The very first Labor Day was held on a Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. The day was celebrated with a picnic, concert and speeches. Ten thousand workers marched in a parade from New York’s City Hall to Union Square.
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abour Day weekend, running from Friday September 5 through Monday September 8 is a statutory holiday throughout Canada. As such, Upper Canada Immigration Consultants will be closed for the weekend: from 5:00 p.m. Friday September 5 until 9:00 a.m. Tuesday September 9. Labour Day celebrates the achievements of workers and employees worldwide.
Traditionally celebrated on the first Monday of September, Labour Day was an idea of Peter J. McGuire, a New York carpenter and labor union leader in the 19th century. McGuire proposed his idea of celebrating labour’s contributions to New York’s Central Labor Union early in 1882. By 1894, Labour Day was a statutory holiday in the United States and Canada, and spread to most countries in the world.
Labour Day in Canada is also the end of school summer vacations. Primary, secondary and post-secondary classes begin for the new school year right after, or shortly after, Labour Day. In the Canadian Football League, traditional Labour Day weekend match-ups include football games between local rivals Toronto and Hamilton; Montreal and Ottawa; Winnipeg and Saskatchewan; and between Calgary and Edmonton.
Upper Canada Immigration will be fully open for business on the morning of Tuesday September 9.
During the Labour Day holiday weekend, please click here to leave us an e-mail message.
ews articles in Canada in the past year have focused on the immigration challenge facing western democracies. Populism and nativism, amplified in volume well beyond the number of their advocates by strident social media and flat-out cyber manipulation by totalitarian nations (who, ironically are among the world’s most xenophobic) make dispassionate and rational discussions of the clear benefits of immigration to a country like Canada more difficult for the necessity of trying to speak clearly and calmly amid the noise of hysteria.
We are all, rightly, most concerned about our own situation, and whether we can succeed. Here is a view of the broader immigration landscape.
As authors, the two Canadians are walking ground opened up by the late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling (1948 – 2017) in the YouTube video of his lecture on global population growth. It is a superb one-hour production. Click below to see it.
Update: Rosling was right
Nothing Ibbitson and Bricker’s book, or Rosling’s video, have to say is all that startling, fact by immutable fact. It is the assembling of the larger picture, and projecting it over the entire globe, and the complete 21st century, that make all the data so eye-opening. In 2007, the number of people, worldwide, living in cities surpassed the number in rural or remote areas. Cities are indisputably the 21st century’s engines of growth and repositories of people and knowledge.
The Globe’s Ibbitson published a July 2020 update here. Ibbitson lists some countries that stand to lose more than half their population by the end of the century. The BBC News web site has an article about the implications of a shrinking population, and why global population shifts may be encouraging news for prospective newcomers to Canada.
Nations that have not pursued forward-thinking immigration programs already see their populations in decline. Examples include Japan, Russia, and countries in eastern Europe;
As populations of youth and people in their prime working years decline or stagnate, proportions of seniors in nearly all western nations are rising sharply. Some 90 percent of health care expenses are spent on the old and the chronically ill. This leaves taxpayer-borne expenses such as health care and pensions to be paid by fewer and fewer working age people;
China, which discourages inbound immigration, will see its own population level off shortly, and begin a long decline;
Urbanization leads to better education for women, with families starting their child-bearing years later, and having fewer children. The birth date falls below the rate of replacement (depending on who calculates it, between 2.2 and 2.7 babies per woman of child-bearing years);
The very policies that welcome newcomers run into opposition in older societies, where a graying older generation can’t – or won’t – connect the dots between a healthy level of immigration, and the people they themselves will need to build their homes, manage their communities, and become their doctors, for example.
Most demographic studies put the world’s population peak at between eight and 11 billion, sometime in the middle of this century, then beginning a steady decline. Canada, with its decades of careful, but generous, immigration numbers remains younger than the average nation. Canada has the ability to keep growing without the looming brick wall of worker shortages facing other nations (such as Japan and even the USA).
Canada’s current 41 million people will grow to some 50 million by mid-century, roughly the end of the lives of North America’s ‘baby boom’ generation born after World War II, between 1946 and 1966. Come and work with us. Each year, some 350,000 people will move from the land of their birth to start a new life in Canada. Competition for each of those spots is tight, and the requirements mean you need to have a plan, act on it, and not make mistakes. Contact us. We can help.
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