Canada’s National Newspaper = Canada’s National Manure Spreader
The recent, two-week Globe and Mail series on immigration is an outrageous example of a newspaper presenting infomercials and outright propaganda as if they were unbiased, accurate information. In that series, the Globe and Mail virtually turned its news room over to Canada’s immigration industry to broadcast all the immigration nonsense that it has become notorious for.
In this bulletin, we examine two parts of the series, one at the beginning and one at the end. They were titled “Why Canada Needs A Flood Of Immigrants” and “What Would A Canada of 100 Million Feel Like?”
The first was written by Joe Friesen. The second was by Doug Saunders.
At no time in these two articles did the writers present the views of Canadians who are concerned about the cultural, economic and environmental effects of the current 20-year-old immigration flood. Even worse, the writers of these two advocacy pieces seem to be virtual illiterates on these topics.
In order to add grandeur to the arguments Friesen and Saunders make, both of them invoke the actions of Immigration Minister Clifford Sifton who in the early 19th Century raised immigration levels to 400,000 in order to settle Canada’s west with farmers. Canada’s official immigration intake had never been that high before and it has not been that high since. Both Friesen and Saunders argue that Canada has to return to Sifton-era immigration intake in order to fulfill its destiny.
Friesen begins by stating “Between now and 2021, a million jobs are expected to go unfilled across Canada. We need to radically boost immigration numbers.” He did not admit that he is merely repeating completely unfounded statements that high-immigration promoters like the Conference Board of Canada have been making for many years. That group has claimed that Canada has a looming worker-shortage. It pretends to have unbiased status, but it represents the interests of major employers such as Deloitte and Touche, Canadian Pacific, and IBM Canada.
Friesen has missed two crucial points : (1) There is no shortage of workers in Canada now, particularly of young workers. And with the proper measures, there will probably be little shortage of workers in Canada’s future. According to Statistics Canada, Canada now has close to 1.4 million unemployed. Because so many are not counted, the real number is much higher. Canada also has a very large number of school-aged who will enter the work-force soon. As long as Canada has such a large number of just real unemployed, it should be reducing immigration, not increasing it to satisfy the interests of employers’ organizations and corporations that want to extract resources and sell them as fast as possible to China and other places. (2) It is not merely a good idea that Canadian employers hire unemployed Canadians. It is their duty. If they want to sneak about and cheat, as many have been doing, Ottawa should stand up and deliver a strong message to them, not grovel like the Globe and Mail.
The main point that both Friesen and Saunders make is that Canada has to increase its population to 100 million ASAP. If both are going to make such a proposal, they should have had the common sense to ask whether Canada has the resources to support such a population. But neither does. Instead, both blindly repeat the 100 million population proposal of academic Irving Studin. This man has never examined the ability of Canada’s resources to support such a population or the environmental consequences of 100 million people on Canada. On the contrary, he has said that a 100 million population would give Canada more international prestige and greater potential to produce characters like Lester Pearson. What good are international prestige and diplomats like Pearson if Canada’s standard of living is reduced to a fraction of what it is now by a population it cannot support? What good is it if the 100 million clone an environmental cesspool in Canada?
If either Friesen or Saunders had done even the most elementary research, they would have discovered that The Science Council of Canada, a group composed of Canada’s leading scientists, recommended in 1976 that Canada restrict immigration and stabilize its population at around what it has now. In this unbiased group’s view, Canada had to realize that its large area did not mean it had the ability to support an open-door immigration policy. Most of Canada, it declared, is “desert and rock, swept by winter’s wind”. It warned that Canada had limited resources and that it should conserve what it had for future generations. In particular, it had to conserve its farmland resource, not pave it over with housing for additional people. Eventually, Canada could use its farmland for great economic advantage to produce food for the populations of other countries. That is because many countries had made the very grave mistake of allowing their populations to grow beyond their country’s resource base. Who is more credible : The Science Council or Studin?
Furthermore, if either Friesen or Saunders had bothered to read Health and Welfare Canada’s (HWC) important research on whether immigration would solve problems created by an aging population, they would have discovered that 200 HWC researchers across Canada had concluded that even an immigration intake of 600,000 per year would have a negligible effect on Canada’s average age and that of its work-force. It would be better (mathematically and morally) to use Canada’s own population to solve aging-related problems.
But instead of doing their homework, Friesen and Saunders repeat immigration industry nonsense such as “Canada is under-populated”. Friesen also echoes the unfounded cliches that there is a world-wide competition for immigrants and that we have to get ‘the best and brightest” from around the world. He gives us a few examples to show that immigrants bring a spirit that increases innovation, but much more detailed analysis by Canada’s Economic Council disputed what he says.
Saunders tells us that 100 million people could fit into the southern strip that most Canadians now live in. They would give Canada an increased tax base that would support transit, parks, museums, universities and property developments. If Saunders had read Health and Welfare’s detailed study, he would have seen that it had concluded that Canada had a finite resource pie and that increasing our population would result in each Canadian getting a smaller piece of the pie. Therefore, Canada would not have the extra revenue to do the things Saunders claims it could do. Which is more credible : Health and Welfare Canada’s research or Studin’s proposal?
With 100 million, Saunders concludes, unbelievably, that “Canada’s environment would be far better protected” and that “it’s no co-incidence that the most progressive climate-change policies are found in the countries with the most dense populations’. To most Canadians, it is news indeed that densely populated countries like India and China protect their environment better and that countries like them are the climate-change models for the world !!!
Saunders concludes that he wants to see a “Big Canada” movement like the “Big Australia” one. The latter has been widely discredited in Australia as environmentally unsound.
Friesen ends his propaganda piece by saying “the time to begin the debate (about future immigration) is now”.
The fact that Friesen, Saunders and their hack Globe and Mail editors have really presented only one side of the immigration issue in their immigration series shows clearly that they don’t really want a debate.
In other words, they’d rather just spread immigration industry manure. And the Globe and Mail has provided a large field for them to do just that.
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For the work of Friesen and Saunders respectively, see the following links :
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/what-would-a-canada-of-100-million-feel-like-more-comfortable-better-served-better-defended/article2436609/
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Our Time to Lead
Why Canada needs a flood of immigrants
Joe Friesen – Demographics reporter
The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, May 04, 2012 8:13PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013 11:41AM EST
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Between now and 2021, a million jobs are expected to go unfilled across Canada. Ottawa is making reforms to the immigration system but isn’t going far enough. We need to radically boost immigration numbers. With the right people, Canada can be an innovative world power. Without them, we’ll drain away our potential.
Emily Hughes, 9, holds up a Canadian flag during a Canadian Citizenship ceremony in Ottawa on Sept. 29, 2010. Hughes along with her parents came from England to Canada in 2005.
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1. The Manitoba experiment
Arriving into Steinbach, Man., an hour southeast of Winnipeg, you find a quiet, conservative community, the kind of place that has twice as many churches (22) as traffic lights (11). But continue on and you see some sights you might not expect in a prairie hamlet of 13,500: a Paraguayan food store; two Filipina-run nail salons; and, when you reach the western edge, a 25-acre soccer complex that has become the hub of local life.
As an outpost of the global game in the geographic centre of the nation of hockey, the soccer arena is a symbol of the transformation that has swept through Steinbach in the new millennium – one that could be a lesson to the whole country.
Not long ago, in the late 1990s, Steinbach feared that it might join rural Canada’s casualty list. Young people were leaving for opportunities in Winnipeg or Calgary, and even businesses that were thriving, such as a window manufacturer, could not find enough skilled workers to keep up with demand.
Local leaders, says mayor Chris Goertzen, were searching for a way forward. Then they caught wind of what was happening a hundred kilometres away, in a place with similar problems.
In Winkler, Man., an immigrant from Paraguay named Adele Dyck, who sat on the Chamber of Commerce, heard through family connections about skilled workers in Germany who were interested in coming to Canada, but couldn’t qualify under immigration rules that favoured university graduates. She contacted the federal and provincial governments to say she would get local employers to guarantee jobs if the Germans were admitted. They agreed, and what began with 50 immigrants in Winkler became in 1998 the country’s first “provincial nominee” program: Manitoba was the first province other than Quebec to gain the power to select and resettle a portion of each year’s new immigrants for itself.
And that is how Steinbach found its solution. The owner of the Loewen window plant contacted Ms. Dyck about finding 150 to 200 skilled German employees.
“They wanted people who were trainable, people who were very capable of learning,” says Ms. Dyck, who is now a professional immigration consultant. “Even though not many spoke English, language was never really a problem. At some point, they had over 300 of our clients working for them.”
That was just the beginning. Since the mid-1990s, Steinbach has grown by 60 per cent, one of the fastest rates in the country. Last year, the region welcomed about 900 immigrants from 40 countries into industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, trucking and hog farming. The city had to expand its industrial park and then open a new one. National chain grocers, restaurants and department stores are setting up shop. Steinbach has been revitalized.
What ailed the Steinbach of old is the creeping malignancy that threatens all of Canada today. The shortage of skilled labour in the Alberta oil sands and Saskatchewan potash mines has become a national issue. But a similar lack of people power is plaguing the ambitious but underdeveloped secondary cities of Ontario, and in Atlantic Canada a third of the population will be over 65 in less than two decades. The Conference Board of Canada estimates that over the next 10 years, there will be a million jobs going wanting across the country. This shortage is a drag on Canada’s potential to innovate and compete into the future.
Unless Canadians suddenly start having radically larger families, the only logical answer is the same as Steinbach’s: The country needs to dramatically increase its immigration levels – perhaps even double them, at least in the case of immigrants in the “economic” category (which includes skilled workers, provincial nominees, those with prior Canadian experience, entrepreneurs, investors and their families).
The nation’s great challenge for the 21st century will be not only to locate and attract the people Canada needs, give them rich opportunities and integrate them into communities, but also to understand and embrace the ways they will reshape this country.
Ottawa’s plan falls short
When immigrants arrive, they not only fill gaps in the work force but pay taxes and spend money on housing, transport and consumer goods. Productive capacity increases and there is a ripple effect across the economy. And studies show that their offspring tend to be among the country’s best-educated and initiative-taking young people.
It’s not that the federal government is blind to the issue. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is crossing the country to promote his reforms of the system, trying to make it more responsive to the needs of employers and the economy. But he says he has no intention of boosting the actual number of immigrants Canada admits annually, despite demands from nearly every provincial government.
On that level, the federal plan seems inadequate to the looming challenge. Today, there are 4.2 working-aged Canadians for every senior citizen, making contributions to cover retirees’ pensions and health care. By 2031, that ratio will be cut in half. The tax base will shrink, growth will slow and labour shortages will become even more dire. Immigration can’t completely cure a problem of that scale, but it can help to alleviate the symptoms.
Already, in 2012, all the growth in the country’s labour force comes from immigration. Within two decades, barring an improbable baby boom, immigration will account for all population growth too.
Luckily, Canada has an advantage: The country has the highest per-capita rate of immigration in the world, a program that commands widespread public support. While there would be resistance, expanding immigration is not the political impossibility it would be for some competing nations. And with good reason: With 34 million people, this country remains highly underpopulated, for all its vast geography.
The motivations for growing out of that awkward middle phase – between the northern hinterland we once were and the thriving modern power we could be – stretch far beyond short-term calculations of labour markets and pension balance sheets.
As University of Toronto public policy professor Irvin Studin puts it, “We’re losing the idea of building the country.” Prof. Studin argues that the country should set its sights on swelling to as many as 100 million people. This new Canada would become a far more influential consumer market, a more diverse and imaginative producer and a much more robust and self-sustaining culture. Its voice would become more prominent in international affairs.
When history looks back, what seemed like a temporary western labour shortage could turn out to be the impetus that prompted Canada to embrace its destiny as a nation of immigration.
Can we really handle so many?
The idea of a radical boost in newcomers, even skilled and educated ones, will strike some people as crazy, experts included. They will point to the difficulty many immigrants have getting their credentials recognized, and the social disruption that can spring from culture clash. Steinbach’s example suggests that those problems are more than manageable, with the appropriate commitment and resources.
The immigrants under Manitoba’s provincial-nominee program have education levels three times higher than the provincial average. The Institute for Research on Public Policy in Manitoba has found that “almost everyone who wanted to work was working” – nearly 85 per cent were in the labour force within three months of their arrival, not always in their chosen fields but generally progressing toward that goal.
Steinbach residents know they have benefited. Orville Giesbrecht, co-owner of Harvest Insurance, says his business has expanded to 21 employees from seven, because all the new arrivals need to insure their homes and cars – and he has made a point of catering to them by hiring employees who speak their languages.
Steinbach’s largest immigrant group is composed of German-speaking families from the former Soviet Union, notably Kazakhstan, who had lived in Germany since the fall of communism. They were drawn to the promise of abundant land in an area that fit their conservative religious values: It helped that Steinbach’s population is descended from the German-speaking Mennonites who arrived a century ago.
One of the first signs of the demographic shift, Mr. Giesbrecht says, was a sudden explosion in demand for wood-stove insurance.
“They have lots of children and they chop their own wood for heat and have a few chickens and other animals for food,” says Sjoerd Huese, president of the Chamber of Commerce, himself originally from the Netherlands. “Construction has just been unreal. We’ve gone from 20 or 30 housing starts a year to 100.”
That kind of change does not come without friction – there have been moments of culture shock, particularly in local classrooms. But over all, the Russian-Germans, as locals call them, are well accepted in Steinbach and beyond. Many apprenticed in the trades in Europe, and every day, Mr. Huese says, you can see the steady flow of their pickup trucks heading down the highway for building sites in Winnipeg.
Evelyna Prochorow, 21, came from Kazakhstan by way of what her family found a crowded, unwelcoming Germany. She was 8, the sixth of 13 children, and barely spoke a word of English. A decade later, she graduated near the top of her high-school class. She is a broker at Harvest Insurance, her sister is a legal assistant nearby, and the evangelical church that is dear to them is here (with more under construction). Unlike many small-town Canadians her age, Ms. Prochorow has no desire to be anywhere else.
2. Bridging gaps on the oil patch
While Steinbach is the small-town microcosm of Canada’s demographic crisis, the epicentre is in Alberta, where oil-fuelled expansion is voraciously eating up all the skilled labour it can find and hungers for more.
“Labour shortages are going to be the single biggest impediment to economic growth in Alberta for the foreseeable future,” says Ben Brunnen, chief economist at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. “At the end of the day, we just don’t have the people to fill the jobs that are being created. … We can’t alleviate our labour needs without tapping into immigration.”
On the southwestern outskirts of Edmonton, lilted speech fills the trailer where the cladders – men who install metal roofs and exteriors – stop for a quick morning break. Of the 10 men from Clark Builders who are erecting a new police station, only one is a Canadian, from Newfoundland. The remainder are sign-bearers for the British Isles, their English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish roots displayed by flags on their helmets and, for Irishman Brian O’Donnell, a tousle of red hair that slips out from beneath his hard hat.
To Canada, they are temporary foreign workers. To Europe, they are economic emigrants.
Tom and Jimmy Sutton are brothers from Brackley, England, both working on the Clark site. Another brother works at a different Edmonton construction company. They have homes, cars and girlfriends here. And a fourth brother, who’s in information technology, has this very morning been accepted to a “working holiday” program that will bring him to Alberta, too.
“Honestly, the best decision I’ve ever made in my life, by far,” Jimmy says. “Back home, you’re struggling. There’s no work around, so you get behind on your bills. It’s hard to get by. Over here, you can work hard and get paid well for it, and you have a better quality of life.”
Prairie fire in the job market
Western Canada is drawing temporary workers from across the planet: Polish welders, Filipino retail workers, Mexican electricians and Chilean mechanics. As they arrive, stepping off planes into blizzards and uncertainty, they are changing the complexion of the western Canadian work force.
Clark Builders currently employs 31 foreign workers out of its total of 770, and is actively seeking to add dozens more – carpenters, project managers and more cladders. With a raft of oil-sands work about to begin, the company says, it could easily double its number of foreign workers by year’s end, joining a broad industry push.
That is not to say transatlantic hiring is simple. Earlier this year, Clark Builders flew managers to Manchester, hoping to find 15 workers. They had posted ads and received 125 résumés. After 27 interviews, they made offers to 12 people and got nine. For a first attempt, says Gerald Clark, the company’s senior manager of human resources, they were pleased: “I would suspect we’ll be back there later this year.”
In theory, rising wages and job opportunities should attract plenty of Canadian workers to Alberta, and training and technology should be applied to make the work force more productive. But those economic adjustments take time that Canada may not have.
“We know from the previous round of big expansions out in the oil patch,” says Queen’s University economist Charles Beach, that “the supply of skills just doesn’t grow quickly enough. The price of expansion became so high that many just tailed it off. They’ve learned from that and don’t want to see it again.”
Across the West, provinces are encouraging young people to learn the skills demanded by the labour market. But even if everyone who wanted to work was working, there would still be jobs available. Al Wahlstrom, an engineer with Suncor Energy Services, says it would help to get aboriginal people and other disadvantaged groups more involved in the work force, but that would eliminate just a portion of the labour gap.
And Alberta needs much more than just tradespeople. It faces shortages in almost every sector. Recently, for example, the province sent a delegation to Europe to recruit Mandarin, French and Spanish teachers for the burgeoning language programs in its schools, and it is continually trying to recruit nurses and truck drivers, among others.
Permanent migration is far more desirable than the rapid expansion of the temporary work force. Temporary workers lack the stability to set down roots and build communities, and are often separated from their families. After four years they’re required to go home, but there are estimates of a growing group, perhaps a few hundred thousand, who have overstayed their visas and now live undocumented in Canada.
Back at the police station, the Brits and Irish are raising long strips of silver metal into place. At least three see “temporary” as a label they are eager to shake. Keiron Tanner, the cladders’ superintendent, applied in February to stay here permanently.
In his hometown, a little ways from Oxford, England, he had watched his own cladding company, with 14 employees, careen into a wall of economic misfortune. Bidding for jobs grew so fierce that he was flirting with losses just to get work.
So when Mr. Tanner saw an ad in a local paper, he leaped at the chance to come to Canada. A half-dozen of his workers have since followed him, to a place that has proved welcoming beyond expectations.
“I was worried, because you don’t want to go somewhere and have it hostile towards you,” he says. “I haven’t had a single issue yet, touch wood, with guys saying, ‘Oh, you stole our jobs.’ ”
On April 26, Mr. Tanner marked two years in Canada. He has a Canadian wife, and a new home – one whose bitter winters, he says, are outweighed by sunny summers devoid of the rain that dogs Britain.
“For me,” he says, “I knew after a year or so that this is where I’d be staying.”
The question is whether the government feels the same way.
3. Take a number
The experts and Ottawa generally agree that Canada needs to welcome more of the most capable immigrants. The dispute is over just how high those numbers should be.
Last year, Canada admitted just under 250,000 immigrants in total. It will probably be close to 250,000 this year too – which happens to be the same as the average for the past 10 years: In 1992, Canada welcomed roughly 250,000 immigrants. On this question, the country seems stuck in place.
It wasn’t always this way. At the turn of the 20th century, when Canada was still expanding westward, it aggressively advertised and recruited abroad to bring in as many settlers as possible. From 1903 to 1913, immigration levels were never lower than the equivalent of 2 per cent of the country’s population, including the people interior minister Clifford Sifton called “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats” – the hardy Eastern Europeans who settled the Prairies. The intake hit 400,000 (more than 5 per cent of population) just before the start of the First World War.
While immigration has never reached those heights since, the evolution of Canadian immigration policy was generally expansive, with exceptions often based on racial biases (including some of the more shameful moments in Canadian history). In the 1960s, immigration was opened to people of all races and national origins, and the introduction of the points system created a more level playing field that rewarded higher education.
Immigration levels increased substantially under Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives in the late 1980s, which contributed to politicizing the issue.
In the early 1990s, policy-makers took advice from the late economist Alan Green, who suggested pegging immigration around the historical average of 1 per cent of population. The figure became a central Liberal platform plank in the period, though all three major parties have advocated it at various times, including the Conservatives as early as 1962.
Even that relatively modest target, however, has never been hit hasn’t been hit since 1967: In 1992, the 250,000 figure was more than 30,000 short of 1 per cent. The gap has only widened since. To reach 1 per cent today, Canada would have to admit about 347,000 people.
Indeed, organizations as wide-ranging as the Royal Bank, the Ontario Coalition of Agencies Serving Immigrants, the Conference Board of Canada (an economic research group) and the Canada West Foundation (an Alberta think tank) all have been calling for immigration to grow to 340,000 or beyond.
“Immigration certainly can be sustained at significantly higher levels,” says Robert Vineberg, a former director-general of citizenship and immigration for the prairie region and a fellow at the Canada West Foundation. “These numbers may seem large, but at 1 per cent of the population it’s not all that much, particularly when we have an aging work force.”
Some analysts paint a stark picture: In the next 15 years, Canada could become a “Northern Tiger,” if it commits to a major boost in immigration levels, a more effective selection system, tax incentives for immigrants to settle outside the big cities and a plan to retain them, said an April report from international consultants Deloitte and the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA). The alternative scenarios are a “Lost Decade,” in which Canada falls further behind, or at best an “unsustainable prosperity,” in which a complacent Canada continues as it’s been doing, and emerges unprepared for the next phase of its development.
“We certainly need more immigration than the status quo,” says Bill Greenhalgh, chief executive officer of the HRPA. “We need to get the right people, prescreen their qualifications and change our philosophy to truly welcome and integrate them.”
Mr. Kenney, the Immigration Minister, points to polls showing Canadians do not want higher intake levels, and says he does not want to endanger our enviable social consensus on the issue. That could be the case if increased immigration were perceived to have raised unemployment or poverty. But he has not totally closed off the option.
“We can get to reviewing the question of levels once we’ve fixed the programs,” Mr. Kenney told the press in March. “Once we’ve moved to this fast, flexible and pro-active system, once we’ve seen higher levels of income, once we’re doing a better job of matching the newcomers with the job shortages, then I think it would be sensible to look potentially at higher levels.”
Immigration is a huge adjustment, and the first five or 10 years after arrival are often difficult. That effect has increased as Canada has drawn from a wider pool of nations, with more cultural and accreditation differences.
Recent immigrants earn only about 60 per cent as much as the Canadian-born, whereas in the late 1970s it was nearly 90 per cent, according to research by McMaster economist Arthur Sweetman and former StatsCan director Garnett Picot.
After 10 years in Canada, however, immigrants’ employment rates and earnings start to approach those of the Canadian-born. Among those in their prime working years, immigrants are nearly 60 per cent more likely to have a university degree than those born here (37 per cent compared with 22).
And their children have become perhaps this country’s greatest asset: One of the best indicators of whether a Canadian child will go to university, says economist Ross Finnie, is not the parents’ levels of education but their countries of birth, since the children of almost every immigrant group outperform kids with parents born in Canada.
Taking the long view
It is short-sighted, then, to evaluate immigrants’ success solely on their income or their ability to get a job quickly in their field – or indeed, on any purely economic terms. A nation’s horizons extend for generations. In their daily struggle and sacrifice, every first generation of immigrants is laying a foundation for the future.
“We miss the human side if we boil [immigration]down to this economic calculation,” U of T’s Prof. Studin says. “That reduces a complex story to something very mechanical.”
At the same time, the ideal way to minimize any turbulence is to follow Mr. Kenney’s lead and emphasize economic-class immigrants, with their higher skill levels, lower unemployment and greater earning power.
At the moment, Canada accepts 150,000 economic immigrants a year. If that figure doubled to 300,000, and the other categories – refugees and family-reunification cases – stayed constant, total immigration would be in the range of 400,000 people, or a little more than 1 per cent.
That would mean economic migrants would make up about 75 per cent of Canada’s annual immigration, up from 60 per cent today. It’s not as big a jump as it may seem: Over the past decade, Canada has allowed its temporary-foreign-worker program to balloon, bringing in 180,000 more temporary workers, such as the cladders in Edmonton, every year. Replacing that number with more permanent immigration would be a more stable solution, giving those workers a common stake in the future with their Canadian neighbours.
Doubling economic immigration would send a signal to every talented prospective migrant around the world. Right now, the economic turmoil that is gripping Europe has raised the issue for thousands of well-educated, skilled, multilingual workers. In Spain, unemployment has hit nearly 25 per cent, and youth unemployment has surpassed 50 per cent. Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia have recently been recruiting in Ireland.
By contrast, as China and India, two of the largest source countries, become more prosperous, their pools of applicants may shrink. They may even join the U.S., Australia and South America in competing with Canada for talent. Canada needs to distinguish itself.
As the increase rolled out, Canada would have to monitor the outcomes and ensure that the policy was achieving its goals. Then, over the long term, immigration would have to rise even higher to sustain growth, since according to current projections, by 2031, more Canadians will die every year than are born. By that time, immigration could grow to 500,000 annually – fully double the total today.
And Prof. Studin’s 100-million-strong nation would become more than an abstract dream.
4. The immigrant idea factory
Immigration also can be a boon in less predictable ways. By bringing together ideas and experiences, it can fertilize imagination and invention. In his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, American writer Jonah Lehrer, who specializes in tracing the implications of neuroscience, suggests that “ages of excess genius are always accompanied by new forms of human mixing.”
According to the U.S. patent office, Mr. Lehrer says, “immigrants invent patents at double the rate of non-immigrants, which is why a 1-per-cent increase in immigrants with college degrees leads to a 15-per-cent rise in patent production.”
In that spirit, in the industrial heart of Kitchener, Ont., a 19th-century brick tannery offers a window on Canada’s post-industrial future.
The Communitech Hub is a space where the academic world of the University of Waterloo incubator programs meets the real world of entrepreneurs and investors. On average, there is one new business born here every day. And the bright minds who sit hunched over laptops in sneakers, jeans and Buddy Holly glasses are a multi-ethnic mix, including many immigrants and children of immigrants. The white board next to the empty takeout boxes spells out their ambition in huge block letters: “We are not leaving until this is done.”
Vigen Nazarian, 51, a Canadian born in Iran, is at Communitech meeting with an app developer. Mr. Nazarian is on his fourth tech start-up, a company called Antvibes, which tackles one little challenge of a diverse society by providing audio of the correct pronunciation of a name from a business card or e-mail signature.
In his opinion, people of different backgrounds take different approaches to problem solving, and with unusually successful outcomes: In the U.S., a quarter of energy and technology start-ups launched in the period from 1995 to 2005 had at least one immigrant as a key founder, and nearly half of the top 50 venture-funded companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants.
“Today, you’re building a global product,” Mr. Nazarian says. “Gone are the days of a product with only local reach. I would love to have product-development ideas coming from immigrants who have a different perspective.”
Upstairs from the Hub is a Google branch office, an ever-present reminder of how quickly a company with a bright idea can grow. And across the hall is John Baker, CEO and founder of Desire2Learn, one of the darlings of the Canadian tech sector, which produces software for teaching, assessing and analyzing student learning.
Mr. Baker’s company has grown to 420 employees from 140 two years ago; it aims to approach 600 by the end of the year. But he has 120 jobs that he can’t find the talent to fill. In some cases, he has pored over 500 résumés, primarily from Canadians, without turning up a viable candidate.
Namir Anani, president of the Information Communications and Technology Council, says his industry forecasts predict that there will be 106,000 unfilled jobs in the ICT field in just four years. Immigration will have to help address that shortage, he says.
Mr. Baker agrees: “Our industry thrives on finding the best and the brightest from around the world.”
But if a company’s growth is impeded, it can miss its moment. Mr. Baker has gone abroad to hire before. Though he found the process cumbersome, he found someone from Finland with a rare set of skills who has been an important asset to the company. An employee of Brazilian background was extremely useful in understanding South American education systems – how the curriculum works there, and which exams are the most important.
Right now, Desire2Learn is looking for people deeply familiar with European education systems, their next target for expansion.
“Having a global work force helps us create products that serve a global marketplace,” Mr. Baker says. “If we don’t have the skill set to help us understand how to serve those markets, we can’t do business there.”
5. The devil and other details
Tamara Fernandez Lima and her husband are economic-class immigrants from Cuba. They initially landed in St. John’s, but hated the weather and heard there was more opportunity out West. Within four days of touching down in Calgary in January, 2010, they both had jobs.
“It wasn’t a dream job, but it was a job, and we needed to get established,” Ms. Lima says. “For us, it was like heaven.”
Not content with one position, within weeks they had several more. Ms. Lima has a graduate degree in psychology and worked as vice-president of human resources at a Cuban government-security company. In Calgary, she would start her day at 10 a.m. at a women’s clothing store, while her husband washed dishes at a restaurant. He had another dishwashing job in the evening, followed by a cleaning job at Dairy Queen – and then they would rendezvous at Pizza Hut at around 1 a.m. and to make pizza dough until 6 a.m. Ms. Lima would go home for three hours of sleep and then start again.
“We barely slept until my husband found something closer to his field,” she says.
He now installs home and office alarms, not far from his expertise as an electrical technician, while Ms. Lima eventually worked her way up to a more appropriate job too, handling payroll at a Safeway corporate office. They recently bought a condominium and are expecting their first child. Both are continuing to upgrade their education, Ms. Lima by taking a certificate in human-resources management at the University of Calgary.
“We haven’t finished yet,” Ms. Lima says. “I’m not yet in my dream job, but this is one of the steps along the way.”
Their story is a reminder that immigrating is far from easy, and expanding it will not be simple either. Taking on more immigrants would require more employees at Citizenship and Immigration to screen and select newcomers in time to be more responsive to the demands of employers. It would require more money for settlement work and for promoting Canada abroad.
To maximize the benefits, Canada would have to get immigrants of the right age. As McMaster’s Prof. Sweetman points out, they should fill the gaps in Canada’s population structure, and right now that would mean targeting people in their mid-30s.
Canada also has to get newcomers to smaller centres, as envisioned in Deloitte and HRPA’s Northern Tiger scenario. In 2006, 70 per cent of recent immigrants lived in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver, which have felt the stresses of housing, job and infrastructure crunches.
By contrast, immigrants can halt population decline in smaller areas. And if communities and local employers have a role in selecting them, their outcomes tend to improve.
Still, any large immigration influx puts pressure on public services. In Steinbach’s case, it was the schools that felt it first.
Watch out for the ‘25th frame’
Superintendent Ken Klassen remembers scrambling to deal with the sheer number of newcomers who kept showing up without warning in his classrooms. “We got huge families, 10 to 13 kids and one in every grade,” he says. “Classes were getting new kids on a weekly basis.” And most of the newcomers did not speak English.
But the problems did not stop at finding more classrooms and teachers. There were cultural confrontations that threw everyone off. Russian-German parents objected to yoga in gym class, for example – saying its Eastern religious roots conflicted with their Christian beliefs.
They felt the same way about aboriginal dream catchers in classrooms, and ghost stories at Halloween.
Most astonishing of all was the immigrants’ objection to any educational video, even the most innocuous: The parents suspected that each second of video carried a hidden “25th frame” that contained subliminal anti-Christian messages.
Mr. Klassen, who is descended from German-speaking immigrants himself, met with the concerned parents. Remember, he says, that they were raised in the Soviet Union, where they developed a deep suspicion of authority and a fierce protectiveness over their religious freedoms. He assured them that the 25th-frame story was not true, but he agreed that students could opt out of videos or yoga if they chose.
It took as long as five years for Steinbach to adjust, Mr. Klassen says. By then, the migration was coming from all over the world, not just Germany. “From being almost a monoculture before, we now have up to 40 cultures represented in our schools,” he says.
In 1999, the schools had 20 educational assistants for languages and special needs. Today, they have more than 200.
Yet Mr. Klassen is totally enthusiastic about the final result. Vocational classes, once a dumping ground, have become a centre of excellence thanks to the trades interests of the immigrants. There are two new schools under construction, the first since 1973 (when “I was one of the first students through the door,” Mr. Klassen recalls, chuckling). And as the first wave of immigrants’ children are now starting families, an “echo boom” is about to hit that may be bigger than the first.
Richard Harder, a settlement worker in Steinbach, has been working with newcomers for years. In many cases, he says regretfully, immigrants who arrive in middle age, speaking little English, are not as successfully integrated: They can live comfortably in their own society, interacting only as much as is necessary with the broader community to buy their groceries, send their kids to school and receive public services. It’s not uncommon in Steinbach to see an earnest seven-year-old translating for a parent in a government office.
But their children all integrate, he says, largely through the public schools, as generations of immigrants have done before them. And the society around them learns other lessons.
Last summer, Mr. Harder watched as his recently immigrated neighbours put their teenage sons to the task of clearing every inch of their small acreage of trees, bushes and rocks. It was long, backbreaking work, day after day. He marvelled at the boys’ diligent ethic, noting that his own sons could not be roused from playing video games in the basement.
When the clearing was done, the neighbour wandered over and offered to have his sons do the same for Mr. Harder’s property too. He declined, explaining that he preferred the disorder of trees and bushes. The neighbour was puzzled, and persisted. It became an odd standoff, with each side struggling to grasp the other’s position.
“We explained to them our Canadian view on that and they explained their view on it. They thought that it looks more cleaned up … more orderly,” Mr. Harder says. “We chose not to. And in the end they were okay with that.”
In a small way, that’s the story of immigration in Canada: It reshapes the social landscape, while negotiating boundaries with the sensibilities that came before. The question now, when necessity and ambition demand that we welcome newcomers in greater numbers and at a brisker pace, is whether we can maintain the peaceful tenor of that process – and where we’ll find the limits of our abilities to accommodate each other’s points of view.
As we stress immigrants’ skill sets, will we still be able to harmonize our values? How will the new priorities change the mix of faces in the Canadian crowd? And what national virtues will we emphasize as we circle the world in search of recruits? Our future depends on how we answer such questions – and the time to begin the debate is now.
– With a report from Nathan VanderKlippe
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The Immigrant Answer
What would a Canada of 100 million feel like? More comfortable, better served, better defended
DOUG SAUNDERS
LONDON — The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, May 17, 2012 11:32PM EDT
Last updated Wednesday, Jun. 20, 2012 5:30PM EDT
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This is part of The Immigrant Answer –The Globe’s series on the future of immigration in Canada. Read the original story here.
If you were in London 110 years ago to watch the coronation of King Edward VII, it would have looked a lot like the scene of this month’s royal jubilee, with one notable exception: In 1902, the route of the royal coach, visited by millions of people, had been transformed into a giant advertisement for immigration to Canada.
Appication form from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Poll
Vote: What is your attitude toward immigration in Canada?
Senator Don Meredith.
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Don Curry started the North Bay newcomer network after the city of North Bay made attracting immigrants a priority back in 2007.
The Immigrant Answer
Video: How integration helped immigrants settle in this Ontario town
The largest public-sector ad campaign in the country’s history had led Ottawa to erect giant sheaves of wheat over The Strand in London, to establish recruitment bureaus from Reykjavik to Moscow promising “homes for millions.”
Prime minister Wilfrid Laurier made no secret of its purpose: to increase Canada’s population tenfold as soon as possible, and thereby turn the country from a sparsely populated colony into a major, independent nation with its own culture, its own economy and its own institutions, capable of influencing and bettering the world, rather than simply being buffeted in the world’s tides.
“We are a nation of six million people already; we expect soon to be 25, yes, 40 millions,” Mr. Laurier declared. “There are men in this audience who, before they die, if they live to old age, will see this country with at least 60 millions of people.”
It was the largest immigration wave we’ve experienced, three times the rate of today’s influx, and arguably the most important human event in Canada’s history, ending its colonial culture. But it was a failure: It only doubled Canada’s population in the short term, and helped cause it to increase just fivefold in the next century.
Today we need to recognize the fact that, despite what Laurier did a century ago, Canada remains a victim of underpopulation. We do not have enough people, given our dispersed geography, to form the cultural, educational and political institutions, the consumer markets, the technological, administrative and political talent pool, the infrastructure-building tax base, the creative and artistic mass necessary to have a leading role in the world.
Because our immigration rates have remained modest and our birth rate is low, our population will grow only slightly – to perhaps 50 million by mid-century. By that point, the world’s population will almost have stopped growing and it will be difficult to attract large numbers of immigrants. At current rates, Canada will have lost its chance to be a fully formed nation.
It is time to act. Canada should build its population to a size – at least 100 million – that will allow it to determine its own future, maintain its standard of living against the coming challenges and have a large enough body of talent and revenue to solve its largest problems. All it takes is a sustained and determined increase in immigration, to at least 400,000 permanent immigrants per year.
This will not be free: Immigration requires support and assistance. But it will become much more expensive in the future, when shrinking world populations make immigrants scarce, and Canada’s crisis of underpopulation becomes expensive.
The case for 100 million
The moment when the United States stopped being dependent on the ideas, imports and expressions of other countries was exactly when it passed the 100-million mark, shortly before 1920. It was at this point that the U.S. developed the world’s first conservation program, the first progressive taxation system and the first great national infrastructure program. It was this population level that turned America into the capital of the modern world.
Whenever Canada’s ideal population is studied, the 100-million figure comes up. In 1968, a group of scholars, policy advocates and business leaders formed the Mid-Canada Development Corridor Foundation, which argued that a population of at least 100 million was needed to have a sustainable and independent economy. In 1975, a study by Canada’s Department of Manpower found that economies of scale leading to “significant benefits to Canadian industry” would occur only after the population had reached 100 million. And more recently, in 2010, the journal Global Brief argued in detail that Canada needs that much population for geostrategic, defence and diplomatic reasons. This population level would give Canada “new domestic structures coupled with growing international impact and prestige,” the journal argued, that would turn it into “a serious force to be reckoned with.”
What would a Canada of 100 million feel like? Much like today’s Canada, but more comfortable, better-served and better defended against ecological and human threats.
If just the narrow strip of land upon which most Canadians live were to develop the population density of the Netherlands or England, then the overall population would be more than 400 million. A quarter of that density would give Canada’s southern strip the population density of Spain or Romania, two big countries noted for their huge, unspoiled tracts of nature. The remaining 90 per cent of Canada would remain largely untouched – modern immigration takes place in already urbanized areas.
It would turn our major cities into places of intense and world-leading culture – and it would greatly improve their quality of life, as they’d finally have a critical mass of ratepayers large enough to support top-quality public transit, parks, museums, universities and property developments. It would put an end to the low population density that plagues large sections of Toronto and Calgary. It would turn the less-large cities, including Edmonton, Regina and Ottawa, into truly important centres.
Canada’s environment would probably be far better protected: Densely populated places like California and France tend to do better at conservation than empty zones like the Asian steppe, which produced such ecological catastrophes as the Aral Sea disaster unobserved. The threats of global warming – notably ocean-level rises – will require large-scale infrastructure projects that must rely on a large tax base. And it’s no coincidence that the most progressive climate-change policies are found in the countries with the most dense populations.
The price of underpopulation
Canadians cannot build the institutions of nationhood and the tools of global participation using the skills, markets and tax revenues of somewhere between 21 and 24 million English speakers and eight million francophones scattered more or less sparsely over a area of land encompassing five time zones, several geographic and cultural regions, a dozen political jurisdictions and the second largest land mass on Earth. Underpopulation has been part of the dialogue in Quebec for decades, but English-speaking Canadians too often fail to recognize the banana peel that keeps tripping up their nation’s ambitions.
The challenge is not simply economic. The greatest price of underpopulation is loneliness: We are often unable to talk intelligently to each other, not to mention the world, because we just don’t have enough people to support the institutions of dialogue and culture – whether they’re universities, magazines, movie industries, think tanks or publishing houses. Unlike the tightly packed countries of Europe, Canada has multiple, dispersed audiences with different regional cultures – and therefore needs a larger base population, especially in its cities.
Anyone who has tried to do culture, scholarship, public thought, entertainment or political thinking on the national level will recognize the brick wall of underpopulation. There isn’t a large enough audience, or market, to support such institutions at a minimal level of quality or scope. That’s why all of Canada’s major publishing houses are branches of foreign firms. It’s the reason why our TV and movies are either foreign- or government-funded and regulated. It’s the reason why such important institutions as McClelland and Stewart and Saturday Night magazine failed, even after repeated government bailouts and tax protection. Just not enough audience. It’s the reason why our only English-language national newsmagazine, Maclean’s, manages to survive (and then just barely) only through as much as $3-million a year in federal grants and laws preventing U.S. titles from publishing north of the border. In online media, where such protections don’t work, the isolation is more dire.
Our institutions of public thought are badly constrained. Canada could never have small magazines, such as The New Republic (54,000 subscribers) or the Weekly Standard (81,000) or Britain’s Prospect (40,000), because once you divide those numbers by 12 (the population difference between English Canada and the U.S.), you don’t have enough subscription revenue to support even a single staff member. And even those magazines rely on volunteers and low freelance rates; a world-class weekly like The New Yorker or the Times Literary Supplement would be inconceivable. We’re stuck reading theirs. It’s the reason we have only one think tank with more than 100 people on staff, while the United States and Britain have scores of them.
Much of the influence of larger countries flows from their institutes and think tanks. Volumes of vital research and political development spring from such places as the Urban institute (450 full-time thinkers), the Brookings Institution (250), the Hoover Institution (320), or the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (220). Canada has only one institute with more than 100 staff – the Conference Board of Canada. The next largest is the right-wing Fraser Institute, with 64 staff, followed by the C.D. Howe Institute, with only 21 – and then a whole bunch with a handful of people stuffed into a single office. Too many of our institutions are too small to matter – and so is our talent pool.
Even if you don’t care about culture, politics and thought, you’ll pay the price. The economic and fiscal cost of underpopulation was measured last September by Ottawa’s Parliamentary Budget Officer. It makes for grim reading.
At current rates of immigration and population growth, the average age of Canadians will soar. Canada’s old-age dependency ratio – that is, the proportion of the population dependent on government pension and health-care spending (i.e., those over 65) will more than double from 20 per cent today to 45 per cent of the population in the 2080s.
This will cause GDP growth to plummet, from 2.6 per cent annually to 1.8 and below. Government debt will increase by 3 per cent annually, and Ottawa will either have to raise taxes or cut its spending by a dramatic amount, which estimates show would be comparable to the emergency cutbacks of the mid-1990s. A decent social safety net, world-class foreign-policy and military spending, infrastructure, universities and ecological programs will become unaffordable – unless we can expand Canada’s population base sharply in the next few decades.
How to build a bigger Canada
The difference between a stagnant population and a robust one is less than you may think. By increasing Canada’s population growth rate of 0.8 per cent per year (based on 250,000 to 300,000 immigrants annually) by 50 per cent, we would have 75 million people in 50 years and 100 million by the end of the century.
To do this, we would have to attract between 400,000 and 450,000 immigrants per year, or about half the rate (as a percentage of the population) of the Laurier years. Canada’s low birth rates (averaging 1.6 children per family) will pull that number down, but that would be counterbalanced by the youth and higher first-generation birth rates of the new immigrants.
It wouldn’t last forever – immigrants always merge with their host country’s family size within a couple of generations, and the surge of youth and productivity will be temporary. But it would hold us through the 21st century, during which the entire world’s population will stop growing, level out, and start falling. Canada should use this moment – now – to start boosting its base population so we are on a world-class footing before the world reaches “peak people” and immigrants become increasingly difficult to attract.
In some ways, that competition has already begun. Australia’s government, influenced by the “Big Australia” movement, which calls for a doubling of population, has made entry much easier for its immigrants.
We need a “Big Canada” movement and – given our economic needs, our labour shortages and the continuing pains of underpopulation – this is the time to launch it.
Doug Saunders is a Globe and Mail correspondent based in London and the author of Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, winner of the 2010 Donner Prize for writing on public policy.
To find out what immigration looks like in your community, see an interactive look at solutions to Canada’s immigration problem and share your own story click here.
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