all major industrial sectors, with StatsCan identifying the mining and oil and gas extraction industries as being the largest contributors to growth.
Newcomers to the country generally make less money and chip in less in taxes than the national average.And allowing 250,000 immigrants into the country annually is costing us all billions of dollars each and every year, according to a study by the Fraser Institute.
The study, dubbed Immigration and the Canadian Welfare State, sharply criticizes Canada’s current immigration system, using earnings and other figures from the 2005-06 fiscal year reported by 844,476 people in the 2006 Census.
It claims the group as a whole earned on average about $10,000 more and paid about $2,500 more in income taxes annually than those within the sampling who had settled in Canada in the previous 18 years.
The study also found immigrants typically pay a little over $6,000 less in property and sales taxes than the national average.
That means the approximately 3.9 million immigrants who settled in Canada between 1987 and 2004 are shortchanging federal government coffers by between $16.3 billion and $23.6 billion annually, depending on how many of those newcomers have moved back home, emigrated elsewhere or died, the study said.
[…]The study also takes on the notion that immigrants are helping the country by taking menial jobs that most Canadians don’t want.”Immigrants do fill jobs that Canadians don’t want and thus benefit the economy but, in the absence of immigration, these jobs would pay higher wages and would be filled by Canadians or eliminated by the application of labour-saving technology,” the study states.
“Under these conditions, poverty in Canada would be reduced substantially.”
As for changes, the study suggests annual immigration numbers should be increased or decreased, depending largely on “market forces.”
The study also recommends Canada be more selective, allowing only newcomers who have employment lined up, offering them citizenship only if they hang onto their job for a set number of years and deporting those who lose their jobs.
Canada has a welfare state with single-payer health care, public housing, welfare payment and free public schools. So, people who cannot pull their own weight can rely on all of these goodies provided by the working Canadians. Because of these generous benefits, Canada has a lot of people who would like to move there from poor countries. And they can’t possibly take them all in because it is costing the working Canadians billions of dollars. But there is a way for them to allow more immigration – they just have to stop all of their government handouts. If there were no handouts then everyone could come to Canada freely, because they would go home again unless they held on to their job and pulled their own weight. They could even bring their families once they had worked hard enough to support them – but those family members would not be eligible to get money from the government.
So what do we as Americans learn from this? Well, we need to make sure that the people who come here are selected on the basis of their skills, their education, their ability to pay their own way. We need to have a big fence to keep illegal immigrants out, and we need to have a huge gate to allow skilled legal immigrants in. And they can even bring their families with them – as long as they don’t get a dime of taxpayer money in cash or through social programs – they should have to pay for everything they use, including schools and health care. And they should not be eligible for a dime of government money until they get their green cards after years of demonstrated hard work and clean living.
Quebec’s $7-a-day daycare system is failing to improve children’s educational outcomes, an economics professor from Montreal says.
In a new paper, Pierre Lefebvre of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal explains that when the system was created, Quebecers were told “it would promote children’s development so they would perform better in school later.”
“This never happened,” he says.
The researcher studied children under the age of five from Quebec and children of the same age from the rest of Canada and compared their progress at various points between 1994 and 2006. He found Quebec’s family policy did nothing to improve cognitive skills in children.
According to Lefebvre, it’s because the Quebec government program is doing a lousy job.
“There is a serious quality problem. I would go as far as to say that daycare quality is very low, both in terms of educators’ formation and in terms of the quality of interactions between educators and children.”
The program receives taxpayer money from all working people. So working husbands with stay-at-home wives have to pay for a day care system that they will never use.
True, parental leave in Sweden is a generous 16 months. There are no babies in daycare. But when parental leave ends, practically the reverse is true: A full 92% of all children aged 18 months to five years are in daycare. Parents pay only a symbolic amount for this; tax subsidies for daycare are $20,000 per child, annually. Swedish taxes are among the highest in the world, and the tax system was designed to make both parents seek employment in the work force.
[…]Then there are the questions about the social toll Sweden’s childcare system is taking. Sweden has offered a comprehensive daycare system since 1975; since the early ‘90s, negative outcomes for children and adolescents are on the rise in areas of health and behaviour. While direct causation has been difficult to prove, many Swedish health-care professionals point to the lack of parent involvement beyond the first 16 months as a primary contributing factor. Psychosomatic disorders and mild psychological problems are escalating among Swedish youth at a faster rate than in any of 11 comparable European countries. Such disorders have tripled among girls over the last 25 years. Education outcomes in Swedish schools have fallen from the top position 30 years ago, to merely average amongst OECD nations today. Behaviour problems in Swedish classrooms are among the worst in Europe.
This isn’t surprising. After a generation of inexperience, Swedish parenting abilities are deteriorating. A study sponsored by the European Union showed many middle-class parents lack the ability to set limits and sense their children’s needs.
Recently, Swedish public service radio investigated the state of Swedish daycares. Parents, psychologists and daycare staff expressed deep concern. In spite of high funding levels, group size and the child-to-adult ratio continue to increase. An experienced pre-school teacher recalls that in 1980 the group size for small children was 10 kids with four adults. For older children, that ratio was five kids per adult. But after the Swedish financial crisis 20 years ago, this changed. Today younger children face ratios of up to 17 kids to three adults and older children face ratios of up to 10 to one. Staff on sick leave are not replaced. “We can’t give quality care today,” one teacher reported. Only one person interviewed contended that Swedish daycare is still top quality — the Swedish Deputy Minister of Education, Nyamko Sabuni.
Again, this program is taxpayer funded. Working husbands with stay-at-home wives will be paying for something that they don’t even use.
I think parents need to consider what happens in other countries to see how good these universal day care programs really are.
WINTERY KNIGHT 