Minister: Canada Needs More Immigrants

MONTREAL - Canada's foreign affairs minister said Thursday that the country badly needed more immigrants to replace aging workers who are headed for retirement.


Pierre Pettigrew said that increasing the population to 40 million by welcoming more immigrants would help foot the bill for new infrastructure, such as roads and bridges.

"This is a vast country, the infrastructure is expensive and it's a bigger country than the United States is," Pettigrew said. "I am saying that if we were 40 million Canadians, that infrastructure would not be necessarily a lot more expensive, but we would be more (people) to foot the bill."

The minister, in comments to reporters after a speech in Montreal, said Canada was built by immigrants and that's the way it would continue to be built.

Canada's population of just under 32 million has grown by only three million in the past decade. The federal government is set to unveil a new immigration plan this month that would open its doors to 320,000 skilled immigrants a year by the time the plan is fully implemented in five years.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051014/ap_ ... nts_needed

We know where you can get lots of immigrants.