Monday, September 21, 2009

Im'grints Taking our PENSIONS dagnabbit !

I got an email [origin: vancouver craigslist?] forwarded from a family member who hoped I would become incensed over Bill C-428:
Subject: URGENT ATTENTION About Our OAS pensions Bill C-428 An Act to Amend the Old Age Security Act ( residency requirements) This bill had first reading in the house on June 18, 2009.

When I saw the video on U tube, I heard that it was seconded by Bob Rae. MP Ms Dhalla who introduced the bill represents the riding of Brampton whose population is mainly east Indian. Right now you have to have lived in Canada for 10 years in order to qualify for Old Age Security. She wants the time reduced to 3 years. So you could come here when you are 62 years old, never work or contribute to this county’s tax system etc and qualify for full Old Age Security benefits. Can you believe this. 10 years is a stretch!!

I certainly hope this bill does not get passed and I am thinking it is about time we call our elected MP’s as well as the NDP and Liberal candidates and ask them if they support this bill. This may be one factor to help us determine who get elected in the next election.

I hope this bill doesn't get passed!!!!!!

What Can You Do?

1. Spread the message to family and friends
2. write letters, send emails or call Members of Parliament
If you don't agree, I apologize for wasting your time

Bill C-428, An Act to Amend the Old Age Security Act.( residency requirements ) It is time Canada looked after it's own citizens before splashing OUR money around on people who have no right to this money, never having contributed to it. If a family wishes to bring elderly relatives here and wish to waive their own right to collect these resources in order that the elderly relatives can - fine, otherwise, look after them yourself and do not expect the Canadian people to do it. There are too many people abusing the generosity of the Canadian people, it needs to stop ... NOW!

Here is my reply:

Sorry, I can't muster the outrage, and here's why:

Let's say you escaped war-torn Congo or Somalia or North Korea or Gaza - where you have likely slaved away in harsh conditions your whole life with nothing to show for it but your new-found freedom as a refugee here in Canada - a land of peace and relative prosperity. What are you supposed to do when you hit 65? You probably need social assistance one way or another. So if it isn't a pension it'll be something else, because the sight of such persons starving to death on the sidewalk wouldn't be pretty.

For them to be in this situation, the government must have previously allowed them to come and live here at an advanced age. So Canada implicitly became responsible for their well-being at that point. We obviously can't leave them to rot just because they didn't pay into the Canadian system all those years. Anyway, it's not like this is a whopping huge number of people, sitting pretty and "living off the fat of the land" while you and I are left with nothing. And remember, this does not affect other pension recipients one iota - only tangentially, by possibly adding a few hundred thousand to our $55+ billion deficit. (Is that what Jim Flaherty last pegged it at? I can't keep up).

This email campaign is just a typical baiting tactic of the right-wing political machine meant to get us all fired up over nothing of much import, distracting us from some of the real mis-steps and atrocities of our Harper government (note that we are asked to pressure our NDP or Liberal candidates, implying them as the "culprits"; leaving the Conservatives as the de facto "good guys".)

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9 comments:

Mark Richard Francis said...

From http://www.rubydhalla.ca/PDF/InParliament/In_Parliament/Old_Age_Benefits/June%2018th,%202009_Old_Age_Security_Act.pdf

"This bill seeks to increase support to immigrant seniors and erase an inequality and discrimination that exists among seniors coming to Canada from certain countries, like China, the Caribbean, India, Africa and South America. Immigrant seniors from these countries have to wait 10 years for their old age security benefits versus three years for seniors from other countries."

The bill: http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4007101&Language=e&Mode=1&File=24

ACSial said...

For years, the pundits have been telling us that we 'need' all of these immigrants (over a quarter of a million per year), to shore up our pension system, by bringing in younger workers to cover retirees in our 'ageing' population. Now, it seems, the facade's finally fallen off.

This is an actuarial timebomb, with a three-year fuse. The pension system will NOT remain solvent with this influx of retirees. The Canadian government owes its responsibility to CANADIAN citizens--the plight of foreigners fleeing 'harsh conditions' is sad, but not the responsibility of the CANADIAN government.

Not only should elderly immigrants not recieve pension benefits, they shouldn't really be admitted into the country. We don't need foreign elderly people, when we're barely taking care of our own.

Canadians have to take a hard look at what mass immigration has done to Canada, without calling each other 'racists'. Our pension and healthcare system can't afford ageing immigrants. Our environment is suffering the effects of urban sprawl, habitat loss and stress on fresh water supplies, caused by nothing other than immigration-fuelled population growth. Food prices are rising, thanks to immigration-caused urban sprawl, that's gobbling up farmland.

We're experiencing hitherto unknow social ills: doda and khat abuse, honour killings, female genital mutillation. Babar Khalsa, LTTE and Islamist terrorists operate with imputiny in Canada. As the cases of HRC complaints against Canadian publishers demonstrated, many of these immigrants have nothing but contempt for Canadian values.

Increasingly, our 'multicultural' society is becoming ethnically fragmented, with second and third-generation immigrants unable to function in either official language. Foreign gangs--MS-13, the Fresh Off the Boat and FOB-Killers, Vietnamese gangs and Chinese Triads, Hatian and Jamaican gangsters--are responsible for the gunplay on our streets, including the murder of bystanders like Jane Creba.

You may love this new 'Canada', but I'm nostalgic for the Old Days: wide open expanses of land and affordable food, virtually no urban gang violence, everyone being able to function in English, or French, freedom of the press, no Sikh airline bombers, Muslim terrorist cells, or Tamil Tiger street-blocking protests, and being inocent of terms like 'honour killing', hijab and 'female genital mutillation'.

Scott in Montreal said...

ACSial: thanks for all the attibution! Way to back up all your outlandish sweeping generalities with citations and facts!

Please read the Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Section 15 explicitly forbids discrimination on the basis of country of origin.

A conservative is someone who harkens back to the good ol days that never existed.

ACSial said...

Prior to the mass immigration wave of the Trudeau years and beyond:

*Doda and Khat [ab]use were unheard of in Canada.

*Honor killings (e.g., the Aqsa Parvez tragedy) never occured.

*Female Genital Mutillation ('circumcising' the clitorus and/or labia, popular in many African and Muslim cultures) was unheard of in Canada.

*Babar Khalsa, the LTTE and Islamic terrorist organisations never had a presence.

*Shootings of 'civilian' bystanders were unheard of...this was BEFORE the gun-control legislation of 1977-onward (FACs and PALs required for purchasing firearms, bans on fully-automatic weapons).

*The Fresh Off the Boat and FOB-Killers (my, what politically-incorrect names!), Lebanese and North African, Latin American and East Asian gangs never had a presence on our streets.

*Half of Lebanon didn't hold Canadian passports, despite having lived out of Canada for over 20 years. (And, after over $70M was spent evacuating them--and complaining of the 'substandard' emergency transport--they returned to Lebanon.)

*Muslim polygamists didn't live in Canada, with their wives collecting welfare.

*Magazine editors were never taken to task, by the state, for politically-incorrect cartoons.

*Hijabs, Niqabs and Burkas were never seen on our streets.

*Jane & Finch was a Toronto-area farm.

*Vast tracts of land in the GTA, Southern Alberta and Lower Mainland were either farmland, or natural areas (not sprawling suburbs).

*Everybody was expected to function in either of our two official languages--even recent immigrants.

*Food prices were MUCH lower.

Try to paint this any way you want, but the changes wrought by Trudeaupian immigration policies have NOT been positive for most Canadians. The only sectors that has benefitted from our staggering immigration intake is the construction, real-estate and banking industries. In order to justify the construction of housing (and associated infrastructure, like schools and roads), these people need constant population growth: importing warm bodies en masse satisfies this requirment. As the Dhalla bill illustrates, every other reason given is bogus.

Scott in Montreal said...

ACSial, I guess you must be a native Canadian. Otherwise you must realize that your own family must have immigrated here only a few generations ago at most. You have no leg to stand on with this half-baked argument you present that paints vast numbers of individuals with the same unsubstantiated brush. It is called scapegoating and it is the sort of vile stuff propagandists like Goebbels used to get 1930s Germany riled up against the gypsies, gays and of course, Jews. So put a sock in it.

Now, I think I am going to go out and enjoy a nice Shish Taouk, or perhaps an enchilada; or maybe Thai; or a good Indian curry for lunch. I am grateful for the wealth of possibilities my neighbours from around the world present to share with me. And I hope my french is as good as theirs. Seriously! You should get out more. Don't be afraid. "Fear is the worst motivator," (something a white German immigrant friend of mine said once - he was 13 and living in the Deutschland countryside when WWII ended and his father vowed to take his family someplace safe from dangerous ideologues. That place was Canada).

ACSial said...

My family came as Slavic, Ashkenazi and Gypsy 'DPs', with no home to go back to...unlike, say, Lebanese-'Canadians', who view a Canadian passport as a quick and temporary trip out of their REAL homeland.

As for honour killings, women wearing bags on their heads, HRC complaints over cartoons and the like: thought isn't being given to cultural compatibility. Hardcore Muslim and Sikh immigrants really AREN'T compatible with Canada's Judeo-Christian, liberal-democratic culture. Ujjal Dosanjh found this out the hard way, when one of his countrymen nearly beat him to death over criticism of Babar Khalsa.

Regardless of WHERE people are coming from, the volume is simply excessive. You can't add over a QUARTER MILLION people (closer to 400,000, when illegal and 'temporary' immigration is factored in), without requiring more land for development. Worse, the areas where most new immigrants are metropolitan areas, in the middle of prime agricultural land. This is destroying our best farmland, for new housing. No amount of fanciful New Urbanist 'smart growth' will arrest the loss of farmland and greenspace caused by mass immigration. We need to cut immigration levels down to sustainable volumes, or we'll have a serious food and environmental crisis in the developed world. Third worlders also have to take responsibility for their unsustainably-high birthrates.

Our 'pay-go' pension system simply can't sustain a sudden jump in claims, caused by a massive influx of retirees. This is an actuarial nightmare. Unlike would-be immigrant pensioners, my mother and grandmother have paid into the system for decades. Whatever emotional arguments you make, actuarial facts mean that the system WILL crash, if immigrants are allowed to tap in after three years.

Yes, ethnic food is great. 'Belgian' chocolate and 'Irish' coffee were sourced from elsewhere, and all that. However, should we keep losing farmland to mass immigration-driven sprawl, there won't be potatoes to go with your curry, or wheat for your couscous. If masses of South and East Asians start collecting pensions, you won't afford to eat when you get old, either.

Scott in Montreal said...

The birthrate in Canada is not high enough to sustain the population (needs to be at 2.1 and is only around 1.6 nationally). This was just released by StatsCan yesterday, and it proves the need for immigration - most of which is NOT comprised of sexagenarians, but of younger, educated people filling needs in our job market that we can't fill otherwise. As an example, friends of mine in a small PEI town of population 600 or so have a local doctor who immigrated from Africa and is the only black person within a 50 mile radius, probably. Without that immigrant - and many others - our health care system would not be able to cope under the strain. And if anything is a threat to the food supply (or to the amount of arable land in Canada) in the foreseeable future, it's climate change, not urban sprawl.

ACSial said...

Scott,

Canada has lost nearly 20M hectares of agricultural land, since 1960, to development. There is no way this level of farmland loss can continue. There is a serious overpopulation problem in the developing world and moving it here isn't a solution. It's amazing how 'green'-minded people like yourself stick your heads in the sand over the issue of overpopulation.

The 'doctor shortage' was the result of Provincial governments, influenced by Medical Associations, capping enrolment in medical schools in the early '90s. This was probably a ploy by the Associations to maintain a sellers'-market for medical services. Open up medical school enrolment to any qualified Canadian student and you've solved that problem. As for all the fabled, 'jobs Canadians won't do', that's another issue entirely. Either employers refuse to pay a living wage (e.g., Ruby Dhalla's own staff), or there are too many make-work programmes that absorb skilled labour (e.g., the Gun Registry, municipal bureaucracies).

The 3rd World can't be our nursery. Our population passed the point of sustainability in the 1960s. Unlike the developed world, which went through all the social changes wrought by WW I-II, people from non-European societies have very high birthrates. Thanks to the multicultural left and the religious fruitcake right, family planing for the 3rd World is a taboo topic.

The point of all this is that you can't dump a bunch of retirees on our pension system without expecting actuarial armaggedon. Ruby Dhalla is pandering to her Sikh constituents with this horribly ill-concieved legislation. I repeat: Bill C428, if passed, WILL bankrupt the pension system. If you pass it, the sexagenarians WILL come in droves...

Scott in Montreal said...

Over-population is a serious global concern, I'll give you that much. I disagree with most of your conclusions ACSial, as I've been saying upthread. I have to say, though, that for someone as opiniated and loquacious as you have proven to be here, I am rather surprised you haven't got a blog of your own. Do try to tie your assertions to verifiable facts if you want to be taken seriously. Good luck, and may you find some greater truths in your travails.