A breakdown of JD Vance's claim that Canadian immigration is destroying living standards. The speaker uses life expectancy, median income, and poverty rates to show Canada outperforms the U.S., and notes that 84% of recent U.S. population growth came from immigration, contradicting Vance's narrative.
Chapters
My god, it finally happened! J.D. Vance went a full 24 hours without saying anything stupid— oh shit! Today, the American Vice President, who once called his boss America's Hitler and still got the job, said that Canada's living standards are stagnating because we have too many brown people. Welcome to a new series called J.D. Vance is an idiot and I have the data to prove it. First, this chart he retweets from some random financial guy in Halifax. It uses GDP per capita and as the measure of living standards. That's like measuring your height with a thermometer. Like, you could, but there are better tools, like life expectancy, education, median income, poverty. GDP per capita is the math that you do when you want an answer that supports your existing theory. It is an average that has very little to do with quality of life. If Jeff Bezos walks into a Tim Hortons, the average wealth of the room will shoot into space. But every person is still there eating a stale donut and regretting every moment of it. Here's the awkward bit: on those real measures, Canada does quite well. Our life expectancy is more than 3 years longer than the US, and a few more— I mean, if this is stagnation— Second, the chart that Vance shows starts in 2016. Since 2016, the US, his country, has issued more than 8 million green cards, giving immigrants the right to live in America permanently. And that doesn't count the student visas, the H-1Bs, the humanitarian entries, the millions of people who arrive through temporary streams, last year alone immigration accounted for 84% of America's population growth. This idea that Canada is running some sort of sole-survivor immigration experiment while the US is living in a Norman Rockwell painting is so deeply dishonest. Which shouldn't surprise us. Vance lies a lot. His poverty-laden upbringing? He went to Yale. And on immigration, he built his whole public image on a story about moving from one region to another in search of work. His ancestors? Irish immigrants. His wife's? Indian immigrants. Our whole story here in Canada is shaped by people who arrived here from somewhere else and made this country better. Irish workers carved out the Rideau Canal. Chinese workers built most of the most dangerous stretches of the CPR. Sikh settlers began farming in BC in the early 1900s, long before they even had the right to vote. Immigrants are the reason our country still exists at all. More than 80% of our labour force growth over the last decade came from newcomers. Without them, our population growth drops to nearly zero. And that would mean you can kiss your pension, your healthcare, the entire social state goodbye. Yes, we should improve the system. We need to better match immigration levels to housing and services. But if the American Vice President wants to have an honest conversation about living standards, he's welcome to start with the facts. Until then, we'll be up here, growing the only way we ever have: with people who arrive, roll up their sleeves, and help us make this place worth handing to our kids.
