Well, the streets of Toronto are littered with able-bodied people who are begging for a living. Sad to say, too, many or most of these people are native-born Canadians who have found that begging is easier and more profitable than working at minimum wage. Just take a minute to think how many people walk by some of these beggers in downtown areas -- just one in twenty has to give them a toonie on a busy Toronto street and they are making far more than someone at McDonald's.
So, why have we imported nannies from the Philippines, fruit pickers from Jamaica, janitors from Portugal (as refugees no less in the 80's), airport security workers from the Punjab, meat-packing workers from Somalia, and taxi drivers from South Asia and the Middle East? Seems like we have covered a lot of lower skill jobs here. In fact, it seems like somehow some of these job categories have been almost monopolized by certain immigrant communities. Do we need to import lower-skilled labour or not?
You don't see Chinese people begging on the streets, but you see a lot of them doing hard work for almost nothing in Chinese stores. Is there a correlation here? How can we get Canadians to have the work ethic of these Chinese people? No easy answers from me, but I think that as long as it is not so hard to beg or go on welfare, and lower skill jobs are being monopolized by immigrants, we will continue to see young people begging on the streets and others choosing as a lifestyle to have some fatherless kids and live on welfare. |
