By Dr. Ricardo Duchesne
Doug Saunders’s Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Are Not Enough, was published at the same time as my book, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians. Maximum was published by a conglomerate, Alfred Knopf-Penguin-Random House, backed by solid editorial reviews, interviews, invited talks, and displays at major bookstores. Canada in Decay was released by a very small publisher, yet it has been consistently ranked number one at Amazon.ca in various subcategories, with excellent customer reviews. The magazine and newspaper reviews of Maximum are positive while very unenthusiastic. Decay has been reviewed four times in the alternative media, two long reviews, always with verve and eagerness.
Maximum seeks to maximize ideas repeated every day in the media and in bank branches. It says that Canada needs to double its immigration intake to become a nation worthy of respect. Bringing 250,000+ immigrants per year since the early 1990s has not been enough. We need 400,000-500,000 annually until the end of this century. Imagine reading this after daily rituals that “diversity is our strength.” Imagine having to gulp down three gallons of milk a day.
Why should patriotic Canadians be interested in Saunders’s book when its central argument is that Canada was a mediocre nation created by mediocre people until liberal elites brought us multiculturalism in the 1970s? The implicit message is that only diverse immigrants can make Canada great and that Whites are inherently incapable of creating great nations. He claims Canada was kept down by a “minimizing impulse” characterized by “restrictive immigration,” “ethnic homogeneity,” a colonial relation with Britain, “a view of indigenous communities as problems, not partners,” a restricted relation with the United States, and a small population.
Saunders Is Right: Canada Was NOT Created By Immigrants
The only good point about this book is that, in trying to demonstrate that Anglo Canadian leaders were men without ambition and worldliness, stuck to a mercantilist system controlled by imperial Britain, he brings some very revealing statistics about immigration which show that Canada was never a nation of immigrants except momentarily during Wilfrid Laurier’s rule between 1896 and 1911, and only after the 1960s. Contrary to the lie taught to Canadian students, Canada was more a nation of emigrants than immigrants.
From 1851 to 1901, Canada attracted 734,900 immigrants from England, Wales, and Scotland, and lost at least 1.2 million emigrants, mainly to the United States […] During the ninety years between 1851 and 1941, Canada had attracted 6.7 million immigrants but had lost almost 6.3 million people through emigration (pp. 33, 99).
So, if most immigrants became emigrants, who created Canada? Saunders never asks this disquieting question, but the following observation is in tandem with what I say in Canada in Decay:
Canada’s population growth until the twentieth century was entirely due to fertility. Large families permitted the population to rise to 5.3 million (p. 33).
In the words of an economic historian Saunders cites:
immigrants only began to contribute significantly to population growth after 1901…For much, if not most, of its formative history, Canada was not a country of immigrants” (p. 33-4).
Saunders Is Wrong: Canada WAS Created By Indigenous Whites
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A boy ploughing, Manitoba, c. 1900 |
But instead of reflecting on how these straightforward numbers demonstrate that the people who founded this nation were born in the soil of this nation, and were therefore indigenous to this land, Saunders’s malevolent aim is to portray British Canada as a closed-minded society inhabited by dull farmers without ambition. Those who emigrated to the US, he says, were the “most ambitious and inventive immigrants,” whereas the ones who stayed
didn’t want much from life: an agrarian, very religious, austere population of peasants and labourers who tended to see change and growth as a threat rather than an opportunity (p. 49).
But how did we get from this minimizing model, which he says continued into the Diefenbaker years, to a cosmopolitan Canada in the 1960s, which he says rightfully saw itself as multicultural? Saunders wants a Canada that is dull when it is homogeneously British and French, and a Canada that has long been diverse when he needs to justify the onset of multiculturalism — in order to give the impression that the adoption of the maximizing multicultural model was merely a “recognition” of a historical reality rather than an ideological imposition from above against the wishes of the indigenous British and Quebecois founders.
Of course, Saunders would counter that Canada did achieve some ethnic diversity during the Wilfrid Laurier period (1896-1911) when three million immigrants came and the nation momentarily adopted a “maximizing model.” He writes that these years saw
a decisive break with the minimizing impulse and the advent of an entirely new approach to building the country. Never before in its history — and never since — has Canada grown so rapidly and so successfully in population, in economic activity, in urbanization, in ethnic diversity, in scope of government and in standard of living (p. 65).
He says a “very large proportion of present-day Canadians are descended from the three million immigrants who arrived as part of the Laurier wave.” But were Laurier’s immigrants really diverse? Saunders tries to trick his readers with the statement that “25 to 30 percent of immigrants during each year of the Laurier era were considered to be of non-Western origins — Slavic, Nordic, southern European, and Asian” (p. 77).
Nonsense. Except for a minuscule number of Asians, these ethnic groups were all Western and European. The other 70 to 75 percent that came each year, he has to admit, were mostly Britons, “never before…have so many British people moved to Canada” (p. 76). No one denies Saunders’s point that Canadians of British descent had declined by the 1960s. In 1961, 43.8 percent were of British ancestry. But a high number, 30.4 percent, were French, one of the founding peoples, and the rest were overwhelmingly European.
Let’s not mince words. When Saunders says “non-Western” he means to imply that Canada was not longer really European and White as a result of the immigrants who came during the Laurier years (and afterwards). But this is very misleading. In 1961, the non-British, non-French population consisted of 5.8 percent German, 2.6 percent Ukrainian, 2.5 percent Italian, 2.4 Dutch, 2.1 Scandinavian, 1.8 Polish, 1.0 Jewish, 0.7 Russian, and 3.6 “other” Europeans. There were only 121,753 “Asiatics” (0.7), and, according to an earlier census from 1951, there were only 18,020 blacks. In 1967, people of Third World origin constituted less than 1 percent of the Canadian population.
Facts Are Stubborn Things
Saunders skips over many troubling stats standing in his push for a massive increase in immigration. For starters, his portrayal of the United States as a vibrant nation open to immigrants from diverse cultures since independence in 1776 is belied by a White-only immigration reality prevailing until 1965. Real GDP growth in the US between 2003 and 2013, when the borders were set wide open to Mexican and Asian immigration, was only 1.72. By contrast, the American GNP jumped from about $200 thousand-million in 1940 to $300 thousand-million in 1950 to more than $500 thousand-million in 1960 when immigration intakes were quite low and the borders were closed to Third World immigration. This growth was sustained by a high fertility rate among indigenous Americans.
It is also the case that much of the growth Canada saw during Laurier’s time was driven by the “second industrial revolution”, electrical equipment and chemicals in the 1890s, electricity-powered streetcars, food processing (meat packing), housing materials, and aluminium after 1900. The rate of growth between 1950 and 1973 was very high at 5.1 percent, a time which included the “minimizing” years of Diefenbaker, when immigration overall was very low. By contrast, the period between 1986 and 1996, as mass immigration from outside Europe took off, saw a meager 2 percent average growth. During the last 20 years of massive immigration, the rate of growth has rarely risen above 2 percent.
Saunders tries to overcome the obvious fact that most of the wealthiest nations in the world have small populations by emphasizing Canada’s size and low population density as compared to Singapore, Switzerland, and Norway. He forgets to mention that none of these wealthy nations can be described as immigrant nations and that Norway is not a densely populated nation. Ultimately he never answers the question why the current top countries in population size — such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Mexico — hardly stand up to top countries in the world with the highest human development index and with small populations: Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Ireland, and Iceland.
His repetition of the deceptive corporate argument that Canada is facing an unsustainable old age dependency ratio, a declining working age population that will result in lower tax receipts, completely misses what the Japanese don’t: AUTOMATION. Japan is facing a worse dependency ratio, with the difference that in this country academics are allowed to question the merits of mass immigration, and to cherish the value of Japanese ethnicity. Why don’t we think in the same disciplined way as the Japanese leaders who have openly stated that an aging population is “not a burden, but an incentive to boost productivity through innovations like robots, wireless sensors and artificial intelligence” without immigration?
What drives Saunders is not Canada’s economic needs but an anti-White agenda now pervasive in the West. Our lying press and disloyal financial elites are raising the same false alarms across Europe about how this continent can’t be assured of an affluent future unless masses of Africans and Muslims are put on welfare payrolls. This pathological animus against European identity stands at the root of Maximum Canada.
