WIECHNIK: The immigration gamble Canadians will face for generations

Budget 2026 has unveiled the Liberal government’s new immigration numbers, and at some point, we’re going to have to stop pretending this is just business as usual.Canada is now set to take 380,000 new permanent residents a year and 370,000 new temporary residents a year in its plans for 2027 to 2029.Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner — MP for Calgary Nose Hill — said on November 5, 2026, the plan “once again puts 200,000 permanent residents outside the headline target. That brings the real total potentially to 580,000, not 380,000.”All this comes despite a large share of Canadians now wanting less immigration, if recent polls are anything to go by.I won’t go into all the details on the numbers; my esteemed colleague Colin MacLeod has done a fine job of that.The current pattern is hard to miss: when Canadians are asked, a lot of them want the immigration volume turned down.But Ottawa keeps finding reasons to crank it back up.The budget itself reads: “For too long, our investment and productivity have lagged, we have relied too heavily on one market and too often on immigration to fill gaps in our workforce. That’s all changing now. The government of Canada has taken back control of immigration, with material reductions of newcomers to return immigration to sustainable levels.”Right…Canadians are repeatedly told immigration is an economic necessity, yet at the same time, I keep hearing that more and more jobs are going to be filled by AI and automation. So why exactly does Canada need workers through immigration then?With all the talk of jobs, what receives less attention is that immigration policy is also cultural policy, and its effects are now being felt across the country in neighbourhoods, schools, and customs, and in the expectations people have of one another.People will be called xenophobic or racist for opposing immigration. That doesn’t answer how much change a society can absorb and over what period of time, nor how it integrates cultures totally alien to Western culture — some of which seemingly have no desire to integrate.Canada has always contained different peoples, but that looks more and more like a gaslighting tool used by the mainstream media and the left.The 1971 census — in the Pearson-to-Trudeau years when the old country-of-origin rules gave way to the points system and official multiculturalism — recorded about 96% of Canadians as having European ethnic origins.In 1981, visible minorities were 4.7% of the population.By 2021, they were 26.3%. In 2022, Statistics Canada projected that share could be 38% to 43% by 2041..“You have one people, and almost at a stroke, in one generation, you have in its place one or several other peoples,” Renaud Camus, the French author who coined the term “The Great Replacement”, has said.“Canada has always been multicultural” is not the beginning and end of an argument..Also, the current kind of immigration, which remakes a country’s ethnic makeup — possibly forever — is seemingly only a Western tale.Middle Eastern Gulf states import huge numbers of temporary workers who never become citizens or stay permanently.Japan and South Korea have been adding foreign labour too, but they aren’t running Canada's playbook.A country is more than just an economic zone, with interchangeable human units — aka homo economicus.There is also a reason to take integration seriously.Robert Putnam, the political scientist who wrote Bowling Alone, found that, in the short run, “immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital.”In diverse neighbourhoods, he wrote, people “hunker down” — “pull in like a turtle,” something I’ve personally witnessed increase over time.Trust falls, and with it, the sense of community goes kaput.Not to mention the ongoing issues with our current two-tier justice system.The National Post seemingly writes at least one story a day on this.Columnist Tristin Hopper has said, “Roughly every day, a Canadian criminal is getting a reduced sentence because of their race.”A Jamaican cocaine dealer facing deportation had his sentence halved in 2025 so he wouldn’t be booted from Canada.An Ecuadorian man’s sex-assault sentence in 2026 was discounted because, as the judge put it, the conviction would have “devastating immigration consequences.”Then there’s the political angle.Do Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals still think mass immigration is going to deliver them electoral advantages?Take Ontario Liberal leadership hopeful Nate Erskine-Smith, who lost a nomination race in Scarborough Southwest in May.He lost to Ahsanul Hafiz, a Bangladeshi businessman who owns a string of Domino’s Pizza franchises and was found to have handed out sample ballots written entirely in Bengali to party members.The second most widely spoken language in the riding? Bengali.Take a guess who won.While no party should treat immigrant communities as permanent political property or expect every member of a community to vote the same way, many will vote for a candidate who is part of their in-group just because that candidate is one of them..“In multiracial societies you don't vote in accordance with economic or social interests. You vote in accordance with your race and religion,” Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, once said..It seems prudent to predict that this sort of thing will become even more common in the coming years. That raises the question: what kind of future are our politicians leaving?In his work A Short History of Man, Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that a king who “owns” his realm and may bequeath it to an heir “will care about the repercussions of his actions on capital values” and will be “comparatively future-oriented.”Now, while a king’s “exploitation will be comparatively moderate and calculating”, a temporary democratic politician doesn’t own the country. Instead, “as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his own advantage.”“He owns its current use but not its capital stock,” Hoppe writes.“This does not eliminate exploitation, it makes exploitation shortsighted, present-oriented, and uncalculating, i.e., carried out with no or little regard for the value of the capital stock.”It’s easier to burn down the long-term value of a country in the name of progress when you have no personal stake in what it looks like in 30–40 years.You don’t have to support a monarchy or a “great man of history” to realize that our current system of unaccountable bureaucracy is failing wildly, and that the ongoing immigration debacle is a perfect case study.A government entrusted with a country owes its people more than ever-increasing GDP and this one’s greatest betrayal lies in asking people to surrender their inheritance while refusing to take their concerns seriously — or even acknowledge them — in exchange for promises of prosperity this government will most likely never deliver on.To quote Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

WIECHNIK: The immigration gamble Canadians will face for generations

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