Great minds thinking alike, I see Czarcasm has just posted a very similar threat wrt New Zealand.
I’m wondering about the possibility of buying a modest summer home in a rural area somewhere near the northern shore of Huron or Superior, and maybe after several years retiring to live there full time. We don’t need citizenship or work permits, just legal permanent resident status. Would this be reasonably attainable? Would it matter how much time passes between buying the property and making it a full time residence? If we bought the property now, how much time per year could we legally spend in Canada on tourist visas?
Edit: the bit about border guard discretion is true. My husband was initially given 12 months rather than 6, based on my status, our intention to remain permanently, and the paperwork we’d filed to date.
I mentioned to my (step) neices and nephews that they were Canadian citizens by birth, and any of their children born before 2007 - since their grandmother and mothers were Canadian citizens before they moved to the USA in the 1960’s. (After 2007 apparently the succeeding generations had stricter requirements). However, they would have to figure out their spouses’ status…
The other problem is health insurance. Canadian citizens and landed immigrants qualify, but visitors should have travel health insuance. (Canadians over 65 are covered by health insurance the moment they arrive, under 65 they may have to wait depending on how long they have lived abroad.)
Last year, Parliament passed a law called Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act. It’s meant to prevent people who are neither citizens nor permanent residents of Canada from buying “residential property” in Canada. Foreigners can still buy vacant land (even if zoned residential) and build a house, but they can’t buy an existing house or condo. That’s my understanding of the situation, but I could be wrong. There’s nothing to prevent foreigners from renting property, so far as I am aware.
With the above links and some google fu, it appears that Canada simply has no provision for retiree immigrants; if you have no family there and don’t have either some highly sought-after job skills (which of course defeats the whole purpose of “retirement”) or a couple million bucks to “invest”, you’re just SOL. OTOH you can hang out six months a year with no problem, so maybe just go with the summer home plan (as renters, apparently).
I suspect that’s because of our proximity to a certain much larger country with radically different financial structures for healthcare for senior citizens. Whatever you think about the merits of either one, even a modest set of American retirees coming north could tank the system.
This is by design and almost every country that is (or was up until recently) a civilized country has similar requirements.
Said another way, they all saw the USAian refugees coming and have wisely raised their drawbridges and filled their moats with laser beam-equipped piranhas.
That was the same logic as with ANZ - they don’t want older immigrants unless they have the wherewithal to cover health care, which generally is mostly spent on the elderly. (IIRC when I looked into NZ there was a cut-off of 50 or 55 for regular immigrants. Canada does (or did?) have good provisions for reuniting families - I recall many snide and racist comments about the elderly parents joining their immigrant children here.
I recall some similar item about British people travelling in Europe, thanks to Brexit - not only are extended stays far more difficult, they need to provide proof of medical insurance coverage. Soon, non Europeans will need an electronic preclearance to visit Europe, same as the USA does outside of NAFTA.
My immediately previous GF is Afro-Caribbean by birth and has been a naturalized US citizen for decades. A pretty common scenario here in Miami.
Substantially every non-white or foreign born (or worse yet both) co-worker of hers is figuring out which country they can escape to. These are well-trained people making serious money delivering a serious product, not housekeepers, gardeners, and retail clerks.
The USA has enjoyed other countries’ “brain drain” coming our way for decades now. We’re about to learn what happens when that tide reverses. Hard.
Since we’ve resurrected the zombie, my recent sleuthing indicates that most countries in Europe, at least, will let you stay there indefinitely (and after a period apply for permanent residency/citizenship) if you have sufficient funds to demonstrate that you can provide a certain monthly income and you maintain health insurance. In fact, in both Germany and Greece, the monthly income is only equal to the minimum wage. In some places this is specifically a “retirement visa” and in some places via another mechanism.
As an example, in Greece you just need 3500 Euros/month to meet the requirement.
(We are considering retiring to Europe, so I’ve been looking into this)
Housekeepers, gardeners, and retail clerks may well also be well-trained people delivering a serious product. I will grant that they’re usually not paid well.
Article about a Canadian-American doctor coming home to Canada.
This jumped out at me:
“Some days it really feels like you’re treating the insurance company and not the patient and beckoning to their demands in spite of what’s in the patient’s best interest,” said the 36-year-old. “And so you’re having to choose between your conscience and just being compliant — and most of us are kind of getting sick of it.”
Recent news article mentioned that if the Department of Health makes vaccines optional or “not recommended” then health insurance companies in the USA would likely make them not covered.
Certainly there would be a demand for child care workers, etc. Unfortunately, the pay levels (north and south) tend to be low and therefore the level of (formal) training is not worth it for a lot of these workers.
There’s plenty of demand in Canada for doctors and nurses - which of course, have more solid formal training requirements. Many retired because Covid gave them a reason to pick that time; and Canada has had a burst of immigration without (AFAIK) making provisions in the last decades to increase the number of doctors being trained. An aging population has provided more need for care home workers, and a decade or two of provinces being cheap by not increasing health care wages is coming home to roost, as provinces discover the need to seroiusly increase the pay rates. The biggest problem I see in the news with nursing is that they are subject to varied and random schedules and much part-time work, mandatory overtime when the staff shortages mean nobody coming on shift to replace them; which has aggravated the problem in recent years by causing nurses to leave for other less stressful jobs. (Or worse, they leave for private agencies, which then fill in the shortages under contract with those same nurses for a much higher cost.)
Our system is not all sweetness and light, but I would never trade it for the mess south of the border.
The article is true, though, that Canada is actively recruiting doctors and nurses that are fed up with the politics of the job down south. There are no politically inspired limitations here on women’s health or on vacccinations.
Notice that this does not apply to Quebec. Foreign trained doctors have to undergo a new residency and the number of residency slots is severely limited. And, needless to add, they have to speak French before even being considered.
Actively recruiting Canadian doctors working abroad. The Federal government is still keeping a low cap on the number of non-citizens provinces can give work visas to; that article says BC has only 4000 for the year, and plans to allocate 1000 of them for health care.