does chris selley really think the concern is inflation, rather than profit?

i'm going to spin the question around: how do we eliminate our reliance on foreign labour in food production? that's not sustainable, but in some sense it's continuity. has anybody written the report that starts with handing out free (often already occupied.) land to immigrants in the 1800s and ends with tfws, as a narrative on the country's continual reliance on foreign labour for food production?

or the slow collapse of the family farm into these massive corporate conglomerations that have the nerve to import slaves and then send them back?

i've been arguing for a very long time that this system is fundamentally incompatible with a free society - it's just a more humane type of slavery, by another name. i know - capitalism is, in general. maybe i'm the one that even told you that. but, this is ethnic. if capitalism in general is barely tolerable, it's these tfws that are across the line of acceptability, of decency and of dignity. this should simply not exist at all.

so, how do you just shut this terrible system down altogether?

i don't actually want to bring back the family farm. maybe we could have avoided losing it, but maybe it's technological determinism - maybe it was inevitable. maybe. but, right now, trying to move back to family farming would be on par with some kind of communist experiment. a communist experiment, you say? what could go wrong?

i'm in strong support of increasing automation in farming, actually. i'd like to see more indoor growing, and less carbon produced by transportation. my carbon footprint is so low you can't even trip over it, but i do have one guilty habit - it's not air travel, exactly (i'd actually rather take the bus.), but the reliance on fruit in my diet, much of which is imported from the southern united states, or mexico. i want to be able to buy strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, bananas, tomatoes, kiwis, pineapple and whatever other fruit you can think of, as well as green peppers, which are the only technical vegetable that i buy regularly, at all times of year, in this country, with a minimal travel footprint. you could probably grow all of these things in leamington.

but, i don't see any particular reason why you actually need humans to do any of this. you may claim that fruit must be picked, but i'll tell you, actually - i'm perfectly happy buying a literal bushel of strawberries out of a bin if it took three hours to transit, instead of sitting three weeks in a plastic container designed to maximize it's shelf-life. you don't have to lay the strawberries down nicely on top of each other in that plastic container. i don't even need the packaging at all; we'd all be better off without it, really. so, this is kind of a weak concern. there's ways around it, even if it means changing how we package and distribute our food, which we need to be looking at ways to do, anyways.

it's never really been cost effective to do this, previously.

is it cost effective now? if not now, when?

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-ottawas-plan-for-quarantining-temporary-foreign-workers-is-more-bizarre-than-comforting