Immigration Is Killing Ontario’s Small Towns
by Maggie McDougal
Elora, Ontario
Historic town: Elora, Ont. is one of many towns targeted for a massive influx of immigrants looking for “quieter” places to “raise their children” as the children of Canadian residents are forced out due to rising housing prices and businesses committed to hiring foreign immigrants only.
I was on my way to work one morning around the beginning of March, when I decided to stop at MacDonald’s for a morning coffee, one of the few luxuries I can afford, despite having trained for four different fields of work throughout my life in Ontario, Canada. At my current job, I am by far the highest educated worker, with vast training, including a graduate degree in the chief public service that the organization provides: human services. Yet, I am employed on contract at the lowliest clerical job, with the poorest status, and wages and without benefit, not even vacation time (only money in lieu of vacation). That in it-self should raise the eyebrows of the handful of critical thinkers that still exist in this nation.
Immigration is a working class issue, make no mistake about it. If you were waiting for the wealthy to intervene and to try and stop immigration, that isn’t going to happen — ever!
At this point, the immigration tap doesn’t need to only be turned off, we actually need restoration efforts to make up for the losses sustained by Canadians proper — restorative justice.
I waited for my coffee, which was being poured by a long-time Canadian such as myself. Likely he was forced to take any job in order to continue to live in this town, like citizens in so many other small Ontario towns, which have suffered for decades as the jobs left for nations where products could be manufactured at a lower cost to create a product of poor quality to sell back to people like us.
I reached for the newspaper rack, and ended up with a newspaper in my hand, which I have learned through the application of my critical thinking skills to distrust and despise. Yet, it was in my hand, so I read the headline, “The Future Of Ontario’s Small Towns Is Immigration.”1
I was served my coffee and I gulped it down, not paying attention to it, but rather the headline and burning my mouth and throat in the process. The pain was no comparison to the raw feeling of acid burning in my gut as I continued to read the front page newspaper story, which the low wage workers serving me would likely never even get a chance to glance at throughout their stress-full day at work.
Imagine having watched your entire community being fed a steady diet of raw potatoes and turnips for thirty years, and in order to survive you’ve swallowed it, but not because you liked it, but because you had been led to believe it was the only way to survive. And then one day you discovered that you could have been eating steak and lobster, and it was all a grand farce, because the joke was on you and the rest of the folks in your towns and communities all across the nation.
Reading that Toronto Star article, on that freezing cold morning in March, I recognized that “we” the working class had all been made complete fools, not once but again and again and again, as lie after lie was unveiled for us by grinning political shysters.
Immigrants resent me for being Canadian
I am an environmental refugee, having twice fled the shameless and unnecessary destruction of the green spaces in and around central Ontario, in the name of atrocious and unnecessary development projects which include row after endless row of cookie cutter housing for immigrants. At forty-five years of age, I have watched the replacement of Canada’s host population with nothing but wall to wall immigrants. I have experienced deep hate and racism from immigrants in the workplace and in the communities I have lived in. The hate they direct at me is called “internalized oppression.” They resent me for being Canadian. It has been vicious abuse from them and nobody is interested in hearing my story, and seems like nobody ever will.
I came to live in the community my husband spent much of his youth in, and which is a two and half hour drive from Toronto. One would think that I had travelled far enough to escape, but not so. In the decade since coming here, we have watched the community emptied out of working class Canadians, many of whom were in tears at having to return to urban centres such as Toronto and surrounding communities. Like all of us, they had to go where they could find work. As if that wasn’t enough, to further aid the destruction of the community the provincial government has mandated the closure of small hospitals in all small Ontario communities, as they move to a centralized model for healthcare. They have also closed high schools and junior schools to ensure real estate opportunities for the new, wealthy immigrants.
There is one common theme for people who live in Central Ontario, north of Toronto, “Good luck finding a job, eh!”
Most of those who are able to live here and find work have to accept that their children will have to leave and come home only when they have a long weekend. Most of these children would love to work and live in the communities they were raised in, and have deep roots in, but they can’t.
With no jobs for us, where are the jobs coming from for the immigrants?
Apparently, while this exodus continues all around us, the Toronto Star, for some reason is assured that the future of our small towns across this province is immigration. The logical question, which media outlets such as the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) will never pose is: How can the future of Ontario’s small towns be immigrants, when there is no future here for Canadians?
I want to jump to the heart of the matter: Where are the jobs coming from for the immigrants when there are no jobs here for Canadian citizens and their children?
One has to accept that assertions such as this one, made by mainstream media are steeped in knowledge of a strategy at-work, one which includes many sectors of society working together to ensure high employment rates amongst immigrants and not citizens, no matter how educated. Such a duplicitous strategy is often referred to as a conspiracy or elites breathing together for their own gain.
Immigration portal of Leeds & Grenville
As a human services professional I have become aware over the past decade of the agencies that are funded by the government to find immigrants jobs, and which provide incentives to their staff to do so. The Local Immigration Partnerships which exist in every single community in Ontario and which are working with private enterprises and local social service agencies, to ensure new immigrants find jobs, but not us. We are not the future, we are ghosts walking around remembering amongst ourselves about what was, but which we cannot celebrate any longer, for fear of being labelled and losing what few options for employment we still have.
There is a vast network of immigration lobbyists that have lined their pockets with gold, as they lead Canadians to believe that we must remove the shirts from our backs, and leave our home communities, in order to make way for the immigrants, lest we be accused of our lack of humanity.
Last week, CBC Radio aired a live phone in program called Disappearing Life Lines and it exposed some of the different stories not being heard from small town Ontario. It basically spelled out for us the death of Ontario’s small towns. The guests on the program cited the unnecessary closure of high schools and hospitals in towns such as the one I live in, as a final death knell and guarantee of population decline. Yet, the pro-immigrant CBC Presenter made no connection between this and the Toronto Star’s assertion that the future of Ontario’s small towns is immigrants. If these towns are brimming with so much opportunity, then how come Canadian citizens have been so hard pressed to find any? Why would they leave if there are opportunities?
First they let our jobs disappear by allowing industry to flee to the Third World, causing a dramatic decline in the population of Ontario’s small towns. They could have simply applied protectionist policies to protect Canadians from greedy corporations — of course they couldn’t do that because protectionism is a taboo word in globalist circles. Then they over-populated central Ontario through immigration, and now they are going to re-populate our beloved small towns with wealthy immigrants, when the Canadians who long to live in these towns can’t afford to stick around!
One immigrant is quoted in the Toronto Star article as stating, “A smaller community makes the transition easier. There is no hustle and bustle, and people … It would have taken me much longer to settle down in a big city like Toronto,” said the 35-year-old from Bangalore, a metropolitan city in India with a population of nine million.
“There are more opportunities and less competition here. The salaries are not as high as in the big cities, but the cost of living is lower,” said Joseph, who works as an operation and planning co-ordinator at an area trucking company.
Joseph states exactly what we Canadians like about our small towns, and the way we would like to keep them, but there is no opportunity in these communities for most Canadians, so exactly how does he come to find it?
The article goes on to state: According to the latest census, populations fell between 2011 and 2016 in one in four of Canada’s 723 municipalities with 5,000 people or above, with those further from urban centres more likely to show a decline in population than those close to a larger city.
Neither the Toronto Star nor the CBC have wasted their time interviewing Canadian Citizens who have been forced to leave small towns for the urban centres, because we don’t ever want to get near the heart of the matter, lest some truth be revealed to the general public.
Finally, the new measures instituted by Ontario politicians to bring the price of houses down in Toronto, brought UP the price of houses in small communities across the rest of the province, which in my mind is more evidence of a larger strategy at work, not to control an out of control market, but rather to spread the “out of control” aspect of it to the impoverished working poor who are clinging to life in small town Ontario.
Employment agencies do not advocate for Canadians and place them into jobs
In the town I live in, a Syrian refugee family was given a handsome house to live in, while a homeless guy spent the last two winters in a cardboard hovel tucked into a corner of the local cemetery. He is a nice man, whom I am sure could be placed in to do a good job, but that’s not ever going to happen, is it? Government funded employment agencies are not in the business advocating for Canadians and placing them into jobs. They are only good at collecting government money and engaging in nonsense such as the resume critique.
One million wealthy immigrants are on the way and will be enjoying the good life here in Canada by 2020. Millions of Canadians will most definitely be displaced by them including in the area of jobs, housing, business opportunities, political opportunities … the list goes on and on. The best part is that the Trudeau government has made it clear that the one million are not headed to Canada’s major cities. Oh no, these immigrants are going to be provided with INCENTIVES to settle in our small towns. The same small towns the host population can only dream of living in and which most Canadians have to wait until they retire to live in.
I have lost everything, at this point, I don’t feel there is a future for me and what is left of my family. I missed the chance to have children because I wasn’t able to afford to and now there is nothing but hollowness inside of me. I don’t know what I will do with the rest of my life, but it is very sad to think of the future. I don’t know what I risk by writing this letter, or what they will do to me, but I just had to write it.
There is an alarm belling ringing, and it is warning us about the future, and it is time to listen to it.
[1] The article I read on the front page of the Toronto Star was titled, “The Future Of Ontario’s Small Towns Is Immigration,” but the version I found online is titled: “For Small Towns On The Bay Of Quinte, The Future Is Immigration.” Maybe there was a virulent reaction to the original title, or at least we can hope.
