Skip to main content

How Quebec wins in the New North America

 Since the Americans had no problems dealing with the Chinese, Korean, or Mexican the French language issue in America is a nonissue, it even makes Quebec a nice place to visit...

So how does Quebec win in the next decade, how does Quebec make inroads in the growth of the North American "winning" formula, as manufacturing is onshored back?

The issue is simpler than most people think:  immigration is the key, as Quebecers don't make babies despite generous government handouts,  The truth is that as a whole these help at the margin.  I would suggest that cheap daycare is by far the most important component because getting 3,000 dollars for a baby is almost an insult when you consider the overall cost of raising children, but having a "guaranteed" daycare is something else entirely!  

The new immigrants will need places to live.  It's nice to see that Laval (Quebec's second-largest city now) restricts the construction of single-family homes in favor of apartment buildings.  When there is a housing shortage that will help.  The new Canadian law on non-residents buying properties should also help a lot, since these (non-residents) are looking for a place of safety, and therefore don't use these dwellings, and are largely price insensitive.  So Quebec government's push for more housing is a move in the right direction.

The next question is where will these new immigrants come from? Europe is the answer, Denmark, Germany, France, and Holland are obvious choices, but Africa too will find immigrating to North America a question of survival.  Most of these are used to speaking more than one language.  The key for Quebec is to have a young well formed labor force and that's the winning formula.  Quebec's mostly useless (Mason du Quebec) across Europe should dedicate 100% of their efforts to getting French German, Dutch Spanish, and Greek young people to consider immigrating to Quebec.  We are next door to America, but we are not Americans and don't have the same immigration pressures that the Americans have.  We have several very good universities and tons of room in grade and high schools.

If Quebec wants to be part of the New North America which no longer depends on the rest of the world, then immigration is the key, as a qualified workforce becomes a value added to the US requirements which will allow the Americans to continue to not discuss the need for immigration reform.  A win-win for both sides.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu