It never goes into detail about the jobs they can’t find… what is the barrier they are dealing with? Experience? Expectations too high?

Anecdotal i know but… my brother in law is on the job hunt and there’s loads of potential employers calling him back for construction work, entry level jobs in garages, hotels looking to staff up in the summer, etc. He’s working on getting his work permit sorted so he’s not able to take the job offers yet… certainly seeing a lot though.

LMIA? It’s one way to legally hire non-residents.

Higher interest rates are impacting Canadians in every corner of life. Food costs… mortgages… fuel… they all domino and collapse together. The lack of urgency is directly hurting the vulnerable portion of our society. There’s no easy fix. Drop interest rates too fast and you risk pushing inflation back up… don’t drop interest rates fast enough and you risk pushing a significant portion of the population into bankruptcy or homelessness (not just home owners… also renters who are forced to absorb that same interest rate hike in the form of higher rents). Within my circle of friends. several have been forced to close businesses because of the impact of the rapid increase in interest rates. It’s not the base rate itself, so much as the speed with which it was increased which was faster than their businesses could absorb.

As for mortgage renewals themselves… the insanity of the Canadian system of the typical 5-year renewable mortgages is just plain vanilla stupid. It makes everyone incredibly susceptible to microeconomics instead of averaging out the risk on a macro scale like most other countries do.

No urgency

Meanwhile people are facing financial struggles with stupid high food prices and out of budget mortgage renewals.

Let them eat cake…

The whole “run a business” thing is bonkers. No wonder so many family doctors give up and go do something else.

With that change in the CBC article that you linked… there’s hope. My family doctor told us that she’s going to retire this year… hopefully there’s a replacement or 10 at the clinic so people can start getting that initial care they need and relieve the pressure on the ER :-(

I’m in BC, and technically have a family doctor… and it sucks. My doctor is only seeing patients a couple of days per week, so appointments are currently booking out around 4 months. There’s ONE walk-in clinic where I live (Nanaimo), and they take a limited number of patients per day - they put out signs on a Saturday morning like “Only accepting 10 patients today” (I have a photo of this one to prove it). TThe ER is backup up so bad, you could die before they even triage you (18h or longer wait is normal). The staff at the Critical Care unit in the neighboring Parksville yells at you and tells you to go back to Nanaimo (it’s happened to both my wife and I at different times… and we both actually needed medical care). We’ve ended up driving to Port Alberni or Courtenay for medical care… or in my case, I’m travelling for business and have booked a doctor visit in another damn country to get some checkup work done because I can’t get it done locally… OK, I can get it, but the local wait times are so fucking long that I can book a flight, fly overseas and see a doctor, get my results and be back home a month before I’d even start the process with my family doctor.

Talkign with the parents at the local school… many are afraid that their kids will catch something… and thehy won’t be able to see a doctor to get the help they need

So yeah… there’s widespread frustration :-P

You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.

Have you been playing on Reddit again?

Well… to be fair, I lived a good life from my mid-20s to my mid-40s. I traveled the world. I have worked in various parts of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I’ve done a solo motorcycle trip from Nairobi to Cape Town… just as one example. The problem is… while I had money during these years, I didn’t save much. What I did save was used up in the in-between-jobs times after I was laid off… and this happened more than once over the years. Before I got married, I had a plan to retire at 50, and I was actually well on my way to achieving it. Then life happened… and kids arrived… and money disappeared faster than it came in.

Now that retirement is closer… and I’m thinking about it, the reality of it not happening. I look at the stupidly broken medical system in Canada… and think “shit, I’m screwed”. I can’t see a doctor for example… just to do some preventative body maintenance and checkups. The local walk-in medical clinics are overwhelmed. I have a family doctor, but she’s retiring this year… and she’s currently booking in-person appointments 3 to 4 months out and every day the gap for appointment availability gets bigger. The only other option is the ER… and if you show up at the ER saying “I am almost 55, I need a physical just to check on things” they show you the door and say “come back when you’re sick”. I’m literally booking a flight to Europe to go see a doctor for a checkup.

So yeah… wheeee…

Can I join your club? I’m in my 50s. I have worked since I was 14 years old… full time since I was 17. I worked most of my adult life outside of Canada, so I do have some state pension saved up outside of Canada, but it’s nowhere near enough to live on in Canada. I moved back to Canada a few years ago with a “seemed like a good idea at the time” decision. In total, I have worked less than 10 years of my life in Canada… so my CPP is basically zero. I look at what Canada has to offer me and think… what the hell am I doing here? It’s fucking expensive to live here… I have nothing to retire on… and only homelessness ad starvation to look forward to.

So… while I’m still employable, fit, and healthy, I’m planning on getting back out… this year actually if all goes to plan.

Every Value Village I’ve been to is either over priced or just picked over junk. There’s never anything worth buying. The overpriced stuff is all originally from Walmart or one of the Dollar stores and always priced well over the new retail price.

The same thing happens at Once Upon a Child. Kids clothes are all George (Walmart brand) and price at least 2x new.

I’ve got this with my Canada Life coverage. I can get prescriptions at any pharmacy at 80%, but if I go to Costco pharmacy it’s 90% covered.

It’s not any better in Alberta. :-(

In BC you can “play games” with the medical and go to smaller communities and find a Emergency Care Clinic that serves a smaller community.

Family doctors are impossible to get. There are more than a million people on the waiting lists.

To be fair, the government is making some progress on improving things. They’ve made changes to allow more doctors to be certified. They’ve pumped money into training programs (they pay a full salary and all tuition at university for some certifications). It’s not perfect but it is something.

Edit: fixed some words that got mangled on mobile

Nah you’re 100% welcome in Canada. We are glad you’re here.

Try Nanaimo. A city of over 100,000 people… there is ONE walk-in clinic in the city, and they are rarely open. You go there and it’s either closed or there is a sign on the door “Accepting 10 patients today”. So you go to the Nanaimo General ER and IF you’re lucky, you will be seen in about 8 to 10 hours.

Drink bottle water and consume plastic particles… drink tap water and get all the other contaminants (places I travel for work outside of Canada have highly contaminated and unsafe water… so water with bits of plastic are the lesser evil).

Yup. I really regret letting my EU number go when I moved (back) to Canada. My EU number was about 25 Eur per month (a few years ago) including international roaming calls and data in Canada.

I though naaah, I’ll get a local number because it makes sense right? No not really… 98% of the calls I get on my local Canadian number are scam calls (someone threatening me in Chinese with deportation over unpaid taxes etc.) so it’s not like I would have been inconveniencing anyone local calling me… most of the remaining 2% call me on WhatsApp or Signal…

Yeah once you fly with other non-Canadian airlines you realize just how awful flying domestic and international on Air Canada really is (and the discount airlines like Swoop were even worse). I travel a lot for personal and work, and I try my best to book Qatar, Emirates, Turkish, etc. Hell, even KLM is better and they aren’t amazing. Same with Ethiopian Air… not amazing or even good but better than Air Canada.

I explicitly go out of my way to avoid Air Canada and WestJet. They are both abysmal airlines. WestJet used to be good… but lately, it’s become a competition between them and AirCanada to see who can fuck things up more spectacularly.

I’d say that Air Canada also lands last in customer service, quality of service, comfort, and adhering to the rules for customer rights… and pretty much EVERYTHING else.

It’s a problem with Canonical. They stepped up and created the snaps and then abandoned them instead of maintaining them. They still maintain the core that they include with the distro… it’s all the extras they created to pad out the store… and then abandoned. “Look the snap store has so many packages”… yeah… no… it doesn’t.

Why would a company who makes a commercial level open source package want to add snaps to their already broad Linux offering? They typically already build RPM (covering RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, etc.) and DEB (covering Debian, Ubuntu, all Ubuntu derivatives, etc.)… and have a tar.gz to cover anything they missed. Why should they add the special snowflake snap just to cover Ubuntu which is already well covered by the DEB hey already make?

Sure, show vendors what’s possible, but if Canonical stepped up to make the snaps, then they should still be maintaining them. It’s not a business opportunity… its more bullshit from Canonical that no one wants.

Snap is a steaming pile of excrement. So much of the crap on the Snap Store is obsolete and out of date. Anyone and their monkey can post a snap on snapcraft, and… they do. Canonical is just as bad. They took it upon themselves to package up a lot of commercial-level open-source software 3 or 4 years ago… and then have done fuck all with it ever since. Zero updates to the original snaps they put there in the initial population of the Snap store (yes they do maintain a select few things, but only a small percentage of the flood of obsolete software in the Snap store). The result is people looking to install apps who poke the Snap store, go “oh hey, the application I want is there”, install it, and then get all pissy with the vendor… who looks about in surprise wondering how a potential customer managed to find such an old version (happened with at least 2 of my employers, and I’ve come across many more). Go search Reddit (or Google) for obsolete snap discussions. There’s no shortage people pointing at the same issue.