DONOVAN: Canada’s intellectually bankrupt mass immigration policy

Riley Donovan is a freelance journalist and the editor of Dominion ReviewAccording to an Abacus poll released in October, 72% of Canadians want lower immigration — a statistical supermajority that includes a majority of voters in all four major political parties and all age groups. A Leger poll released this September found that 66% of white Canadians — and 61% of non-white Canadians — feel this way.Talk about a consensus! Woke academics and mainstream media pundits portray immigration as a divisive issue; in fact, there are few issues on which the Canadian public is as remarkably unified as this one.The reason for the near unanimous consensus is obvious. The negative effects of Canada’s skyrocketing population growth — 97.6% of which came directly from immigration last year — are being felt from big cities to small towns.Housing, schools, healthcare, and social services are being put under an unprecedented degree of strain. A report on hunger in Toronto warned that food banks are buckling under increased demand, and revealed that four in five new food bank users are immigrants who have been in the country for less than five years. In the Calgary region, there are serious concerns about how to provide enough water for the seemingly endless wave of new arrivals.There is a disjuncture between the everyday life of ordinary Canadians, in which sky-high population growth is generally understood to be one of the chief causes of our deteriorating standard of living, and the constant refrain that high immigration is needed to deal with an aging society.Canadians of all backgrounds and walks of life are starting to look at the aging society argument with suspicion — and they are entirely right to do so.The line goes something like this. Canada’s population is currently trending upwards in age, potentially leading to labour shortages and strains on healthcare and services down the line, so we need high immigration to bend the age curve down. It is never elaborated beyond this, but instead repeated ad nauseaum like an article of faith for good citizens to memorize.There are many flaws — let’s start with the most obvious. Immigration is not making Canada’s population substantially younger.It’s fair to say that Canada has had what I call mass immigration, or what might more politely be called a continuous and uninterrupted high inflow of immigrants, since Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s government departed from our historic “tap on, tap off” policy in 1990. Under then Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall, high immigration regardless of domestic economic conditions became the new norm — and has only gone up, up, up in the decades since!It's been 34 years. How did the experiment work out? From 1967 onwards, Canada’s media age consistently increased, with this trend finally stopping in 2021. This year, the median age decreased very slightly to 40.3. The Statistics Canada document that reports this figure adds the very important caveat that even this slight downward trend is temporary “since population aging is unavoidable”.That’s all that those 34 years of mass immigration accomplished for Canada’s age structure! If the Canadian people permit our political elite to continue this experiment for another 34 years, we can expect another exceedingly marginal median age decline — at the cost of further imploding our housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and social services.This policy failure of epic proportion had long been foreseen in the data. A study published by the C.D. Howe Institute in 2006 titled No Elixir of Youth: Immigration Cannot Keep Canada Young concluded that annual immigration would have to be raised to a jaw-dropping 7 million to maintain Canada’s dependency ratio. Almost nobody – with the possible exception of Justin Trudeau — would support a rate that high!Immigration is not making Canada substantially younger. But even if it were doing so, why on earth are we pursuing that goal?The truth is that an aging society is not a crisis, but merely a transitory demographic trend reflecting the very large generational cohort that resulted from the Baby Boom of the 1950s and ‘60s. This phenomenon is found across the world, but only Western Europe and North America see it as a five-alarm-fire that needs to be counteracted through high immigration.East Asian countries are navigating this demographic shift without opening their borders. Japan is experimenting with creative policies, including offering financial incentives to young families to move out of crowded Tokyo and revitalize depopulating villages by setting down roots in the countryside. The Japanese are also adopting cutting-edge automation techniques to replace and enhance human labour.In other words, Japan is dealing with an aging society by using the type of long-term thinking that our political class runs from like the plague.Like most demographic trends, an aging society is actually a mixed bag of challenges and benefits. To take just one example, Japan — which rejects almost all forms of immigration — has a much lower house-price-to-income ratio than we do.If Canada took the pedal off immigration and let our population stabilize (or even decline for a period of time) we would reap a host of benefits — most notably, cheaper housing and reduced strain on healthcare, infrastructure, and social services. In other words, we could go back to focusing on improving quality of life instead of increasing the sheer quantity of life.Canada’s political elite has been conducting their mass immigration experiment for 34 years. It isn’t working. Let’s try something new.Riley Donovan is a freelance journalist and the editor of Dominion Review.

DONOVAN: Canada’s intellectually bankrupt mass immigration policy

Related Stories