Prime Minister Carney is signalling that the era of immigration-driven population growth may continue, suggesting that not resuming this policy would be contrary to the essential “nature” of the country. He could not be more wrong. His comment came in a recent interview with the New York Times. Asked about Canada’s immigration policy, Carney first outlined the cutbacks his government has made, before sketching a path towards managed growth going forward: “…the question starts to become: When do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada. So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control.”Now, we must pay close attention to the rhetoric. Why must we return to a policy of “controlled increase in the population?” Because that is “the nature of Canada.” No practical or economic reason for immigration-fuelled population growth is presented; the argument is backed up by a national myth. Carney’s claim is very simply that we need high immigration because it is part of who we are as a country. The most common way of presenting this national myth is through the repeated claim that “Canada is a nation of immigrants” or that “diversity is our strength.” There is nothing wrong with national myths. These are stories that say something about the character or ideals of a nation. Every country has one or several. The well-known phrase “Peace, Order, and Good Government” that appears in the opening of the 1867 British North America Act (BNA) distills the Canadian worldview and basically functions as a national myth, and one that is hard to disagree with.The problem with the nation of immigrants myth cited by Carney is that there is no justification for it. The idea that immigration-fuelled population growth is part of “the nature of Canada” has no basis in fact. .Canada was not built by immigrants. Before Confederation in 1867 — and in frontier regions well into the 1900s — it is more accurate to describe the men and women who built Canada from the ground up in the northern half of this continent by the sweat of their brow as “pioneers” and “settlers” rather than “immigrants.” Immigrants move from one society to another. Pioneers and settlers build a new society.Once Canada was built, we did receive waves of immigrants who contributed to enhancing an already great nation, but we did so under a different framework than at present. From 1867-1990, immigration was governed by the “tap on, tap off” system that saw pauses that lasted decades in between immigration waves. A cursory look at historical immigration graphs reveals a timeline of high peaks and low troughs. These long pauses allowed immigrants to assimilate, and infrastructure to catch up to growth.In 1990, the Mulroney government abolished this historic immigration policy and imposed a new policy of high, continuously increasing immigration. From 1990 onwards, in a Canadian immigration graph, one watches in amazement as the peaks and troughs turn into one never-ending wave.This open-door policy is an aberration from historical norms. Academics who have studied Canadian immigration attitudes invariably conclude that the Canadian public has always been broadly sympathetic to immigration restrictionism. In a foreword to Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada 1900-1935 by Barbara Roberts, published in 1988, historian Irving Abella wrote this: “Every single public opinion survey over the past fifty years indicates that most Canadians — including, by the way, most immigrants themselves — do not want any substantial increase in the number of people admitted to this country.”The real history of immigration in Canada is a constant tug-of-war between pro-immigration vested interests — notably the business lobby and the immigration industry of lawyers and consultants — and the large majority of regular people who support immigration controls. Mass immigration is not “the nature of Canada” but an aberration. Opposing mass immigration is as Canadian as maple syrup.
