Originally Posted by Knalus
Perhaps cold and heartless is the word I was thinking of instead. He wasn't a "temporary worker", he was a dual citizen, he just didn't want to give up his American citizenship. For this, he was told to either move to the states or give up 50% of his wages to the States, then 50% to Canada. Taxation - you're really defending Revenue Canada and the IRS, eh? Wow.
Your position is one I used to hold. I really did. It's nice as an abstract thought, it seems clean, and those that don't fit the role, well, they must be people that don't play by the rules.
You'll find, eventually, however, that the people that made the rules, well, they weren't superior to you or me. Why do those rules need to be the ones that we follow? When you start looking at people, and not abstractions, things get a little different. When you put yourself in a situation of someone who did everything according to the rules, and still gets shafted, well, then you realize that these nice, abstract ideas, they are cold and heartless, and they don't make as much sense as they seemed to a little while ago.
There's more than one way to force someone to move other than the Police showing up at your door.
Well, my point was that out of Calgary's 1million in population, over half came from elsewhere in Canada. 500,000 gave Calgary's economy the biggest boost any economy could possibly have, making us the richest part of Canada. My other point - if you cared to read it - was that people from Newfoundland are just as different as anyone else from North America. Newfies definitely think of themselves as different. They have moved here enmasse - and everyone else is better off because of their moving here.
Don't be so defensive of 'Canadian' jobs (Just like Americans shouldn't be about "American" ones). There is no such thing as a limited number of jobs in this world, there are as many as are made. It is not a zero-sum game, it adds up instead. Americans (and by that I mean North Americans) are very proud of their entrepreneurial spirit, and love stories of people "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps". I never understood why voters could be so scared of others doing the same thing. We believe in the trickle down effect, where wealth builds more wealth, then are worried about people moving in because of the wealth we created, with some of us not realizing that that will add to the wealth being created, instead of taking away from it. Free Trade has made Canada and the States wealthier than any other nation in the history of mankind - why should people moving be any different than goods moving? A cabinetmaker in Winnipeg can undercut a Calgarian cabinet maker's prices just as well as an Oregonian. But if the Oregonian wanted to move here, that's something that needs to be very tightly regulated? By who? And why?
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