(no subject)

Yesterday, I enjoyed myself reading Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century on the deck with my walkman, listening to the new Annie Lennox CD (which, incidentally, is #3 on the Canadian music charts and #4 on the American this week) in the light of the evening sun.

Heat. Ah, heat.

I'm still interested in getting my Master's degree from Queen's. Lately, though, I've been considering the prospect of not going on to get my doctorate. There's a few different reasons: it's apparently difficult to get tenure in the current market, I'm not at all sure I want to be a professor, and there's other disciplines that interest me.

Job counselling would probably be a good idea for me.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] PEI at last becomes a labour-receiving area

From the PEI CBC website:


Migrant workers will harvest Island crops
WebPosted Jun 20 2003 09:54 AM EDT

CHARLOTTETOWN — Island farmers can look forward to hiring migrant workers from Jamaica and Mexico to help bring in their crops this year.

The federal government has given farmers permission to hire offshore workers for the annual harvest after complaints about a labour shortage on Prince Edward Island..

The new workers, mostly Mexican and Jamaican, will work for $7 minimum wage for a few weeks in August and September.

( Read more... )

This, I predict, will become the start of a trend, despite the Island's low incomes and high unemployment rate. The Prince Edward Island economy as it now exists is well-structured for gastarbeiter to begin doing the jobs locals don't want: Islanders, as the article mentions in passing, are unwilling to do the brute physical labour on farms that immigrants on contract will happily do (or at least be required to do). There is, just as in southern Spain and the Italian Mezzogiorno, a structural space for immigration at the lower end of the wage/status scale owing to the institution of the welfare state, with its unemployment benefits and lax requirements.

The only question to my mind is how long will it be before the Island begins to acquire large Mexican and Jamaican immigrant communities descending from this first experiment. The Island's birth rate is below replacement, and though the population continues to increase more rapidly than elsewhere in Atlantic Canada owing to high in-migration and a relatively high birth rate this isn't sustainable forever. Sooner or later, replacement miugration will beign whether Islanders planned for it or not.