and, what about montreal?

well.

i'd have to live in quebec for a fixed amount of time before i'm eligible for disability there, and i would not be eligible for disability here, if i go. i don't know the exact rules. but, in order for me to keep the check i have, i have to have a mailing address in ontario.

the way that would have to work is i'd have to go with a bank account and hope for the best. that's a hail mary.

so, i want to stay in ontario. if the last two tazs have been in montreal and detroit, where's the next one? buffalo?

niagara / st catherine's is something i should seriously look at....

...but, all of southern ontario appears to have been flooded by cheap labour, right now. & the north is poorly developed.

the refugees want to live in cities. the government would apparently actually like to direct them to the north, where the population density is extremely low, but they don't seem to understand that there isn't any housing up there, because it's largely undeveloped. are they going to start handing out plots of land like it's the nineteenth century? because, they seem to want them to act like settler colonists, without giving them the resources that the state gave the settler colonists. they can't buy land living on welfare.

this government operates on broad principles, and doesn't do the actual research. this is weird for the liberals, and is going to hurt their branding, long term. their reputation as the 'smart party' is pretty much in tatters, at this point. they didn't do any planning around housing at all, they just let thousands of people in without thinking twice about it - that's not smart.

wherever they end up, there's going to need to be housing built, and it's hard to understand what kind of private sector actor is going to build housing for largely illiterate refugees on welfare - or the disabled and other low income people they're displacing.

this might be a long term mess. and, all the government wants to talk about is free markets. so, it might require an election to fix the vacancy rate. sadly.

and, if my goal is to escape capitalism, rather than participate in it, my best guess in the short term may actually be too look for a small town, as the refugees don't want to go to small towns.

we may end up in a situation, for example, where housing in windsor is non-existent, but housing in the smaller towns around windsor starts to open up. &, likewise, i might be able to find cheap housing in smaller ontario towns like brantford or paris than i would in larger ones like windsor or london.

& if i want access to toronto, without living in toronto, i should start looking at something scattered around the 905 - something with go train access into toronto to see the odd show now and again.

we just brought in thousands of people with poor job prospects, which is not really going to change the economy. they'll take tax revenue and use it to pay for housing and buy imported food and imported clothes. this is not likely to have much of a multiplier effect - it's just more people on welfare. so, the basic premise of the taz in this region does still exist, it's just being pushed out of the population centres. we're not all of a sudden a prosperous region with good job prospects, but just being flooded with unemployed people, making it that much harder to exist.

a reasonable question is how many of these people stay here, in the long run. there's still no jobs here. the influx of refugees may help some grocery stores, but that isn't much of an economic driver. any jobs created will be in store fronts and restaurants and likely to add up to a net deficit.

some of these people legitimately just want to sit on welfare, and i guess we're stuck with them. but, it takes quite a bit of ambition to move across the world to claim status as a refugee. and, you'd think many of them are going to want more than that.

they won't find it here...

i don't have a good suggestion as to where to go. we used to send our surplus labour to the oil sands, but there's no future, there, either. this region will be automated before it is reindustrialized. do they want to work in agriculture?

we're left with the same set of solutions that we needed to the same set of problems in the first place, it's just more obvious now than it was before. we still need more subsidized housing. we still need more state funding for industry. adding thousands - tens of thousands - of illiterate people just exacerbates everything...

so, in the end, the government will need to step in, one way or another - or we're going to have a homelessness crisis of both refugees and non-refugees.

but, if it takes ten years for subsidized housing to materialize, the way, in the short run, may be to escape the cities for cheap rent in the towns...