Glad the Line is publishing this. There aren’t many things that I can put my hand over my heart and say that I truly believe that Canada is better than every other country in the world — but “multiculturalism that works” is one of them. I sometimes call it the Canadian Multicultural Miracle. We do immigration and integration at the scale/rate we do, better than anyone else. We should celebrate this more.
(Aside, this is the one thing I will never forgive Justin Trudeau for: Spiking the immigration rates so high that it broke our ability to integrate and house everyone. And maybe permanently breaking the immigration consensus and the Canadian Multicultural Miracle. We already took immigrants at 3x the rate the U.S. does, with better outcomes, but we had to go and jack the rates to 10x the U.S. Just a damn tragedy.)
If that "success" of multiculturalism holds through any significant upheaval or material hardship that requires people to put the group before themselves, maybe then it's worth bragging about. Until then, I don't think people living side-by-side (not necessarily together) in relatively good economic times with little incident--happy with the deal they get as individuals--means we're not eating away at social resources and a reserve of trust we didn't recognize we ever had.
If the last serious trial we've had as a society was WWII (and even then less of a direct threat to Canada than in many other countries), it's probably worth thinking about how much even mere biculturalism was a threat to conscription.
I would submit that Covid was such a trial. To the extent that the public health response (school shutdowns etc.) created a rift among Canadians, it wasn’t on ethnic or racial lines, it was more about urban vs rural Canada. Multiculturalism passed that test, I think.
Also I strongly suspect that multiculturalism would pass the much harder test of a war and conscription, too. Other than a few people who have been radicalized against western civilization by the Palestinian cause, I think the vast majority of non-white communities (Chinese-Canadians, Indian-Canadians are by far the two largest, and then African and Caribbean black communities) would sign up to fight just as much as anyone else.
I actually think the far deeper rifts in Canadian society are with far-left urban people versus suburban and rural centrists and conservatives, it goes beyond just political disagreement to the point of real deep values and culture differences at this point. People are blaming immigrants and immigration for what is really white leftists against Western Civilization. It’s misguided.
Blaming immigration for problems is completely different from blaming immigrants. It is very possible for immigrants, as individuals, to be morally benign, while immigration still has catastrophic effects.
Arguments against immigration or in favour of remigration don't rest on claims of moral fault in immigrants.
I don't think we've come to terms with yet what goodwill the pandemic response ate through, although partially along generational lines. We managed it (at least until we didn't) but not for free.
Not sure whether you have ever lived in rural Canada, but rural vs urban Canada is /also/ in many ways a racial divide and in my experience many rural Canadians self-concepts and increasing feeling that the elite and political class does not represent them reflect this. If you're confident personally there's no racial angle: do you think many Canadian's mistrust of Theresa Tam, even open mockery of advice, has nothing to do with her being both an immigrant and ethnically Chinese? For that matter, do you think public health advice that treated the mistrust of racialized communities towards public health with kid gloves but in at least one region made explicitly ethnically-targeted restrictions for (white but largely segregated) Mennonites was not a source of racial tension? The experience of the UK should make clear it's possible for feelings of double standards or a government that no longer represents some parts of the public to simmer for a long time before any open conflict.
The war part strains credulity for me. My gut feeling is that anyone eligible for a second passport and with some family ties still in their birth country (even their parent's birth country) would be long gone. If not, this would genuinely change my mind about multiculturalism, but again I'm skeptical.
I think the vast majority of Canadians followed Tam’s advice and didn’t mock it, until people started asking questions about real tradeoffs (why are our schools and businesses and religious institutions closed for this long? Why do we need a vax passport for a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission?). I don’t think it had much to do with her race.
For those few people for whom Tam’s race mattered to their trust of her, I’m comfortable just actually calling them racists. They’re wrong and should be castigated for those views. But thankfully, I don’t think there are really that many of them.
Are you comfortable calling racialized communities who distrust white leaders (or trust them less) making choices for their communities racist? If so, there's plenty of racism going around in Canada, and if not, there's the kind of racial double standard currently eroding trust in the UK (although I'd say in Canada a much milder version of it).
Depends on the community. I think there’s a lot of misguided application of American racial frameworks to Canada. Joseph Heath wrote well about this in 2018.
Writers like Desmond Cole desperately want Canada to be just as racist as the U.S. so he can be a civil rights leader, but he’s wrong. Our history and relationship to slavery is totally different. And I don’t think even most racialized communities in Canada distrust white leadership of the country. It’s just a small group of loud activists. Would I call them racist? I guess?
I think it’s genuinely different with indigenous. They have real reason to mistrust white leadership. I wouldn’t call such views racist there. It’s based on real painful experience.
Deliberately provocative, like so many of AE's other pronouncements in this forum. Not worth dignifying with a response, as he will only wrestle you to the ground with sophistry and meretricious arguments.
No white drivers have ever caused a mass tragedy, right? You don’t even have any statistics on this, you just have your biased view of masses of unqualified Indian drivers.
Here’s another anecdotal tragedy, caused by a drunk scion of an Italian-Canadian real estate development family company. Nothing to do with mass immigration over the past decade.
I'm not sure why this has to be framed as an either/or choice. The Humboldt Broncos tragedy has nothing to do with Canada's men's soccer team. We can honour the memory of those young men and still celebrate one of the greatest achievements in Canadian soccer history.
The Broncos, and many other Canadian deaths, are a direct consequence of mass immigration. Which has bad consequences that vastly outweigh the benefit of a better national soccer team.
The Humboldt Broncos tragedy was exactly that—a tragedy. It was not an act of hatred or violence, and it wasn't caused by immigration. It was a catastrophic traffic accident caused by one man's terrible mistake.
The driver accepted responsibility, served his prison sentence, and has expressed profound remorse from the beginning. You can believe his driving was negligent while also believing that someone who has accepted responsibility and paid his debt should not face perpetual punishment. I strongly disagree the CBSA's decision to seek deportation for this man.
Reasonable people can disagree about immigration policy—I certainly think Canada needs to manage immigration far better than it has in recent years. But using the deaths of the Humboldt Broncos to argue that immigrants as a group are responsible for the tragedy is neither fair nor accurate. That's not justice, and it's not the Canada I want to live in.
Mass immigration has brought a vast number of incompetent and corruptly licensed truck drivers into Canada. The driver who killed the Broncos was one of them. Without mass immigration, those deaths would not have happened.
At this point you're no longer analyzing evidence—you're fitting every tragedy into a worldview you've already decided is true.
An applied epistemologist follows the evidence wherever it leads. An ideologue starts with the conclusion and works backward. Your comments suggest the latter.
But you are correct though, based on your further comments, I can confidently advise that your first statement was "racist".
Very true. One can imagine other ways of getting to the current situation than mass immigration, and ways to have had mass immigration without leading to the deaths of the Broncos. But this particular accident was dependent on a number of things, one of which was mass immigration.
Similarly, one could imagine a great Canadian soccer team without mass immigration, or a bad team with it
I would add, You describe yourself as an "Applied Epistemologist," yet you're drawing a sweeping causal conclusion from a single tragic event without demonstrating the connection. That's not applied epistemology; it's simply asserting a conclusion.
To enumerate all the bad consequences of mass immigration would take a lot of time. The deaths of the Broncos is merely one such consequence. But one which, in my opinion, by itself outweighs the benefits of a better national soccer team. YMMV
You've now shifted from making a factual claim ("the Broncos deaths were a direct consequence of mass immigration") to expressing a personal value judgment ("in my opinion"). Those are not the same thing.
You're entitled to your opinion. You're not entitled to present an opinion as though it were an evidence-based conclusion.
My objection has never been to criticizing immigration policy. I've done that myself. My objection is to taking a single tragic accident involving one immigrant and treating it as an indictment of millions of immigrants. That's not evidence-based reasoning but rather it is textbook hasty generalization.
For someone who styles himself an "Applied Epistemologist," I'd have expected a much higher standard of analysis.
Understanding that we have we'd have less crime committed by immigrants if we admitted fewer immigrants is not "an indictment of millions of immigrants". It requires no allegation of collective guilt to understand that if our system cannot sort the criminally irresponsible from the competent and law-abiding, the risk invited by immigration is all about the numbers. At worst, it's a value judgement about how much the interests of Canadians matter compared to the interests of prospective immigrants (although I would personally venture that answering "a lot more" is the baseline condition of being a country).
Are you actually claiming that the Broncos' deaths weren't a consequence of mass immigration? Was Jaskirat Singh Sidhu born in Canada? Was he here on vacation?
You can be agnostic about what caused the Humboldt Broncos tragedy and still weigh the overcrowding, housing issues, strain on services, crime, diaspora politics, and loss of national identity brought by uncontrolled mass immigration without any expectation of assimilation, against winning a soccer game. This article is pretty unserious fluff.
An average of 16.6 million Canadians watched the 2010 men's gold medal hockey game between Canada and the U.S., making it the most-watched television broadcast in Canadian history. The viewership peaked at 26.5 million, meaning roughly 80% of the entire Canadian population tuned in to watch at least some part of the game.
To compare that with a victory of Qatar in the group stage of the World Cup disqualifies you as a commentator.
And that game in 2010 was not the most important game in Canadian history. If you have to ask what was, you were not alive then.
Thank you for an excellent illustration of the cumulative effects of public policy meant to facilitate greater good. Greater good is quantifiable and it’s important to do so in the face of 4 of 10 immigration questions on Alberta’s October referendum, and timely because Premier Smith recently implored Albertans to vote yes to restrictions on immigrant support. Albeit Alphonso Davies and his teammates are outlier examples of what’s possible, I’m sure most ‘newcomer to citizenship’ family stories could be framed in this way of cumulative effects of public policy that facilitate successful newcomer integration into Canada. We are not survival of only the ‘fittest’ that is the US melting pot approach.
Aftab...."Hockey will always be the headline sport here, but Canada’s win over Qatar was, arguably, one of this country’s finest international sporting achievements, on par with the men’s hockey gold medal at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics." This is a long stretch for sure!
I enjoyed reading this article because it reminds us that Canada has benefited enormously from immigration and multiculturalism. I live in one of the most diverse parts of Mississauga, and my family and I have been enriched by getting to know people from so many different cultures. I truly believe Canada is a stronger and richer country because of that diversity.
At the same time, I think there is an important part of this discussion that cannot be ignored. During Justin Trudeau's time in office, the federal government increased immigration levels faster than our housing, health care, schools, and other essential services could keep pace. In doing so, it unintentionally damaged the broad public support that Canadians had long shown for immigration and multiculturalism.
Supporting immigration and expecting it to be well managed are not contradictory positions. In fact, they go hand in hand. If we want Canadians to continue embracing immigration, we must ensure that newcomers have a realistic opportunity to succeed and that our infrastructure and public services can support both new arrivals and those already living here. Responsible immigration policy should strengthen public confidence, not erode it.
As for the soccer, this team fills me with incredible pride. I've followed Canada's men's national team since their first World Cup in Mexico in 1986, when players like Bob Lenarduzzi, Dale Mitchell, Paul Dolan, and Igor Vrablic wore the maple leaf. I've attended two World Cups and watched countless Canadian friendlies over the past four decades. I remember the disappointment of so many near misses, which makes this moment all the more meaningful.
Watching Canada score its first-ever men's World Cup goal in Qatar four years ago was unforgettable. Seeing this team now earn its first World Cup victory, draw another match, and advance to the knockout stage feels like a dream come true. This team reflects the very best of Canada, not simply because of its diversity, but because of its talent, resilience, hard work, and determination. Canada is behind this team, and I don't think Canadians could be prouder.
I remain thoroughly disinterested in sports, but I do love the idea that Canada is succeeding at something we barely even engaged in before because the dynamism of our population made it possible.
Despite how immigration has been mismanaged in recent years, and despite it being a bit unfashionable to say so, I still really do feel that our diversity is a true strength. We just forgot that diversity works best when it's paired with competence.
Hopefully we internalize that this can apply to much more, and start doing more things differently, making newer and better things instead of relying too much on past strengths that no longer drive us forward. We have so much potential to grow and change.
Immigrants playing a sport that's primarily popular among immigrants is not reminding Canada of itself, surely. People will have to judge whether they like the changes immigration brings on its own merits (and this one at least is a positive contribution), but it doesn't help Canada remember itself to pretend like it has a history than started in WWII (or worse, 1988) either.
Refugees on average are not net contributors, which is fine because this is not the purpose of asylum. This should of course not take away from any individual's success in difficult circumstances. But individual success should also not convince us to blur the lines between asylum as a shared humanitarian obligation and economic immigration as a benefit to us, or ignore that so many attempt to use asylum as a backdoor to economic immigration that our current asylum system might as well be a regular immigration stream that happens to admit a few refugees.
I think you've made some fair distinctions, particularly between refugee protection and economic immigration. They are different policies with different objectives, and it's important not to conflate them.
Where I disagree is with the suggestion that this team somehow isn't reminding Canada of itself because soccer has historically been more popular among immigrant communities. Canada isn't frozen in time. Our national identity has evolved over generations through successive waves of immigration, and that's part of our history too.
Nor did Canada's soccer history begin after the Second World War—or in 1986. Organized soccer has been played in Canada for well over a century. Canada won the Olympic football tournament in 1904, qualified for the World Cup in 1986, and many of us have supported the national team through decades when success was rare. I've followed this team since Mexico '86, through countless friendlies, Gold Cups, heartbreaks, and near misses. The players wearing the maple leaf today are the latest chapter in that history, not a break from it.
I also think we can hold two ideas at once: immigration should be managed responsibly so that newcomers and existing Canadians both have the opportunity to thrive, and Canada's diversity has enriched our country in countless ways. Those positions are not mutually exclusive. Poorly managed immigration can undermine public support for immigration itself, but that is an argument for better policy—not against the idea that people from different backgrounds can become Canadians and represent Canada with pride.
Canada was not wildly diverse (at least within both of its founding cultures) for most of its history. It wasn't founded as a country of immigrants or as a mosaic. It's revisionism. In 1900, a generation after confederation, Canada was more than 90% french or british isles origin. Canada had higher levels of immigration by the numbers than the US, but much of that was all but culturally identical (from Britain and the US). Yes, a country's conception of itself can change, but this is a nearly content-less belief--you could equally say immigration restriction, even something that borders on a pragmatic ethnonationalism, is a part of our history. To the degree Canada did admit other immigrants, it's more accurate to say it was expansionist than aspirationally multicultural. Canada is a young country, but it's still strange to see people suggest changes that happened within the lifetime of many still alive are what the country fundamentally is.
Mass nonwhite immigration been our policy and history since 1968, though, long enough to be a core value of my Canada. I will stand up for it as a core principle of the Canada I believe in, even if it wasn’t a “founding” principle at Confederation.
It has also been around my entire lifetime and then some, but given that my adult life has been nearly entirely Canadian decline I'm not so willing to take any change as good.
You don’t get to decide what cultural changes other people find positive, let alone agree to politely pretend have always been the culture. If your idealized multiculturalism can’t deal with actual pluralism, time to move on.
My previous comments on this forum have described my disappointment with ‘official multiculturalism’ (see Neil Bissoondath’s ‘The Cult of Multiculturalism’) but, an immigrant myself, I wholeheartedly embrace immigration and welcome the wonderful blending of cultures, faiths, and traditions that evolves naturally and not by the ghettoization of our communities. ‘Nuff said.
If they truly “evolved naturally” there’d be no need for public moralizing one way or the other, is the thing. The reality is it takes a fair amount of social coercion (once through pressure to assimilate, now through pressure for the majority culture to downplay a distinct identity let alone express a preference for it) for people to change their identities to include others’ ways of doing things. If you don’t want ghettoization it has to actively be prevented, and people often aren’t on board with that.
Wonderful article. God knows we've been doing our best to screw up our immigration system in recent years (along with many other things, as a regular reader of The Line will know), but there is no question that our emphasis on immigration has made our country immeasurably stronger and a better place to live in the last half-century.
Nice to read something once in a while that affirms the things that we got right.
Sloppy article. Your underlining point about immigration and their stories and contribution to Canada is a good one, but you really should fact check yourself before publishing. Firstly, the majority of the team was born in Canada. So calling it a majority of immigrants is false. Children of immigrants or grandchildren of immigrants would be more honest and accurate. You also are focussing on non European immigration, which is fine, but you should be more open about the agenda of the article. Also, Davies joined the Whitecaps at age15, he was MLS ready and played a handful of games with their reserve squad (called Whitecaps FC 2 at the time) and then debuted with the main team. He was not part of their youth residency program. He was developed in Edmonton until age 15. There was absolutely no reason to lie about his history to make the point.
A brilliant piece, and a reminder of who we are and what we can accomplish when we work together for the betterment of the nation as a whole. Opportunities come from investment in people. We need more of that. Hope is a drug....a very positive one.
Canada's win over Qatar reminds me of the Oympics before Canadians won any serious medals. (This is before medal winners got their obligatory McCain's Drinkin' box advertising deal.)
It's happening again with Qatar, a nation with 3 million citizens. Let us all thank God for this mighty win for Canada!
Glad the Line is publishing this. There aren’t many things that I can put my hand over my heart and say that I truly believe that Canada is better than every other country in the world — but “multiculturalism that works” is one of them. I sometimes call it the Canadian Multicultural Miracle. We do immigration and integration at the scale/rate we do, better than anyone else. We should celebrate this more.
(Aside, this is the one thing I will never forgive Justin Trudeau for: Spiking the immigration rates so high that it broke our ability to integrate and house everyone. And maybe permanently breaking the immigration consensus and the Canadian Multicultural Miracle. We already took immigrants at 3x the rate the U.S. does, with better outcomes, but we had to go and jack the rates to 10x the U.S. Just a damn tragedy.)
If that "success" of multiculturalism holds through any significant upheaval or material hardship that requires people to put the group before themselves, maybe then it's worth bragging about. Until then, I don't think people living side-by-side (not necessarily together) in relatively good economic times with little incident--happy with the deal they get as individuals--means we're not eating away at social resources and a reserve of trust we didn't recognize we ever had.
If the last serious trial we've had as a society was WWII (and even then less of a direct threat to Canada than in many other countries), it's probably worth thinking about how much even mere biculturalism was a threat to conscription.
I would submit that Covid was such a trial. To the extent that the public health response (school shutdowns etc.) created a rift among Canadians, it wasn’t on ethnic or racial lines, it was more about urban vs rural Canada. Multiculturalism passed that test, I think.
Also I strongly suspect that multiculturalism would pass the much harder test of a war and conscription, too. Other than a few people who have been radicalized against western civilization by the Palestinian cause, I think the vast majority of non-white communities (Chinese-Canadians, Indian-Canadians are by far the two largest, and then African and Caribbean black communities) would sign up to fight just as much as anyone else.
I actually think the far deeper rifts in Canadian society are with far-left urban people versus suburban and rural centrists and conservatives, it goes beyond just political disagreement to the point of real deep values and culture differences at this point. People are blaming immigrants and immigration for what is really white leftists against Western Civilization. It’s misguided.
Blaming immigration for problems is completely different from blaming immigrants. It is very possible for immigrants, as individuals, to be morally benign, while immigration still has catastrophic effects.
Arguments against immigration or in favour of remigration don't rest on claims of moral fault in immigrants.
I don't think we've come to terms with yet what goodwill the pandemic response ate through, although partially along generational lines. We managed it (at least until we didn't) but not for free.
Not sure whether you have ever lived in rural Canada, but rural vs urban Canada is /also/ in many ways a racial divide and in my experience many rural Canadians self-concepts and increasing feeling that the elite and political class does not represent them reflect this. If you're confident personally there's no racial angle: do you think many Canadian's mistrust of Theresa Tam, even open mockery of advice, has nothing to do with her being both an immigrant and ethnically Chinese? For that matter, do you think public health advice that treated the mistrust of racialized communities towards public health with kid gloves but in at least one region made explicitly ethnically-targeted restrictions for (white but largely segregated) Mennonites was not a source of racial tension? The experience of the UK should make clear it's possible for feelings of double standards or a government that no longer represents some parts of the public to simmer for a long time before any open conflict.
The war part strains credulity for me. My gut feeling is that anyone eligible for a second passport and with some family ties still in their birth country (even their parent's birth country) would be long gone. If not, this would genuinely change my mind about multiculturalism, but again I'm skeptical.
I think the vast majority of Canadians followed Tam’s advice and didn’t mock it, until people started asking questions about real tradeoffs (why are our schools and businesses and religious institutions closed for this long? Why do we need a vax passport for a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission?). I don’t think it had much to do with her race.
For those few people for whom Tam’s race mattered to their trust of her, I’m comfortable just actually calling them racists. They’re wrong and should be castigated for those views. But thankfully, I don’t think there are really that many of them.
Are you comfortable calling racialized communities who distrust white leaders (or trust them less) making choices for their communities racist? If so, there's plenty of racism going around in Canada, and if not, there's the kind of racial double standard currently eroding trust in the UK (although I'd say in Canada a much milder version of it).
Depends on the community. I think there’s a lot of misguided application of American racial frameworks to Canada. Joseph Heath wrote well about this in 2018.
https://induecourse.utoronto.ca/against-the-racialization-of-everything/
Writers like Desmond Cole desperately want Canada to be just as racist as the U.S. so he can be a civil rights leader, but he’s wrong. Our history and relationship to slavery is totally different. And I don’t think even most racialized communities in Canada distrust white leadership of the country. It’s just a small group of loud activists. Would I call them racist? I guess?
I think it’s genuinely different with indigenous. They have real reason to mistrust white leadership. I wouldn’t call such views racist there. It’s based on real painful experience.
The win over Qatar was great! Writing it is on par with the 2010 hockey gold medal win is pretty divorced from reality, in my estimation.
I'd rather have a terrible soccer team but have the Humboldt Broncos still alive. But maybe that's racist.
Deliberately provocative, like so many of AE's other pronouncements in this forum. Not worth dignifying with a response, as he will only wrestle you to the ground with sophistry and meretricious arguments.
Surely a deliberately provocative comment is, all other things being equal, more interesting than banal approbation?
No white drivers have ever caused a mass tragedy, right? You don’t even have any statistics on this, you just have your biased view of masses of unqualified Indian drivers.
Here’s another anecdotal tragedy, caused by a drunk scion of an Italian-Canadian real estate development family company. Nothing to do with mass immigration over the past decade.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/neville-lake-reaction-1.3392180
No need to repeat myself, read down thread.
I'm not sure why this has to be framed as an either/or choice. The Humboldt Broncos tragedy has nothing to do with Canada's men's soccer team. We can honour the memory of those young men and still celebrate one of the greatest achievements in Canadian soccer history.
The Broncos, and many other Canadian deaths, are a direct consequence of mass immigration. Which has bad consequences that vastly outweigh the benefit of a better national soccer team.
The Humboldt Broncos tragedy was exactly that—a tragedy. It was not an act of hatred or violence, and it wasn't caused by immigration. It was a catastrophic traffic accident caused by one man's terrible mistake.
The driver accepted responsibility, served his prison sentence, and has expressed profound remorse from the beginning. You can believe his driving was negligent while also believing that someone who has accepted responsibility and paid his debt should not face perpetual punishment. I strongly disagree the CBSA's decision to seek deportation for this man.
Reasonable people can disagree about immigration policy—I certainly think Canada needs to manage immigration far better than it has in recent years. But using the deaths of the Humboldt Broncos to argue that immigrants as a group are responsible for the tragedy is neither fair nor accurate. That's not justice, and it's not the Canada I want to live in.
Mass immigration has brought a vast number of incompetent and corruptly licensed truck drivers into Canada. The driver who killed the Broncos was one of them. Without mass immigration, those deaths would not have happened.
At this point you're no longer analyzing evidence—you're fitting every tragedy into a worldview you've already decided is true.
An applied epistemologist follows the evidence wherever it leads. An ideologue starts with the conclusion and works backward. Your comments suggest the latter.
But you are correct though, based on your further comments, I can confidently advise that your first statement was "racist".
I think you'll find plenty of other factors to blame as well, if you really think about it.
Mass immigration didn't lower the standards for obtaining a Class 1 license.
Very true. One can imagine other ways of getting to the current situation than mass immigration, and ways to have had mass immigration without leading to the deaths of the Broncos. But this particular accident was dependent on a number of things, one of which was mass immigration.
Similarly, one could imagine a great Canadian soccer team without mass immigration, or a bad team with it
I would add, You describe yourself as an "Applied Epistemologist," yet you're drawing a sweeping causal conclusion from a single tragic event without demonstrating the connection. That's not applied epistemology; it's simply asserting a conclusion.
To enumerate all the bad consequences of mass immigration would take a lot of time. The deaths of the Broncos is merely one such consequence. But one which, in my opinion, by itself outweighs the benefits of a better national soccer team. YMMV
You've now shifted from making a factual claim ("the Broncos deaths were a direct consequence of mass immigration") to expressing a personal value judgment ("in my opinion"). Those are not the same thing.
You're entitled to your opinion. You're not entitled to present an opinion as though it were an evidence-based conclusion.
My objection has never been to criticizing immigration policy. I've done that myself. My objection is to taking a single tragic accident involving one immigrant and treating it as an indictment of millions of immigrants. That's not evidence-based reasoning but rather it is textbook hasty generalization.
For someone who styles himself an "Applied Epistemologist," I'd have expected a much higher standard of analysis.
Understanding that we have we'd have less crime committed by immigrants if we admitted fewer immigrants is not "an indictment of millions of immigrants". It requires no allegation of collective guilt to understand that if our system cannot sort the criminally irresponsible from the competent and law-abiding, the risk invited by immigration is all about the numbers. At worst, it's a value judgement about how much the interests of Canadians matter compared to the interests of prospective immigrants (although I would personally venture that answering "a lot more" is the baseline condition of being a country).
Are you actually claiming that the Broncos' deaths weren't a consequence of mass immigration? Was Jaskirat Singh Sidhu born in Canada? Was he here on vacation?
You can be agnostic about what caused the Humboldt Broncos tragedy and still weigh the overcrowding, housing issues, strain on services, crime, diaspora politics, and loss of national identity brought by uncontrolled mass immigration without any expectation of assimilation, against winning a soccer game. This article is pretty unserious fluff.
An average of 16.6 million Canadians watched the 2010 men's gold medal hockey game between Canada and the U.S., making it the most-watched television broadcast in Canadian history. The viewership peaked at 26.5 million, meaning roughly 80% of the entire Canadian population tuned in to watch at least some part of the game.
To compare that with a victory of Qatar in the group stage of the World Cup disqualifies you as a commentator.
And that game in 2010 was not the most important game in Canadian history. If you have to ask what was, you were not alive then.
There will never be anything like 72 again. One of those incredibly rare moments when a nation stops.
If you watched live, no words are possible to describe it. If you didn't, no words are possible to describe it.
They closed our school after the first period and sent us all home. That third period.....
I was in Grade 3 in an open-concept school (do they still have those?), and I watched the game with some cool Grade 5 guys.
My neighbour had the only colour TV in the neighbourhood. I was in Grade 4. Then, we played ball hockey.....
No only that but I still remember where I watched it.
Thank you for an excellent illustration of the cumulative effects of public policy meant to facilitate greater good. Greater good is quantifiable and it’s important to do so in the face of 4 of 10 immigration questions on Alberta’s October referendum, and timely because Premier Smith recently implored Albertans to vote yes to restrictions on immigrant support. Albeit Alphonso Davies and his teammates are outlier examples of what’s possible, I’m sure most ‘newcomer to citizenship’ family stories could be framed in this way of cumulative effects of public policy that facilitate successful newcomer integration into Canada. We are not survival of only the ‘fittest’ that is the US melting pot approach.
Aftab...."Hockey will always be the headline sport here, but Canada’s win over Qatar was, arguably, one of this country’s finest international sporting achievements, on par with the men’s hockey gold medal at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics." This is a long stretch for sure!
I enjoyed reading this article because it reminds us that Canada has benefited enormously from immigration and multiculturalism. I live in one of the most diverse parts of Mississauga, and my family and I have been enriched by getting to know people from so many different cultures. I truly believe Canada is a stronger and richer country because of that diversity.
At the same time, I think there is an important part of this discussion that cannot be ignored. During Justin Trudeau's time in office, the federal government increased immigration levels faster than our housing, health care, schools, and other essential services could keep pace. In doing so, it unintentionally damaged the broad public support that Canadians had long shown for immigration and multiculturalism.
Supporting immigration and expecting it to be well managed are not contradictory positions. In fact, they go hand in hand. If we want Canadians to continue embracing immigration, we must ensure that newcomers have a realistic opportunity to succeed and that our infrastructure and public services can support both new arrivals and those already living here. Responsible immigration policy should strengthen public confidence, not erode it.
As for the soccer, this team fills me with incredible pride. I've followed Canada's men's national team since their first World Cup in Mexico in 1986, when players like Bob Lenarduzzi, Dale Mitchell, Paul Dolan, and Igor Vrablic wore the maple leaf. I've attended two World Cups and watched countless Canadian friendlies over the past four decades. I remember the disappointment of so many near misses, which makes this moment all the more meaningful.
Watching Canada score its first-ever men's World Cup goal in Qatar four years ago was unforgettable. Seeing this team now earn its first World Cup victory, draw another match, and advance to the knockout stage feels like a dream come true. This team reflects the very best of Canada, not simply because of its diversity, but because of its talent, resilience, hard work, and determination. Canada is behind this team, and I don't think Canadians could be prouder.
I remain thoroughly disinterested in sports, but I do love the idea that Canada is succeeding at something we barely even engaged in before because the dynamism of our population made it possible.
Despite how immigration has been mismanaged in recent years, and despite it being a bit unfashionable to say so, I still really do feel that our diversity is a true strength. We just forgot that diversity works best when it's paired with competence.
Hopefully we internalize that this can apply to much more, and start doing more things differently, making newer and better things instead of relying too much on past strengths that no longer drive us forward. We have so much potential to grow and change.
Immigrants playing a sport that's primarily popular among immigrants is not reminding Canada of itself, surely. People will have to judge whether they like the changes immigration brings on its own merits (and this one at least is a positive contribution), but it doesn't help Canada remember itself to pretend like it has a history than started in WWII (or worse, 1988) either.
Refugees on average are not net contributors, which is fine because this is not the purpose of asylum. This should of course not take away from any individual's success in difficult circumstances. But individual success should also not convince us to blur the lines between asylum as a shared humanitarian obligation and economic immigration as a benefit to us, or ignore that so many attempt to use asylum as a backdoor to economic immigration that our current asylum system might as well be a regular immigration stream that happens to admit a few refugees.
I think you've made some fair distinctions, particularly between refugee protection and economic immigration. They are different policies with different objectives, and it's important not to conflate them.
Where I disagree is with the suggestion that this team somehow isn't reminding Canada of itself because soccer has historically been more popular among immigrant communities. Canada isn't frozen in time. Our national identity has evolved over generations through successive waves of immigration, and that's part of our history too.
Nor did Canada's soccer history begin after the Second World War—or in 1986. Organized soccer has been played in Canada for well over a century. Canada won the Olympic football tournament in 1904, qualified for the World Cup in 1986, and many of us have supported the national team through decades when success was rare. I've followed this team since Mexico '86, through countless friendlies, Gold Cups, heartbreaks, and near misses. The players wearing the maple leaf today are the latest chapter in that history, not a break from it.
I also think we can hold two ideas at once: immigration should be managed responsibly so that newcomers and existing Canadians both have the opportunity to thrive, and Canada's diversity has enriched our country in countless ways. Those positions are not mutually exclusive. Poorly managed immigration can undermine public support for immigration itself, but that is an argument for better policy—not against the idea that people from different backgrounds can become Canadians and represent Canada with pride.
Canada was not wildly diverse (at least within both of its founding cultures) for most of its history. It wasn't founded as a country of immigrants or as a mosaic. It's revisionism. In 1900, a generation after confederation, Canada was more than 90% french or british isles origin. Canada had higher levels of immigration by the numbers than the US, but much of that was all but culturally identical (from Britain and the US). Yes, a country's conception of itself can change, but this is a nearly content-less belief--you could equally say immigration restriction, even something that borders on a pragmatic ethnonationalism, is a part of our history. To the degree Canada did admit other immigrants, it's more accurate to say it was expansionist than aspirationally multicultural. Canada is a young country, but it's still strange to see people suggest changes that happened within the lifetime of many still alive are what the country fundamentally is.
Mass nonwhite immigration been our policy and history since 1968, though, long enough to be a core value of my Canada. I will stand up for it as a core principle of the Canada I believe in, even if it wasn’t a “founding” principle at Confederation.
It has also been around my entire lifetime and then some, but given that my adult life has been nearly entirely Canadian decline I'm not so willing to take any change as good.
Time to move on. There are significantly more children enrolled in soccer programmes in Canada than there are in hockey.
You don’t get to decide what cultural changes other people find positive, let alone agree to politely pretend have always been the culture. If your idealized multiculturalism can’t deal with actual pluralism, time to move on.
My previous comments on this forum have described my disappointment with ‘official multiculturalism’ (see Neil Bissoondath’s ‘The Cult of Multiculturalism’) but, an immigrant myself, I wholeheartedly embrace immigration and welcome the wonderful blending of cultures, faiths, and traditions that evolves naturally and not by the ghettoization of our communities. ‘Nuff said.
If they truly “evolved naturally” there’d be no need for public moralizing one way or the other, is the thing. The reality is it takes a fair amount of social coercion (once through pressure to assimilate, now through pressure for the majority culture to downplay a distinct identity let alone express a preference for it) for people to change their identities to include others’ ways of doing things. If you don’t want ghettoization it has to actively be prevented, and people often aren’t on board with that.
Wonderful article. God knows we've been doing our best to screw up our immigration system in recent years (along with many other things, as a regular reader of The Line will know), but there is no question that our emphasis on immigration has made our country immeasurably stronger and a better place to live in the last half-century.
Nice to read something once in a while that affirms the things that we got right.
Sloppy article. Your underlining point about immigration and their stories and contribution to Canada is a good one, but you really should fact check yourself before publishing. Firstly, the majority of the team was born in Canada. So calling it a majority of immigrants is false. Children of immigrants or grandchildren of immigrants would be more honest and accurate. You also are focussing on non European immigration, which is fine, but you should be more open about the agenda of the article. Also, Davies joined the Whitecaps at age15, he was MLS ready and played a handful of games with their reserve squad (called Whitecaps FC 2 at the time) and then debuted with the main team. He was not part of their youth residency program. He was developed in Edmonton until age 15. There was absolutely no reason to lie about his history to make the point.
A brilliant piece, and a reminder of who we are and what we can accomplish when we work together for the betterment of the nation as a whole. Opportunities come from investment in people. We need more of that. Hope is a drug....a very positive one.
Canada's win over Qatar reminds me of the Oympics before Canadians won any serious medals. (This is before medal winners got their obligatory McCain's Drinkin' box advertising deal.)
It's happening again with Qatar, a nation with 3 million citizens. Let us all thank God for this mighty win for Canada!
(Also, I am a footie addict.)