Bruce_the_vii wrote:
Dear Lord, 2000 good jobs available at RIM - lets let in a million more Asians.
You have to watch these articles about labour shortages for veracity. For example RIM might need 2000 R & D experts but Nortel has let off 10,000 of them. There's been a collase of the R & D sector in general, the high tech bubble. So people need to be recycled.
And the idea that the knowledge economy will be boosted by educating people more seems to be a sound bite. The economy will continue to be work a day jobs for the most part, there's no high tech panacea coming. Entrepreneurs tend to be hard cases with business experience that have identified a niche and have the werewithall to run a business - not PhD's. In the West in general higher education is subsidized by the government and tends to be over invested. We all know people that are working in areas other than what they were trained for because it didn't work out. It's the modern situation. After WWII Statistics Canada reports some 2% of adults had university education while now it's 17%. We don't really need more. This idea that we need immigrants to fill the skilled and professional jobs is a cliche that economists as well as journalist will try to sell to you, to be printable. The idea that immigrants should get the high paying jobs and Canadian youth should do the labouring jobs is highly suspect reasoning.
There is always a mismatch of skills to jobs available for sure. My idea is that the federal government should make more of an effort to get the numbers right and get them out there. For example the baby boomers areabout to retire and create demand for skilled and professional jobs and the government could survey the work force to establish the numbers. People need to know if there are going to be jobs in the field before undertaking a long and expensive training. So that would be something Iggy could do as part of “We can do better” Liberal policy.
You're right we don't need more than about 17% of Canadians to have a college education, as long as you're happy with most of the other 83% working at the Gap or McDonald's, with a few thousand plumbers. But if you some of them to be educators, lawyers, accountants, consultants, electricians, nurses, realtors, or whatever, then you need far more than 17%. Especially because all these entrepreneurs you crow about will need people accountants, lawyers and other skilled professionals to run their businesses, be it by keeping their books, helping them negotiate purchases of other businesses/property, or even creating new products/goods for sale (engineers are particularly handy in this field). To succeed in a knowledge-based economy, we need highly educated and knowledgeable workers, not hordes of high school graduates. That was fine for mass production, but in knowledge intense fields like engineering, law, or accounting, Grade 12 simply won't cut it.
The fallacy with your anti-immigration postings are that immigrants usually DON'T get to be doctors or lawyers or even photocopier repairmen. Instead, they show up and drive taxi, work as janitors or 7/11 clerks because their degree/skill/experience is not accepted by professional boards here. Someone who learned to be a doctor in west Africa probably won't have the education and experience as someone educated in Canada, simply because the schools are so different in the quality of faculty, equipment and so on. So most immigrants wind up spending years working crap jobs to get certified by Canadian professional boards. Frankly, I'm fine with that, as long as re-certification is possible at some point down the road.
And I never said let in a million Asians, I simply said why not let Asian students, who meet the entrance requirements, study here? Apparently some people think only Canadians deserve that right.
Given that Canadians are NOT having enough children to sustain our population AND the fact that the Boomer generation was the largest in Canadian history (9 million or so - almost 1/3 of Canadians), where do you propose we find the 9 million workers to fill their shoes? The Bust generation (commonly called Gen X) was barely half of that (just over 5 million), and are approaching middle age, so they might be able to step into some of those jobs, but where do we find the other 4 million or so managers/executives? Do we give those jobs to the Echo generation, who are just graduating from college? Good Lord, I hope not, as they have no experience to do a job at the same level as a boomer (with 30 years of experience) can.
So where do we find the people to fill those 4 million jobs that the Bust generation won't be able to? Obviously, all 9 million won't retire at once, but there will be a skilled labour shortage no matter when they retire, as those following in their footsteps are far fewer in number.
CKA Uber 
CKA Super Elite 
CKA Uber 
