Prime Minister Mark Carney recently told the New York Times that Canada’s immigration system is finally “under control.” He feels it's time for Ottawa to resume a “controlled increase” in the population. “That will happen,” he said. “It’s the nature of Canada.”Translation: the pause is over. The floodgates are being oiled again.Canadians aren’t asking to return to a state of mass immigration. Albertans aren’t asking for it either. So why is Carney talking about doing just that? Perhaps the European Union (EU) is asking for it. Carney’s obsession with doing the geographically impossible by making Canada a part of Europe knows no bounds.Carney’s own numbers show how little control was actually restored. Non-permanent residents still sit at 6.7% of the population. Permanent resident targets have been trimmed from the old 500,000 plan to something in the 370,000–385,000 range. That is still historically high. The pain from Trudeau’s mass immigration policies is still being felt in Alberta. Calgary and Edmonton rents and house prices are detached from local wages, while Ottawa was importing people faster than either city could build housing or staff hospitals. Emergency rooms are still jammed. Youth unemployment is elevated precisely where new arrivals compete for entry-level work. Temporary foreign workers in meat plants, hotels, and fast food did not magically create prosperity. They held down wage growth in sectors that used to offer a path into the middle class. Provincial services such as schools, social housing, and policing are funded by Albertans and then strained by a federal intake decision, which Alberta does not control. When the numbers overshot by hundreds of thousands, the bill landed here.And here we go again..Carney admits the government blew it when it comes to immigration but wants to return to the old policies without changing the structure that made it a disaster in the first place. Carney noted that planned inflows of roughly 700,000 sometimes became two million. The bureaucracy that produced those overshoots has not been dismantled. It has been told to wait a little longer, then resume. The political incentive in Ottawa remains the same. They want to celebrate GDP growth from population, even if per-person living standards stagnate.The timing is not accidental. Weeks before the New York Times interview, Carney was in Strasbourg welcoming the European Commission’s trial balloon of “associate membership” for Canada. He insists this is not full EU membership and that sovereignty will be preserved. Is partial membership superior? Canada may end up with all the obligations of EU membership, while not receiving any of the benefits of it. Whatever those benefits may be.A banker who spent years in London and at the Bank of England is comfortable with the European model using high immigration as economic lubricant while integration problems are treated as a communications issue, and national governments are lectured when they try to slow the flow. Alberta’s resource economy, sparse population, and already stretched services do not fit that model. Europe’s cities have had decades to discover what happens when inflows outrun housing, trust, and assimilation capacity. We do not need to run the same test at higher speed to learn the lesson.How's France looking this week anyway? The EU is in a state of catastrophe due to mass immigration. Canada should be viewing that model as one to avoid at all costs rather than diving into it.Carney’s abysmal record in the ongoing trade war with the United States won’t be aided if he floods Canada with more uncontrolled immigrants. President Trump won’t be easier to deal with if Canada presents a security risk due to mass immigration and a porous border with the USA. It just gives the president one more reason to shunt trade and add tariffs.As per usual, while Ottawa sets the numbers, Alberta lives with the consequences. The referendum questions posed to Albertans on October 19 could give the provincial government a mandate to reduce the services provided to temporary residents in the province. That’s applying a band-aid at best to a much larger issue. The only way Alberta will be able to shield itself from further consequences of mass immigration is to erect a literal border with the East through provincial independence. If the tidal wave of newcomers continues as planned, though, gaining that independence may become an impossibility. Then we will indeed get to enjoy the fate of the EU whether we are associate members or not.
