Something’s going on with the Carney government and its immigration policy that makes little sense and is rightly angering Canadians. The avalanche of backlash would bury a minority government. Lucky for Carney, he neither has to call a general election nor rely on upcoming by-elections to secure a majority. Instead, he’s already achieved it through backdoor deals and clientelism.With the release of the federal budget on November 5, the Carney government revealed that, for all the talk of how they’ve brought immigration “back under control,” they plan to return to record-high levels during the next three years under their new Levels Plan. This year alone, the Liberals aim to admit 380,000 new permanent residents in addition to 385,000 new temporary foreign workers and international students.You don’t need to be a specialist in population demographics or economics to understand that this is a highly questionable strategy for growth. Canada’s burgeoning population, driven exclusively by immigration — and not our anemic fertility rate — is already bursting at its infrastructural seams. Youth unemployment is through the roof as companies continue to preferentially hire Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) to pay smaller wage portions for subsidized employees. There’s a housing and healthcare crisis that cannot be easily solved but that will likely be exacerbated with high levels of immigration. Yet onward this immigration machine goes.There are two possible explanations I see for bucking the trend in what is otherwise currently a very unpopular issue in Canada. The first possibility is that, in the most critical sense, this over-immigration is all for the benefit of big businesses and corporate Canada. It’s this angle that Calgary Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel Garner is advocating. She’s on a media tour across the country to accuse Prime Minister Mark Carney of such perniciousness. A second serious possibility is that, like the consistently unstable country of France, buried in debt and teeming with social unrest in its streets, over-immigration is being used as a kind of economic offset for an ageing population burdened with a massive national debt..There are commonalities in both these explanations for over-immigration, primarily that they are technocratic in nature, and treat people as numbers more than as human beings. It was refreshing and on point to hear Rempel Garner call this out when she said in an interview with the Toronto Sun that, “We won’t let human beings be reduced to sterile units of production for Mark Carney’s technocratic worldview. No. This has to be about human rights and morality and the ability to build a better life.”Rempel Garner’s accusations suggest Carney’s Levels Plan reeks of government-sponsored corporate cronyism, and I think she has a valid point. In her interview with Western Standard publisher Derek Fildebrandt, she suggests, “It has been their decision — the Liberal government’s decision — to advocate on behalf of wealthy corporations who have used an endless supply of foreign labour to depress wages and juice corporate profits.”There is no denying this. It doesn’t matter if you go to Tim Hortons, Staples, the hospital, the municipal dump, or even your accountant. Everyone has hired TFWs to take advantage of government subsidies, and this preferentially benefits those who can hire the most — big business above all. Whatever the underlying motivation, the Liberals’ immigration scheme is clearly not fostering Canada’s historical advantage. What made immigration so beneficial in the past was its meritocratic basis and a level of integration that was only possible with a more manageable number of newcomers each year. Now we have clumsy solutions like dumping many immigrants of one ethnicity in the same locality, which does not foster integration but “setting up shop” within the host country. These immigrants don’t get good lives either; they are often stuck together in large numbers in ramshackle dwellings that their entry-level paycheques can afford.Is this why we have immigration, to create a new class of poverty?When we look over to France, we may be looking not only at our future, but the most charitable explanation for Carney’s obsession with over-immigration. The chaos of late in the streets of France is easily blamed on “student protests,” but there are clearly other factors affecting civil disobedience, which has descended into burning and looting. One of the most powerful factors driving the violent protests is considered to be the austerity measures that France has been implementing under the technocratic leadership of Emmanuel Macron. However, even if the CBC is correct and it is the threat of a welfare freeze and other austerity measures behind the recent protests, that doesn’t fully explain why they have become so unstable..Some French citizens have suggested that the protests are predominantly composed of poorer French people, which includes a disproportionately high percentage of immigrants who have been unable to become a larger and better-paid part of the French workforce.The problem could well stem from a government that believed that importing younger immigrants to enter the workforce would be able to offset the soaring French debt (nearly €3.6 trillion). Their debt-to-GDP ratio stands at a whopping 119.0%. The massive debt belongs to a country where the median age is 41.8 years old and roughly 25% of citizens already receive a state pension. This means France’s largest public expenditure is pensions at over €400 billion per year and it’s going to get bigger.Is Canada in the same boat? Well, Carney’s 2026 budget suggests that not only should we be okay with maintaining the same debt over the next several years, but that the planned over-immigration in the Levels Plan is sustainable. I think Carney is to some degree copying a fraught program from France and fellow technocrat Emmanuel Macron. Surprisingly, Canada’s general government gross debt, as reported by the International Monetary Fund, is actually quite similar to France’s at a 115.6% debt-to-GDP ratio, which includes both federal and provincial debt. If we take that and add Carney’s planned re-activation of over-immigration, the economic consequences could soon become clear. It has surprised me that up to this point Carney has largely avoided austerity measures — reducing the federal workforce by 10% excepted — but those restrictions may be on the horizon. In the meantime, he appears to be making bets on our resource economy to bridge the gap.There is no proof that Canada will economically benefit from over-immigration, and examining France today suggests the opposite might occur, complete with social cohesion exploding. Then all the retirees in Canada who see Carney as the solution to economic stagnation might find out the same thing boomers in France under Macron already have.Technocrats don’t have a magic wand, and using immigrants as a cure-all is both too simple and dehumanizing. With or without Carney, we’re going to eventually have to face the economic downturn associated with the fourth industrial revolution. Whether it’s a charitable explanation for over-immigration, like copying France, or a critical one like Rempel Garner espouses, it’s treating people like numbers in a mathematical equation that will be Carney’s greatest mistake.
