If we are going to build Canada, we need immigrants. But Mark Carney hasn’t offered much in the way of detailed immigration policy, despite his emphasis on the economy.
No. No. No. This absolute belief that we must grow and have more immigration is based on the opinions of rich people and developers who benefit. Immigration keeps wages down and prices up for those of us who have worked to support ourselves. Limit immigration to close family of citizens and genuine refugees from camps and tent cities and no claiming at the border. Most of the border crossers are liars.
Exactly. What matters to Canadians is wealth per capita. Bulking up our population in a quixotic attempt to project power on the world stage is simply dumb - it would either be a failure or make us a legitimate security threat to the US.
And we need to talk about culture: bringing in immigrants at a rate too fast to assimilate into our culture is harmful to Canadians, not helpful.
A so-called asylum seeker who can afford a plane ticket from Lagos or Kinshasa for himself and his family is probably not being persecuted by his home government. Most of these asylum claims made at our airports could probably be summarily dismissed and the claimants put on the next plane back....but for our obligation under international law to let the claimants make an oral claim in front of a tribunal, two years from now with luck. By the time their claim is heard, appealed, and rejected, they have put down roots (and babies!) in their diaspora community whose activists lobby vigorously for them to be allowed to stay, abetted by the homegrown “anti-racism” industry.
I don’t know what the solution is. Canada could simply tell the international law folks to get stuffed, and suspend asylum, but this would have repercussions in other areas where we want foreign countries to cooperate with us, like letting us pivot our trade from the U.S. to those same foreign countries. They don’t want us sticking them with the entire burden of bogus asylum claimants!
Stop misleading readers by referring to "International Law". Without effective enforcement a law are merely a suggestion, like the 10 commandments. The use of this term is yet another example of the magical thinking so favoured by progressives.
I get your point. I say “International Law” because the term in is common use. British barrister Natasha Hausdorff refers to it as a body of convention that most countries mostly observe most of the time., as an alternative to solving every disagreement by coming to blows.. The only way to enforce international law is through military force. Since that is expensive and not guaranteed to get the result we want, although sometimes we have to resort to it, we try to solve most disputes by writing down conventions at international conferences and aiming for diplomatic consensus that will be observed more often than not, except when we really really don’t want to.
Countries are supposed to regard these international agreements as binding on themselves through their domestic law, e.g., on immigration. But countries are sovereign and so can change their domestic laws however they wish. They only risk is that other countries will retaliate with, say, tariffs and trade sanctions, or will withdraw from mutual defence and intelligence cooperation agreements. Canada is a small weak country in decline. There is only so much it can do unilaterally. We might not have much choice but to be the world’s dumping ground for the unwelcome....if they can get here.
Note that the United Nations by itself doesn’t make international law. It just acts as the talking shop for countries to work out conventions to address their grievances with each other as sovereign states.
John we actually do need immigration or else our economy would have a demographic collapse. Our birth rates are terrible and immigration helps deal with that. The problem is "how many" can we handle. JT was beyond reckless and let in a ridiculous number of immigrants and visa holders and international students. We can't take that mess and turn it into "We don't need immigration". We have a country because of immigration and it needs to continue under very low targets while the country and economy catches up.
To touch on a sensitive topic sensitively...our necessary immigration requires greater selectivity. Our needs for newcomers must better match the integration potential of the immigrants. Simply importing culturally-based violence or culturally driven isolation contributes little benefit to Canada.
Glen, I don't reach your conclusion. I admit to tip-toeing around the most pertinent issue...but "immigrant culture" is where I'm going with this. Let me be even more pointed...If the homeland culture of the immigrant application is linked to a culture of violence or isolationism, the applicant is not a potentially valuable Canadian.
This, of course, steps into the minefield of "Islamist culture" vs "Muslim culture" and "Jew" vs "Ultra-Orthodox" Jew. Regardless of these sensitivities, we must recognize that homeland culture cannot be easily left behind...but should be examined as an additional criterion. It is a difficult inclusion, I admit...but an essential one.
I would like to see some serious discussion about what the qualities of an acceptable homeland culture would specifically be. Also, discussion about how this measurement or assessment would be achieved. Have you got any ideas?
I'd like to see serious effort to rethink the entire system of qualification for immigration. I hear that the point system is failing. I hear that security screening is basically non-existent. I hear that there is no way to track the location of hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years. I hear that the failures of our system are evidenced by gaps of public information and lack of enforceability, not only from too few enforcement staff, but too little infrastructure.
The immigration system in Canada is built on decades of good faith and trusting in things to "go well" and I'm bugged that the system is now so inefficient and has been unable to maintain any kind of focus. I'm also bothered by the fact that bad apples are easily gaming the system. The immigration policy needs to connect directly with our future employment and job market needs--not to take jobs away from Canadians but rather to fill jobs in industries that are facing shortages. This connects to how we form our post-secondary education policies. Strong, decisive leadership and discussion is the only way to make these changes.
And my final question is, why does any of this have to be a tip-toe topic that is tagged as extreme?
I sense I lack your depth of immigration knowledge...but, to your question, I would reject:
1. all applicants coming from countries harbouring named terrorist organizations. Between 1979 and 2024, Islamist groups were responsible for approximately 84.4% of all recorded terrorist attacks, according to a report by Fondapol. (Fondapol considers itself a liberal, progressive, and European-oriented think tank.) It may raise the ire of Muslims to say this...but Islamists ARE Muslims.
2. all applicants that demonstrate that they would be unwilling to integrate into Canadian society. Ultra-Orthodox Jews might be included here. Some aboriginal populations might also be included.
3. All convicted criminals...anything above a "parking ticket" crime.
Again, the execution of such a policy would be problematic. However, with local Islamic groups demonstrating violence and physical threats and with the absence of almost any local Muslim pushback to their activity, I'd consider this first.
Concerning "tip-toeing", there may be enough responses to gauge the answer! :-)
Look, this is precisely the wrong time to be talking about increased immigration. Canada has a number of significant problems to solve before adding more people to the mix. Very modest immigration levels based on a strict points system can help. Anything else is a recipe for disaster. Can't believe we're even discussing this nonsense.
This article pointed out how anti-immigration I have become. My knee-jerk reaction was "No way" but reading through the article I gradually came around to "Yes way". Like so, so many things, we just have to update the policy we had 10 years ago.
My personal pet peeve is the amount of money we spend on bringing in and housing immigrants who may be of questionable economic benefit to the country, while spending so little to bring Canadians with substance and mental health issues back into the workforce.
Another pet peeve is that, working through the Century Initiative's numbers, increasing the Canadian population to 100 million would not increase per-capita GDP. We would enjoy a more crowded country for no benefit to us as individuals. The only benefit would be the government collecting more taxes.
I believe the Century Inituative's premise is that Canada has so much space for people. The problem with that belief is that most people (not just Canadians) don't want to live in much of our undeveloped space.
The 100 million Century initiative is just as inane, stupid and impractical idea as the mirage of multiculturalism. These inane, stupid and impractical ideas have been generated by the smoke-addled minds of out-of-touch professional academicians - offense meant - and filthy rich people who never have to queue up.
Around year 2000 I was asked what would be the one thing that I would change about Canada. I said I would discard multiculturalism and create, maintain and enforce an official policy of assimilation. Look at what multiculturalism brought us, Canadian passport became nothing but an easily obtained or bought document of convenience. Only 3 years, and your criminal record does not matter. Eff that.
It fills me with a certain despair that three smart people could write such a bad paragraph: "One of the most significant barriers to successful immigration policy is a lack of trust in the government’s ability to manage growth. Housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, and stagnant wages have bred a pessimism that limits Canadians’ faith in the country’s future. To rebuild the immigration consensus, Canadians must see that real growth is possible. This will require more than policy tweaks — it demands a shift in how leaders communicate about immigration."
This is not a communication issue. This is an issue where actual solutions are needed.
We need more than "policy tweaks" to fix: "Housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, and stagnant wages". In the absence of big systematic fixes, massive immigration - especially as badly done as Trudeau has done it - will increase these problems. But certainly, no amount of lipstick on this particular pig is going to convince anyone.
Yes! Let’s put some real brain power to work on this. It’s a matter of long term planning for success, not putting lipstick on the pig as you so adeptly stated.
I always thought incentivizing the birth rate was a better way to proceed than opening the immigration floodgates. But if I were in a family unit of reproducing age right now and want to have a child I’m looking at not being able to afford a house and bringing a new life into the Canadian world that will get saddled with $60K (2025 Ontario data from Fraser institute ) of government debt. Plus immigration policies that allow a large group of extended family members not allowed to work for each qualifying worker who actually comes in. By contrast a new US citizen can only sponsor their foreign born kids for a permanent residency that the kids still have to apply for and no parents, siblings, etc. Time to change policies, people.
"Family reunification" that allows the elderly to become permanent residents, in the context of a non-negotiable public-only health system, is one of the most galling concepts I've ever encountered.
I don't care if grandma and grandpa can theoretically help take care of your kids, or that leaving them back home is 'not nice'. They haven't paid a cent into the tax base and are about to need a ton of scarce health resources. They will also likely be using the hospital ER as a family doctor from the moment they land.
This is just (among) the most blatant of the myriad ways our dumb immigration system screws over the existing population.
Retirees today (as a group) also paid far less into the system than they will take out because of changing demographics. People tolerate the inter-generational subsidy, to the degree they do, because the freeloaders are their parents and grandparents.
We probably shouldn't have much family reunification (although this is fairly limited compared to long-stay visas where people are buying health insurance and not eligible for benefits), but careful what you wish for. Immigrants still have parents that need to be supported one way or the other, and those paying for their own parents privately may not stay happy to fund the cushy inter-generational transfers boomers have gotten use to.
They will get more bang for their buck sending money home, which also doesn't involve the Canadian taxpayer. I've seen people get 60+ year old parents PR status surprisingly easily, but even if some are paying with private insurance they are still using up public medical resources getting those delivered. And you are right, we are badly off enough paying for various systems that weren't properly funded for the future, as it is.
It's a lottery, at least unless there was some way their parents were eligible on their own behalves (which would be rare for a 60 year-old). It's possible for it to be fast if you get lucky, but on average it's not. About 20k accepted a year, compared to about 200k who register to apply.
Maybe it wasn't nice to go around asking people having a bad time in an emergency room their PR status, eh? (The actual data on this is pretty clear -- permanent immigrants are overwhelmingly working age, about 5% over 65.)
Visitors (of any type) still take up capacity despite covering their own costs, sure. This is more a planning problem than anything. Would love Canadian boomers' faces if they get banned from any of their favourite travel destinations on this basis though.
Part of the problem is that cash subsidies don't help without adequate supply of the things people need. Housing is obvious (more income and same amount of houses just drives up prices), but daycare has been an example of that too.
You end up with the weird result that financial incentives seem not to have worked, all while birth rates *are* observably connected to economic downturns (and housing prices) and there's pretty significant variation in birthrates in rich countries that is not obviously about cultural differences. (People get hung up on 'sub-replacement' but the difference between South Korea's birthrate and France's in the number of babies halving in like 15 years or 150.) So there's a question about the general economy, but there's also a question about whether those incentives have actually made families better off at a budget level.
The baby bonus exists under the name Canada Child Benefit. You get the full amount if your “adjusted family net income” (???) is under $36502. It disappears at an AFNI of $120K. You have to apply and file taxes. The method to arrive at the exact amount is a f@@king bureaucratic nightmare formula.
Well yes but .... eventually it becomes a logjam like we have now. In every society, not just in Canada. There are societies that are capable of purging themselves of the bureaucratic nightmares. However they tend to be on the smaller end of scale, ethnically close to homogeneous, and have an excellent schooling system. So far anyway.
If Canada get broken enough, the purge or something close to it will happen.
Your arguement is flawed. Copilot tells me that Canada has admitted 1.8 million premanent residents in the last four years, increasing our population by 4%. And this does not include student visas, temporary workers or refugee claimants. Are be building any faster? Have home prices declined? is our infrastructure less broken? It takes time for immigrants to assimilate. We need to pause immigration and let housing supply catch up to the demand. Plus, there is a cost to settling immigrants, money that we could be spending repairing our infrastructure.
I believe that Trudeau & Sesm Fraser had 3 goals for their enormous immigration increase in 2024 & 24. They wanted 1) more new Canadian voters (previously reliably Liberal), 2) they wanted an increased percapita GDP, & 3) they were responding to some industries' calls for more (presumably low wage) workers. We got more Door Dash riders.
Your arguement repeats the 3rd falacious arguement. We have many underemployed college & higj school graduates to do lots of "building". Our problems are not enough non-gig jobs and not enough employers willing to make the effort & expense of training workers with specialized skills. We don't need to import house builders, we need to train our own.
You also completely ignore the destructive housing demand this immigration increase caused and is causing. I agree we need to reinstate our points-based rules. But we need a 3 year pause to clear the application backlog. This means no immigration for 3 years, zero, nada. We also need to end the employment & citizenship pathways for the same 3 years.
Your erroneous focus makes me wonder who sponsors your organization.
They actually wanted an increased total GDP, without worrying about per capita. That way they could claim Canada wasn't in recession, because the total economy wasn't shrinking, even though, per capita, it was shrinking rapidly.
The immigration system for the last 5+ years has been indistinguishable from one designed to be most ruinous to the standard of living in our cities.
Slam in more numbers, drive up rents and house prices. Take up all the entry level jobs - by literally paying employers to favour foreign workers - causing knock-on effects all the way up the employment market as competition for even slightly-better-than-shit jobs heats up. Build more condos and Brampton-style sprawl but no additional infrastructure, causing strain and traffic gridlock all around. Emphasize low-skill TFW's and fraudulent "students". We can't get enough people to work construction or other vital roles but there are lineups around the block to apply for Tim Hortons. Add in a dysfunctional perpetually years-long-backlogged refugee system designed to give even the most obviously bad-faith claimants a lavishly 'fair' hearing.
Only the already-wealthy really benefit in any way from all this due to asset inflation and wage suppression.
'Growth' is not an end in itself. The general public wants growth because its a precondition for broadly increased living standards, not because they want the line to go up. There's little evidence immigration increases GDP per capita in a durable way, and much of the supposed immigration surplus--if any--works basically only if immigrants are on the bottom, transferring money to native-born citizens. If nothing else, this is a hard sell in a country where 25% or so are immigrants, because the purported surplus is rarely shown to benefit previous immigrants. Land costs are one example often called a 'surplus'. This is really just an increased cost for anyone who doesn't own land, although on net it is indeed a transfer to the native-born population. Even the benefits of increasing the number of workers to pay for the safety net at best basically involves free-riding on workers another country paid to raise and educate, and at worst is effectively just a Ponzi scheme creating unfunded liabilities for those workers' retirements at least as large as their current contributions.
So, the short-term benefits are dubious at best. Canadians need politicians to be clear on what the long-term goals of immigration policy are. There are plausible arguments Canada is too small for economies of scale or for political influence, although there are also plausible arguments it's a benefit to have natural resources (particularly farmland) well beyond what's needed for the existing population's needs. Growth can't continue forever: once the short term benefit (if any) of juicing demographic ratios is gone, how do we know we're going to be better off as a bigger (and it has to be said culturally different) country?
Until a more specific plan for what segments of the economy will be the focus of growing the economy, determining the workforce required and the role and numbers of immigrants required will not be possible. Immigration needs to be tailored to much more specific needs. The increasing use of robotics and AI has the potential to reduce the overall number of workers required for some sectors of the economy and this will need to be taken into account when setting the policies on the numbers of and skill sets for immigrants.
The huge stream of immigrants in the last few years is Exhibit A for how politicians and the big dreamers who funnel them ideas work in silos, isolated in a utopian dreamland totally cut off from the downstream effects (often cruel) that they inflict upon ordinary people.
Perhaps it’s my line of work, but I understand market fundamentals. Especially supply/demand equations and the way that outside elements can distort both supply and demand.
Government controls the immigration process, healthcare systems including the supply of family doctors, home building and zoning regulations and the banking system.
Right now, the loose immigration policies are an outside disrupter that has thrown a serious blow to the stability of many of the other pillars that immigrants need to come to Canada and have success.
There are many ways that governments can get their act together to alleviate this housing crisis and a good first step is to take the GDP hit and send people who are here on temporary visas or student visas back home as a temporary relief valve. This would be far easier if the Liberals had any idea how many people are involved.
Governments don’t control the supply of family doctors. Medical school graduates themselves do. Increasingly they are not going into what most people think of as family doctoring. Training slots are going begging unfilled, and those grads who settle for them don’t intend to be traditional family doctors just because that was the only residency they could get. Even though it’s the one field of medicine that offers work-life balance (theoretically) It’s just not a good return on the investment in medical school, especially now that the professional schools charge “market-based” (ha!) tuition.
So the government can try however it likes to increase the supply of family doctors. Ain’t gonna work. That’s why they are trying to expand the roles of cheaper force-extenders like pharmacists and nurse-practitioners who haven’t been burnt out yet.
At the risk of annoying the hosts of this platform, I will counter with the argument that the government(s) control the number of slots available to the medical schools and increasingly meddle with the types of applicants who are chosen to fit DEI requirements. And most importantly, in Canada the government controls the working conditions of family doctors. It doesn’t take much research to find well articulated articles that clearly demonstrate how government intervention, much of it due to political dogma, makes a family practice a millstone around a qualified doctor. All doctors can’t be specialists. What had happened to everyone else?
The medical schools set their own admission criteria. Any DEI -- and they are full of it now -- is due to their own activist faculty members who see Canada as a racist Hell-hole, not due to government diktat. The Ontario provincial government did push back against the new medical school at Ryerson when it wanted to set up a specifically black admissions track with skin colour privileged over merit. (Ryerson says it's going to do it anyway. So there.) Many med schools will admit you no questions asked if you graduated college anywhere as long as you have a Status card. "The long [Leftist] march through the institutions" is now pretty much complete and impervious to government retrenching, as Donald Trump is discovering.
The provincial government controls med school class size and the number and type of residency training positions, but the family medicine positions aren't being filled. Opening more of them won't help.
Governments do control absolutely how much doctors can be paid for any service but other working conditions not so much. GPs don't have to do any call or night/hospital work at all if they don't want to. Doctors love to blame the government for their problems -- sure everyone would like to be paid more, but the taxpayers won't spend unlimited amounts of money on doctors even if that small fraction who are patients would like to see better "access". There are profound cultural challenges in the profession that medicine will have to figure out for itself. These occur in the U.S., too, even though the government plays a different (smaller) role there.
Access to family doctors was a small bit of what your original comment was about so we shouldn't dwell on this. I don't want to hi-jack it. Access to family doctors is probably not a fixable problem when we are trying to provide everything free to everyone on the cheap. Advocates of increasing Canada's population to 100 million through mass immigration, or even to 50 million need to face this.
No. This provides an old solution to a new problem without first diagnosing the problem. Mass immigration without assimilation has proven unsustainable. Multiculturalism needs a revisit and that is the elephant in the room. Canada is a nation largely of settlers but before the 1970’s they largely integrated into the existing fabric while adding their own touches. At the same time, have we diagnosed why Canadians already here are not moving to work and to higher value work? Are our social systems a disincentive to productive work and internal migration?We need full employment domestically before adding and when we add, it has to be to obtain skills and capabilities we cannot build domestically fast enough. We should be training carpenters not importing them. It is absolutely clear our per capita GDP is abysmal. Adding low wage or increasingly, no wage bodies, to a retail economy has only obscured how bad the productivity problem is. Have we applied any effort to correcting the low domestic birth rate? Let’s fix why young Canadians are not having children (housing, labour market, social stigma) before we offshore our reproduction. Have we factored in the labour market consequences of AI before throwing population numbers at the wall to see what sticks? In sum, we don’t need to add numbers based on last century thinking, we need to ensure our numbers have the skills and values necessary for a vibrant modern economy.
Canada's labour shortages are bad. Skilled labour shortages are worse. While we Canadians get our heads out of our collective butts and start acquiring skills for things actually needed, we need to bring in hard working, high earning immigrants who love to build and make money. This expectation must be placed on refugees as well.
There is never enough smart, humble, hard working immigrants in Canada.
No. No. No. This absolute belief that we must grow and have more immigration is based on the opinions of rich people and developers who benefit. Immigration keeps wages down and prices up for those of us who have worked to support ourselves. Limit immigration to close family of citizens and genuine refugees from camps and tent cities and no claiming at the border. Most of the border crossers are liars.
Exactly. What matters to Canadians is wealth per capita. Bulking up our population in a quixotic attempt to project power on the world stage is simply dumb - it would either be a failure or make us a legitimate security threat to the US.
And we need to talk about culture: bringing in immigrants at a rate too fast to assimilate into our culture is harmful to Canadians, not helpful.
A so-called asylum seeker who can afford a plane ticket from Lagos or Kinshasa for himself and his family is probably not being persecuted by his home government. Most of these asylum claims made at our airports could probably be summarily dismissed and the claimants put on the next plane back....but for our obligation under international law to let the claimants make an oral claim in front of a tribunal, two years from now with luck. By the time their claim is heard, appealed, and rejected, they have put down roots (and babies!) in their diaspora community whose activists lobby vigorously for them to be allowed to stay, abetted by the homegrown “anti-racism” industry.
I don’t know what the solution is. Canada could simply tell the international law folks to get stuffed, and suspend asylum, but this would have repercussions in other areas where we want foreign countries to cooperate with us, like letting us pivot our trade from the U.S. to those same foreign countries. They don’t want us sticking them with the entire burden of bogus asylum claimants!
Stop misleading readers by referring to "International Law". Without effective enforcement a law are merely a suggestion, like the 10 commandments. The use of this term is yet another example of the magical thinking so favoured by progressives.
I get your point. I say “International Law” because the term in is common use. British barrister Natasha Hausdorff refers to it as a body of convention that most countries mostly observe most of the time., as an alternative to solving every disagreement by coming to blows.. The only way to enforce international law is through military force. Since that is expensive and not guaranteed to get the result we want, although sometimes we have to resort to it, we try to solve most disputes by writing down conventions at international conferences and aiming for diplomatic consensus that will be observed more often than not, except when we really really don’t want to.
Countries are supposed to regard these international agreements as binding on themselves through their domestic law, e.g., on immigration. But countries are sovereign and so can change their domestic laws however they wish. They only risk is that other countries will retaliate with, say, tariffs and trade sanctions, or will withdraw from mutual defence and intelligence cooperation agreements. Canada is a small weak country in decline. There is only so much it can do unilaterally. We might not have much choice but to be the world’s dumping ground for the unwelcome....if they can get here.
Note that the United Nations by itself doesn’t make international law. It just acts as the talking shop for countries to work out conventions to address their grievances with each other as sovereign states.
John we actually do need immigration or else our economy would have a demographic collapse. Our birth rates are terrible and immigration helps deal with that. The problem is "how many" can we handle. JT was beyond reckless and let in a ridiculous number of immigrants and visa holders and international students. We can't take that mess and turn it into "We don't need immigration". We have a country because of immigration and it needs to continue under very low targets while the country and economy catches up.
To touch on a sensitive topic sensitively...our necessary immigration requires greater selectivity. Our needs for newcomers must better match the integration potential of the immigrants. Simply importing culturally-based violence or culturally driven isolation contributes little benefit to Canada.
The exact point of the article
Glen, I don't reach your conclusion. I admit to tip-toeing around the most pertinent issue...but "immigrant culture" is where I'm going with this. Let me be even more pointed...If the homeland culture of the immigrant application is linked to a culture of violence or isolationism, the applicant is not a potentially valuable Canadian.
This, of course, steps into the minefield of "Islamist culture" vs "Muslim culture" and "Jew" vs "Ultra-Orthodox" Jew. Regardless of these sensitivities, we must recognize that homeland culture cannot be easily left behind...but should be examined as an additional criterion. It is a difficult inclusion, I admit...but an essential one.
Tom, thanks for clarifying.
I think we agree in general.
I would like to see some serious discussion about what the qualities of an acceptable homeland culture would specifically be. Also, discussion about how this measurement or assessment would be achieved. Have you got any ideas?
I'd like to see serious effort to rethink the entire system of qualification for immigration. I hear that the point system is failing. I hear that security screening is basically non-existent. I hear that there is no way to track the location of hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years. I hear that the failures of our system are evidenced by gaps of public information and lack of enforceability, not only from too few enforcement staff, but too little infrastructure.
The immigration system in Canada is built on decades of good faith and trusting in things to "go well" and I'm bugged that the system is now so inefficient and has been unable to maintain any kind of focus. I'm also bothered by the fact that bad apples are easily gaming the system. The immigration policy needs to connect directly with our future employment and job market needs--not to take jobs away from Canadians but rather to fill jobs in industries that are facing shortages. This connects to how we form our post-secondary education policies. Strong, decisive leadership and discussion is the only way to make these changes.
And my final question is, why does any of this have to be a tip-toe topic that is tagged as extreme?
I sense I lack your depth of immigration knowledge...but, to your question, I would reject:
1. all applicants coming from countries harbouring named terrorist organizations. Between 1979 and 2024, Islamist groups were responsible for approximately 84.4% of all recorded terrorist attacks, according to a report by Fondapol. (Fondapol considers itself a liberal, progressive, and European-oriented think tank.) It may raise the ire of Muslims to say this...but Islamists ARE Muslims.
2. all applicants that demonstrate that they would be unwilling to integrate into Canadian society. Ultra-Orthodox Jews might be included here. Some aboriginal populations might also be included.
3. All convicted criminals...anything above a "parking ticket" crime.
Again, the execution of such a policy would be problematic. However, with local Islamic groups demonstrating violence and physical threats and with the absence of almost any local Muslim pushback to their activity, I'd consider this first.
Concerning "tip-toeing", there may be enough responses to gauge the answer! :-)
Look, this is precisely the wrong time to be talking about increased immigration. Canada has a number of significant problems to solve before adding more people to the mix. Very modest immigration levels based on a strict points system can help. Anything else is a recipe for disaster. Can't believe we're even discussing this nonsense.
This article pointed out how anti-immigration I have become. My knee-jerk reaction was "No way" but reading through the article I gradually came around to "Yes way". Like so, so many things, we just have to update the policy we had 10 years ago.
My personal pet peeve is the amount of money we spend on bringing in and housing immigrants who may be of questionable economic benefit to the country, while spending so little to bring Canadians with substance and mental health issues back into the workforce.
Another pet peeve is that, working through the Century Initiative's numbers, increasing the Canadian population to 100 million would not increase per-capita GDP. We would enjoy a more crowded country for no benefit to us as individuals. The only benefit would be the government collecting more taxes.
I believe the Century Inituative's premise is that Canada has so much space for people. The problem with that belief is that most people (not just Canadians) don't want to live in much of our undeveloped space.
The 100 million Century initiative is just as inane, stupid and impractical idea as the mirage of multiculturalism. These inane, stupid and impractical ideas have been generated by the smoke-addled minds of out-of-touch professional academicians - offense meant - and filthy rich people who never have to queue up.
Around year 2000 I was asked what would be the one thing that I would change about Canada. I said I would discard multiculturalism and create, maintain and enforce an official policy of assimilation. Look at what multiculturalism brought us, Canadian passport became nothing but an easily obtained or bought document of convenience. Only 3 years, and your criminal record does not matter. Eff that.
It fills me with a certain despair that three smart people could write such a bad paragraph: "One of the most significant barriers to successful immigration policy is a lack of trust in the government’s ability to manage growth. Housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, and stagnant wages have bred a pessimism that limits Canadians’ faith in the country’s future. To rebuild the immigration consensus, Canadians must see that real growth is possible. This will require more than policy tweaks — it demands a shift in how leaders communicate about immigration."
This is not a communication issue. This is an issue where actual solutions are needed.
We need more than "policy tweaks" to fix: "Housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, and stagnant wages". In the absence of big systematic fixes, massive immigration - especially as badly done as Trudeau has done it - will increase these problems. But certainly, no amount of lipstick on this particular pig is going to convince anyone.
Yes! Let’s put some real brain power to work on this. It’s a matter of long term planning for success, not putting lipstick on the pig as you so adeptly stated.
I think fixing the point system to meet the country's needs will fix the number problem too. Common sense vs virtue signalling.
I always thought incentivizing the birth rate was a better way to proceed than opening the immigration floodgates. But if I were in a family unit of reproducing age right now and want to have a child I’m looking at not being able to afford a house and bringing a new life into the Canadian world that will get saddled with $60K (2025 Ontario data from Fraser institute ) of government debt. Plus immigration policies that allow a large group of extended family members not allowed to work for each qualifying worker who actually comes in. By contrast a new US citizen can only sponsor their foreign born kids for a permanent residency that the kids still have to apply for and no parents, siblings, etc. Time to change policies, people.
"Family reunification" that allows the elderly to become permanent residents, in the context of a non-negotiable public-only health system, is one of the most galling concepts I've ever encountered.
I don't care if grandma and grandpa can theoretically help take care of your kids, or that leaving them back home is 'not nice'. They haven't paid a cent into the tax base and are about to need a ton of scarce health resources. They will also likely be using the hospital ER as a family doctor from the moment they land.
This is just (among) the most blatant of the myriad ways our dumb immigration system screws over the existing population.
Retirees today (as a group) also paid far less into the system than they will take out because of changing demographics. People tolerate the inter-generational subsidy, to the degree they do, because the freeloaders are their parents and grandparents.
We probably shouldn't have much family reunification (although this is fairly limited compared to long-stay visas where people are buying health insurance and not eligible for benefits), but careful what you wish for. Immigrants still have parents that need to be supported one way or the other, and those paying for their own parents privately may not stay happy to fund the cushy inter-generational transfers boomers have gotten use to.
They will get more bang for their buck sending money home, which also doesn't involve the Canadian taxpayer. I've seen people get 60+ year old parents PR status surprisingly easily, but even if some are paying with private insurance they are still using up public medical resources getting those delivered. And you are right, we are badly off enough paying for various systems that weren't properly funded for the future, as it is.
It's a lottery, at least unless there was some way their parents were eligible on their own behalves (which would be rare for a 60 year-old). It's possible for it to be fast if you get lucky, but on average it's not. About 20k accepted a year, compared to about 200k who register to apply.
All 20K of them must have been in the lineup in front of me at the ER the last time I went :)
Maybe it wasn't nice to go around asking people having a bad time in an emergency room their PR status, eh? (The actual data on this is pretty clear -- permanent immigrants are overwhelmingly working age, about 5% over 65.)
Visitors (of any type) still take up capacity despite covering their own costs, sure. This is more a planning problem than anything. Would love Canadian boomers' faces if they get banned from any of their favourite travel destinations on this basis though.
Many countries have financial incentives for young couples to have more children. None of them are working.
Young people feel they can't afford the costs of children. They also don't see a good future for themselves, let alone their children.
We need to fix our economy so they can believe they can have the same opportunities as we did.
Part of the problem is that cash subsidies don't help without adequate supply of the things people need. Housing is obvious (more income and same amount of houses just drives up prices), but daycare has been an example of that too.
You end up with the weird result that financial incentives seem not to have worked, all while birth rates *are* observably connected to economic downturns (and housing prices) and there's pretty significant variation in birthrates in rich countries that is not obviously about cultural differences. (People get hung up on 'sub-replacement' but the difference between South Korea's birthrate and France's in the number of babies halving in like 15 years or 150.) So there's a question about the general economy, but there's also a question about whether those incentives have actually made families better off at a budget level.
You are so right!👍👍👍. If you want children it also helps if you have a house to keep them in!
Bring back the baby bonus.
The baby bonus exists under the name Canada Child Benefit. You get the full amount if your “adjusted family net income” (???) is under $36502. It disappears at an AFNI of $120K. You have to apply and file taxes. The method to arrive at the exact amount is a f@@king bureaucratic nightmare formula.
Bureaucratic nightmares that is how government works.
Yes, but it does not have to and we should not tolerate that.
I've been a voter since my 18th birthday in 1985. Canadians tolerate it.
Well yes but .... eventually it becomes a logjam like we have now. In every society, not just in Canada. There are societies that are capable of purging themselves of the bureaucratic nightmares. However they tend to be on the smaller end of scale, ethnically close to homogeneous, and have an excellent schooling system. So far anyway.
If Canada get broken enough, the purge or something close to it will happen.
Your arguement is flawed. Copilot tells me that Canada has admitted 1.8 million premanent residents in the last four years, increasing our population by 4%. And this does not include student visas, temporary workers or refugee claimants. Are be building any faster? Have home prices declined? is our infrastructure less broken? It takes time for immigrants to assimilate. We need to pause immigration and let housing supply catch up to the demand. Plus, there is a cost to settling immigrants, money that we could be spending repairing our infrastructure.
I believe that Trudeau & Sesm Fraser had 3 goals for their enormous immigration increase in 2024 & 24. They wanted 1) more new Canadian voters (previously reliably Liberal), 2) they wanted an increased percapita GDP, & 3) they were responding to some industries' calls for more (presumably low wage) workers. We got more Door Dash riders.
Your arguement repeats the 3rd falacious arguement. We have many underemployed college & higj school graduates to do lots of "building". Our problems are not enough non-gig jobs and not enough employers willing to make the effort & expense of training workers with specialized skills. We don't need to import house builders, we need to train our own.
You also completely ignore the destructive housing demand this immigration increase caused and is causing. I agree we need to reinstate our points-based rules. But we need a 3 year pause to clear the application backlog. This means no immigration for 3 years, zero, nada. We also need to end the employment & citizenship pathways for the same 3 years.
Your erroneous focus makes me wonder who sponsors your organization.
They actually wanted an increased total GDP, without worrying about per capita. That way they could claim Canada wasn't in recession, because the total economy wasn't shrinking, even though, per capita, it was shrinking rapidly.
The immigration system for the last 5+ years has been indistinguishable from one designed to be most ruinous to the standard of living in our cities.
Slam in more numbers, drive up rents and house prices. Take up all the entry level jobs - by literally paying employers to favour foreign workers - causing knock-on effects all the way up the employment market as competition for even slightly-better-than-shit jobs heats up. Build more condos and Brampton-style sprawl but no additional infrastructure, causing strain and traffic gridlock all around. Emphasize low-skill TFW's and fraudulent "students". We can't get enough people to work construction or other vital roles but there are lineups around the block to apply for Tim Hortons. Add in a dysfunctional perpetually years-long-backlogged refugee system designed to give even the most obviously bad-faith claimants a lavishly 'fair' hearing.
Only the already-wealthy really benefit in any way from all this due to asset inflation and wage suppression.
'Growth' is not an end in itself. The general public wants growth because its a precondition for broadly increased living standards, not because they want the line to go up. There's little evidence immigration increases GDP per capita in a durable way, and much of the supposed immigration surplus--if any--works basically only if immigrants are on the bottom, transferring money to native-born citizens. If nothing else, this is a hard sell in a country where 25% or so are immigrants, because the purported surplus is rarely shown to benefit previous immigrants. Land costs are one example often called a 'surplus'. This is really just an increased cost for anyone who doesn't own land, although on net it is indeed a transfer to the native-born population. Even the benefits of increasing the number of workers to pay for the safety net at best basically involves free-riding on workers another country paid to raise and educate, and at worst is effectively just a Ponzi scheme creating unfunded liabilities for those workers' retirements at least as large as their current contributions.
So, the short-term benefits are dubious at best. Canadians need politicians to be clear on what the long-term goals of immigration policy are. There are plausible arguments Canada is too small for economies of scale or for political influence, although there are also plausible arguments it's a benefit to have natural resources (particularly farmland) well beyond what's needed for the existing population's needs. Growth can't continue forever: once the short term benefit (if any) of juicing demographic ratios is gone, how do we know we're going to be better off as a bigger (and it has to be said culturally different) country?
Until a more specific plan for what segments of the economy will be the focus of growing the economy, determining the workforce required and the role and numbers of immigrants required will not be possible. Immigration needs to be tailored to much more specific needs. The increasing use of robotics and AI has the potential to reduce the overall number of workers required for some sectors of the economy and this will need to be taken into account when setting the policies on the numbers of and skill sets for immigrants.
The huge stream of immigrants in the last few years is Exhibit A for how politicians and the big dreamers who funnel them ideas work in silos, isolated in a utopian dreamland totally cut off from the downstream effects (often cruel) that they inflict upon ordinary people.
Perhaps it’s my line of work, but I understand market fundamentals. Especially supply/demand equations and the way that outside elements can distort both supply and demand.
Government controls the immigration process, healthcare systems including the supply of family doctors, home building and zoning regulations and the banking system.
Right now, the loose immigration policies are an outside disrupter that has thrown a serious blow to the stability of many of the other pillars that immigrants need to come to Canada and have success.
There are many ways that governments can get their act together to alleviate this housing crisis and a good first step is to take the GDP hit and send people who are here on temporary visas or student visas back home as a temporary relief valve. This would be far easier if the Liberals had any idea how many people are involved.
Governments don’t control the supply of family doctors. Medical school graduates themselves do. Increasingly they are not going into what most people think of as family doctoring. Training slots are going begging unfilled, and those grads who settle for them don’t intend to be traditional family doctors just because that was the only residency they could get. Even though it’s the one field of medicine that offers work-life balance (theoretically) It’s just not a good return on the investment in medical school, especially now that the professional schools charge “market-based” (ha!) tuition.
So the government can try however it likes to increase the supply of family doctors. Ain’t gonna work. That’s why they are trying to expand the roles of cheaper force-extenders like pharmacists and nurse-practitioners who haven’t been burnt out yet.
At the risk of annoying the hosts of this platform, I will counter with the argument that the government(s) control the number of slots available to the medical schools and increasingly meddle with the types of applicants who are chosen to fit DEI requirements. And most importantly, in Canada the government controls the working conditions of family doctors. It doesn’t take much research to find well articulated articles that clearly demonstrate how government intervention, much of it due to political dogma, makes a family practice a millstone around a qualified doctor. All doctors can’t be specialists. What had happened to everyone else?
The medical schools set their own admission criteria. Any DEI -- and they are full of it now -- is due to their own activist faculty members who see Canada as a racist Hell-hole, not due to government diktat. The Ontario provincial government did push back against the new medical school at Ryerson when it wanted to set up a specifically black admissions track with skin colour privileged over merit. (Ryerson says it's going to do it anyway. So there.) Many med schools will admit you no questions asked if you graduated college anywhere as long as you have a Status card. "The long [Leftist] march through the institutions" is now pretty much complete and impervious to government retrenching, as Donald Trump is discovering.
The provincial government controls med school class size and the number and type of residency training positions, but the family medicine positions aren't being filled. Opening more of them won't help.
Governments do control absolutely how much doctors can be paid for any service but other working conditions not so much. GPs don't have to do any call or night/hospital work at all if they don't want to. Doctors love to blame the government for their problems -- sure everyone would like to be paid more, but the taxpayers won't spend unlimited amounts of money on doctors even if that small fraction who are patients would like to see better "access". There are profound cultural challenges in the profession that medicine will have to figure out for itself. These occur in the U.S., too, even though the government plays a different (smaller) role there.
Access to family doctors was a small bit of what your original comment was about so we shouldn't dwell on this. I don't want to hi-jack it. Access to family doctors is probably not a fixable problem when we are trying to provide everything free to everyone on the cheap. Advocates of increasing Canada's population to 100 million through mass immigration, or even to 50 million need to face this.
No. This provides an old solution to a new problem without first diagnosing the problem. Mass immigration without assimilation has proven unsustainable. Multiculturalism needs a revisit and that is the elephant in the room. Canada is a nation largely of settlers but before the 1970’s they largely integrated into the existing fabric while adding their own touches. At the same time, have we diagnosed why Canadians already here are not moving to work and to higher value work? Are our social systems a disincentive to productive work and internal migration?We need full employment domestically before adding and when we add, it has to be to obtain skills and capabilities we cannot build domestically fast enough. We should be training carpenters not importing them. It is absolutely clear our per capita GDP is abysmal. Adding low wage or increasingly, no wage bodies, to a retail economy has only obscured how bad the productivity problem is. Have we applied any effort to correcting the low domestic birth rate? Let’s fix why young Canadians are not having children (housing, labour market, social stigma) before we offshore our reproduction. Have we factored in the labour market consequences of AI before throwing population numbers at the wall to see what sticks? In sum, we don’t need to add numbers based on last century thinking, we need to ensure our numbers have the skills and values necessary for a vibrant modern economy.
"Policy tweaks" and "political rhetoric" as solutions compared to meaningful review and reform? Really?
Canada's labour shortages are bad. Skilled labour shortages are worse. While we Canadians get our heads out of our collective butts and start acquiring skills for things actually needed, we need to bring in hard working, high earning immigrants who love to build and make money. This expectation must be placed on refugees as well.
There is never enough smart, humble, hard working immigrants in Canada.