The dream of making it big in Canada is turning into a battle for survival for many immigrants due to the high cost of living and rental shortages, as rising emigration numbers hints to newcomers being forced to turn their back on a country that they chose to make their adopted home.

Trudeau has made immigration his main weapon to blunt Canada’s big challenge of an aging and slowing population, and it has also helped fuel economic growth. That drove Canada’s population up at its fastest clip in more than six decades this year, Statistics Canada said.

But now a reversal of that trend is gradually taking hold. In the first six months of 2023 some 42,000 individuals departed Canada, adding to 93,818 people who left in 2022 and 85,927 exits in 2021, official data show.

The rate of immigrants leaving Canada hit a two-decade high in 2019, according to a recent report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), an immigration advocacy group. While the numbers went down during pandemic lockdowns, Statistics Canada data shows it is once again rising.

  • pgp@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    Fight to make your country better! Otherwise, you’ll just contribute to the creation/enlargement of the same problem in some other place. Natives do not want that and start being very wary of digital nomads because of this.

    • rab@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      11 months ago

      I’m not a digital nomad, it would be a permenant relocation. Iceland needs immigrants too

      • pgp@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        If you’re moving to Iceland and working in Iceland, that’s fair. Moving to Iceland and working for a US company, earning a US salary, that’s not.

    • chitak166@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      It’s a losing battle.

      People don’t want the disparity in wealth to shrink, so it doesn’t.

      At some point we need to stop relying on others who don’t want to solve these issues and start looking out for ourselves.