Unforgivable Defaults
They should be beyond forgiven, but they evidently are not.
Can an Ontario court rule in favour of a group of residents claiming they should not be responsible for relatives whom they have sponsored to come to Canada as new immigrants? Despite that immigration is a federal affair, can an Ontario court dissolve them of responsibility? They did, after all, through the family reunification class of emigration, sponsor family members, signing a pledge to be responsible for them financially.
So much for pledges, for responsibility, for honesty. In fact, there is an acknowledged default rate in some classes of immigrants who find it comfortable to their idea of how they would like to comport themselves, to go on welfare rather than earn a living. Entire extended families have been known to succumb to that temptation.
Evidently a handful of people decided to launch a legal challenge against the expectation - explicit in the pledge they signed to financially support family members they sponsored - that they need live up to that pledge. They must know it should be taken seriously, that they have committed themselves to ensuring that the Canadian taxpayer is not on the hook in enabling them to have the pleasure of re-uniting with expanded family.
In this province alone so far this year, roughly five thousand sponsored immigrants have applied for social assistance. We're talking about a cost of $56-million. The province has had to pony up $45-million, municipalities $13.7-million of taxpayer-funded resources to pay that shortfall. It's a shortfall; these are immigrants who aspire to live a better life by leaving their country of origin and settling in Canada. If living a better life corresponds in their estimation to loafing and siphoning cash from the social system, they've found gold.
The very real point of this situation is that taxpayer-funded social services are not a depthless and infinite resource to be dredged and doled out casually. People in this country and in Ontario already are aware through cut-backs in services that we are struggling to pay for rising costs related to health care, to social services, education. The ranks of the unemployed have grown as a result of the recession, and the under-employed and working poor already find themselves in a bind, putting food on the table.
We really, quite absolutely, do not need a program of family reunification, as compassionate as that is, that will continue to drain scarce resources to accommodate people's wishes to settle in a country that takes its social-contract obligations seriously, while new immigrants do not.
Can an Ontario court rule in favour of a group of residents claiming they should not be responsible for relatives whom they have sponsored to come to Canada as new immigrants? Despite that immigration is a federal affair, can an Ontario court dissolve them of responsibility? They did, after all, through the family reunification class of emigration, sponsor family members, signing a pledge to be responsible for them financially.
So much for pledges, for responsibility, for honesty. In fact, there is an acknowledged default rate in some classes of immigrants who find it comfortable to their idea of how they would like to comport themselves, to go on welfare rather than earn a living. Entire extended families have been known to succumb to that temptation.
Evidently a handful of people decided to launch a legal challenge against the expectation - explicit in the pledge they signed to financially support family members they sponsored - that they need live up to that pledge. They must know it should be taken seriously, that they have committed themselves to ensuring that the Canadian taxpayer is not on the hook in enabling them to have the pleasure of re-uniting with expanded family.
In this province alone so far this year, roughly five thousand sponsored immigrants have applied for social assistance. We're talking about a cost of $56-million. The province has had to pony up $45-million, municipalities $13.7-million of taxpayer-funded resources to pay that shortfall. It's a shortfall; these are immigrants who aspire to live a better life by leaving their country of origin and settling in Canada. If living a better life corresponds in their estimation to loafing and siphoning cash from the social system, they've found gold.
The very real point of this situation is that taxpayer-funded social services are not a depthless and infinite resource to be dredged and doled out casually. People in this country and in Ontario already are aware through cut-backs in services that we are struggling to pay for rising costs related to health care, to social services, education. The ranks of the unemployed have grown as a result of the recession, and the under-employed and working poor already find themselves in a bind, putting food on the table.
We really, quite absolutely, do not need a program of family reunification, as compassionate as that is, that will continue to drain scarce resources to accommodate people's wishes to settle in a country that takes its social-contract obligations seriously, while new immigrants do not.
Labels: Canada, Economy, Inconvenient Politics, Ontario
posted by Pieface | 6:17 PM
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