Canada’s new immigration system reveals a different set of priorities—and a different way of thinking about immigration.
The best way to describe Canada’s new application system for skilled immigrants is to compare it to online dating. Foreigners around the world who want to emigrate to Canada fill out online profiles with their age, resume, language skills, education, and much more.
.. Potential immigrants with high rankings are invited to apply for permanent residency. No quotas, no caps, just the federal government skimming off the top every two-to-three weeks. People without enough points to make it to the top of the candidate pool can stay in the database for a year, and employers searching for foreign talent can find them, knowing that they have already been pre-screened by the federal government and therefore can likely have them start working within six months.
.. At one point, Canada banned black immigrants from the United States.) That began to change during the civil rights era and the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the United States to more immigrants from non-Western-European countries. Canada passed a similar law in 1962.
.. Skilled workers in the United States are waiting anywhere from five to 11 years to get green cards. Canada is now averaging about six months.
The Moody’s report says rising levels of Canadian household debt relative to income, along with rapidly increasing house prices, have created conditions similar to those in the United States prior to the financial crisis of 2008.
.. suggested Canada-wide house price declines would be on the order of 25 per cent, while the red-hot markets in British Columbia and Ontario would experience steeper declines of 35 per cent.
He played until he was fifty-two, long enough to skate professionally alongside his own sons. His accumulated stats include 2,421 games, 1,071 goals, 1,518 assists, 2,589 points, and 2,418 penalty minutes. Until Gretzky passed him, he held the professional records of 801 goals and 1,850 points. He seemed to play forever, and he forever played well, winning six M.V.P. awards and six scoring championships, too.
.. “Gordie Howe hat trick,” which is when a player has a goal, an assist, and a fight all in one game.
.. he was a representative—the perfect representative—of a certain kind of Canadianness, reflected, as it was bound to be, in a hockey player, as perhaps Lou Gehrig or Stan Musial, other Iron Men, were representative of similar, American baseball values, now largely lost.
.. He nonetheless made the Canadian virtues of modesty, persistence, and family-above-all-else part of the heritage of hockey. He didn’t just play with his sons; he played well with his sons
The British North America Act, a law from 1867 that served as Canada’s constitution, provided for the appointment of “qualified persons” to the Senate. In the 1920s, with a growing feminist spirit abroad in the land, women had the temerity to assume that “qualified persons” might include them. When Emily Murphy, a leading feminist who was a judge in Alberta, sought an appointment, the prime minister turned her down on the ground that women were not “persons” within the meaning of the law.
.. Driving the point home, Lord Sankey went on to say: “The British North America Act planted in Canada a living tree capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits.” Women, the court concluded, were indeed persons. Soon enough, they were senators as well.
.. “You have to recognize that if the framers knew all the specifics of a just society, they would have written them down,” Justice Kennedy told Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal in an appearance earlier this month at the University of California’s Washington Center. The Constitution’s framers, the justice said, “used words that appeal over time to our sense of justice and our sense of freedom.”
.. And the Voting Rights Act decision, as Professor Johnsen goes on to point out, was likewise the opposite of originalist, rejecting the court’s longstanding deference to the role of Congress in enforcing the 15th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to vote.