Close Reading

You come to arguably the most diverse country on the planet to criticize... it's diversity? Why we're you interviewing that one guy in the middle of the road and ignoring the cars honking at you? Stay in your racist braindead fascist country where you belong.

To me, the problem is threefold. a) Toronto and Ontario in general - and perhaps the whole of Canada - are accepting way more immigrants than they have quality jobs for. If you need taxi drivers and plumbers, maybe this experience should be valued way higher than education as part of the existing immigration programs (which is not the case). At least then potential immigrants know this before they come and get stuck in low-paying or relatively OK-paying but repetitive and demoralizing jobs with debts and mortgages that become a trap preventing them from leaving. It's also partially on immigrants themselves who come to Toronto to only find out there's 100 people competing for one spot and that you need to be exceptional - or connected through your ethnic network - to work regular white-collar jobs. b) The official bipartisan policy of non-integration. The naive expectation that having people live in ethnic enclaves will somehow make the overall culture richer is not what happens: instead, people tend to stick to their own communities and the common culture thus gets eroded and limited to economic and financial matters. This makes some cities feel like one large business with everyone networking 24/7 instead of socializing normally. And arguably, having the right culture / social life is what motivates already successful people move in the first place. So when they come and they find out there's nothing but money talk and hustling, they leave (if they're smart). Quebec is doing better in that regard, but then Quebec is not really Canada and it's been pressured to cave in to the same money-centred, uncultured and disconnected society by the feds for decades now. The States is smarter in that it actually makes sure to integrate its immigrants (and let's be honest, many immigrants like being part of a new culture if it fits them) c) Treating real estate as an investment and not as a basic necessity (as Japan or some Nordic countries do, for example). That coupled with a lot of Asian money being laundered in Canada through immigration channels and private equity firms buying whole apartment blocks for rental purposes has led to the highest housing price increase in all of the developed world in the past 20 years or so. The median price of a condo in Toronto is higher than in New York despite the massive gap in salaries and the fact that New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world to begin with. Some draconian measures are needed here to prevent foreign - or even out-of-province ownership -, second property ownership and corporate ownership for renting purposes.