Semotiuk: Canada’s Immigration System Is Quietly Losing Its Balance

2026/04/30 Leave a comment

One series of suggestions to deal with the current numbers, overly expansionist IMO. Administration of a “one generation rule” (he doesn’t specify what would count as a generation, normally that would be about 20-30 years) would be challenging, with the requirement for community service even more challenging:

…First, Canada should establish a clear, automatic pathway to permanent residence for long-term temporary residents. When an individual has completed two full work permit cycles—or two post-secondary study cycles—typically six years or more of lawful residence, employment, and tax contributions—a pathway to permanent residence should open as a matter of course, provided the individual has complied with Canadian laws.

At some point, time invested in Canada must count. A clearly defined pathway to permanent residence for these people is one way to demonstrate this.

Second, Canada must confront the reality of undocumented individuals living within its borders. It is estimated that about 500,000 such individuals live in Canada. Most are visa overstays; some crossed the U.S.-Canada border irregularly or entered by car, boat, or plane. Many have spent years—sometimes decades—working, contributing, and raising families in the shadows. Many are from countries they fled because of poverty, violence, or war, including Ukraine. A rational system cannot indefinitely ignore this reality. These people live in the shadows and are prevented from building ordinary lives and families. They are vulnerable to criminals, gangsters, and exploiters. Their status erodes the respect our system of justice should enjoy.

A one-generation rule should apply: individuals who have lived in Canada for a sustained period approximating a generation, demonstrated good character, and contributed to society should be granted a pathway to permanent residence. To compensate for jumping the immigration queue, they should be subject to a financial penalty and a period of mandatory community service, such as helping the sick or cleaning up their hometowns, to qualify for permanent residence. Bringing people out of the legal shadows strengthens—not weakens—the rule of law.

Third, Canada should abandon its rigid and largely arbitrary cap on annual permanent-resident admissions, currently set at approximately 385,000. That number may serve administrative planning, but it makes little policy sense in a country already hosting millions of temporary residents. The cap artificially constrains the transition of individuals who are already here, already contributing, and already integrated. Immigration policy should prioritize outcomes, not quotas. There is little substantive difference between someone living in Canada on a temporary work permit and a permanent resident, aside from the temporary status of a work permit holder.

Meanwhile, numerous studies have shown that Canada needs more immigrants. In fact, Canada does not lack immigrants. It lacks a mechanism to recognize those it already has.

Source: Canada’s Immigration System Is Quietly Losing Its Balance

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

CIMM: Canada’s Immigration System – IRGC

2026/04/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

That, further to the testimony from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) on March 9, 2026 related to the presence of agents of the Iranian Regime and agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Canada, and further to the committee’s study on Canada’s immigration system, and further to the imminent danger that the presence of IRGC officials and regime agents in Canada may pose to Canadian public safety, the committee report the following to the House:

  1. Government officials have admitted the known presence of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officials and regime agents residing in Canada;
  2. There are gaps in legislation and procedures that may allow IRGC officials to avoid detection prior to arrival and deportation after;
  3. The Government should exercise the full force of the existing law regarding the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist entity, specifically by expediting the execution of deportation orders of regime officials who are non-citizens under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act;
  4. The Government should immediately undertake a comprehensive review of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act with an eye to modernize it to prevent regime officials from avoiding deportation by:
  5. Clearly ensuring non-citizens are deemed inadmissible if involved in regime-linked businesses, spreading propaganda, or human rights abuses;
  6. Extend inadmissibility to immediate non-citizen family members of regime officials; and
  7. Create an exemption from non-refoulement protections for inadmissible non-citizen regime officials proven to be complicit in human rights abuses.
  8. The Government should, within 30 calendar days following the passing of this motion, table a report to Parliament explaining why it has not made public the identities of known non-citizens who are Iranian regime officials or agents who are currently present in Canada; and
  9. It is imperative that the Government stop approving refugee claims from nations with regimes hostile to Canada without an in person interview being conducted first;
  10. That the Government of Canada undertake a thorough legal review of the measures raised above to ensure consistency with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canada’s international legal obligations.

Source: CIMM: Canada’s Immigration System – IRGC

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Geist: Why the Senate got antisemitism only half-right

2026/04/30 Leave a comment

Valid critique:

…The deepest irony lies in what the report says it wants to restore. Deborah Lyons, the previous Special Envoy on Combatting Antisemitism, understood the problem the Senate does not. Her handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism exists because anti-Zionist language was being used to launder antisemitism, and Canadian institutions, police, educators, and civil servants needed a working framework to distinguish legitimate, protected criticism of Israeli government policy from hate.

The handbook is explicit that Canadians can criticize the Israeli government at length and stay on the right side of the antisemitism line. But deploying double standards, contesting the country’s right to exist, or treating its Jewish supporters as legitimate targets of violence or political exclusion is another matter. The House Justice Committee reached the same conclusion in 2024. The Senate now recommends restoring Lyons’s office while declining the analytical work that made it useful.

For months, Jewish Canadians have argued that words are not enough. Neither, it turns out, is a report that documents the problem and declines to name half of it.

Source: Why the Senate got antisemitism only half-right

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Have a Canadian Great-Great Grandparent? It Could Make You Canadian.

2026/04/29 2 Comments

More US coverage to the C-3 changes, this from the NYT. Keeps on amazing me that nobody, including myself, noted this implication during discussions of the Bill:

…The change could extend Canadian citizenship to “potentially millions of people around the world, many of whom have never lived in Canada and may have only a distant ancestral tie to it,” said Rick Lamanna, a Toronto-based partner at Fragomen, a global immigration and relocation company.

The new policy, he added, stood in contrast both to those of other advanced economies seeking to limit immigration, and to the Canada’s own significant tightening of other immigration routes.

In the last two years, Canada has slashed the numbers of foreign students, temporary workers and the number of permanent residents. That has already resulted in Canada’s population shrinking.

The policy expanding who can qualify for Canadian citizenship also stands in stark contrast to the evolving discourse about who should be American in the United States, where President Trump wants to see even birthright citizenship curtailed.

Among developed economies, Canada now has one of the most inclusive rules on passing down citizenship generation to generation.

Until 2024, Italy offered citizenship by descent without any generational limit, a path many Americans utilized, but it has since limited citizenship to people with an Italian parent or grandparent.

Only a handful of other countries have in recent years broadened their citizenship to people with more distant ancestry, including Portugal and Slovakia, but with some limitations.

The burden of proof to pursue this new route to becoming Canadian is still significant, a spokesman for the Canadian immigration ministry said, particularly since it could require deep archival research and recovering documents that could be more than a century old.

“While these recent changes extended access to Canadian citizenship by descent, having distant Canadian ancestry alone does not make someone automatically eligible,” said Matthew Krupovich, a spokesman for the immigration ministry.

Documents that meet the bar for the Canadian authorities can include birth certificates, citizenship or naturalization certificates, or other official records showing family relationships and citizenship status, but not information gleaned from genetic testing.

There is early evidence that the new rules are already spurring higher demand for historical records. The Nova Scotia Archives, for example, has seen a sharp increase in requests for official copies of historical records, from about 260 requests in all of 2024 to about 1,500 in just the first three months of 2026, said John Macleod, a manager at the archives.

Still, the numbers for the first few weeks since the changes have gone into effect also highlight that most people fail to secure citizenship. Between Dec. 15 and Jan. 31, about 6,280 applications for proof of citizenship were processed by the Canadian authorities. Of those, 1,480 were confirmed as citizens by descent under the new rules, the immigration ministry said.

The motivation behind pursuing Canadian citizenship varies from person to person. …

Source: Have a Canadian Great-Great Grandparent? It Could Make You Canadian.

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with

Adams and Parkin: Polls are getting more and more insane

2026/04/29 Leave a comment

Good discussion of current polling challenges and arguments to track evolving attitudes and values:

…There is a still a role for responsible pollsters in these crazy times. Tracking approval ratings remains useful. Currently, the erosion of Mr. Trump’s approval at the very least offers much-needed encouragement to the citizens who oppose him. Taking the long view can be productive as well: Comparing public views today on a consistent set of metrics to those from years past can offer more signal than noise compared to overnight reactions to another outlandish statement.

We should also shift our focus to tracking more enduring values. It is natural to want to know whether opinions are shifting on the President’s policies. What we really need to know, however, is how social values are evolving. Have Americans really become more accepting of violence, more religious, more patriarchal, less cosmopolitan, or less interested in other cultures? This type of polling attracts less attention, yet ultimately gives us the clues we need about what’s driving America’s deepening ideological cleavages.

When the polling industry took off in the middle of the 20th century, led by George Gallup and others, it challenged the ability of politicians to claim, without risk of contradiction, that they spoke for the people. Polls tested those claims, ensuring that the voice of every citizen could be heard. The mission of survey research helped strengthen democracy then, and can continue to do so now. Only a genuine faker would call them fake news. 

Source: Polls are getting more and more insane

Filed under Polling Tagged with ,

Kazemzadeh: Canada’s Arctic security depends on more than defence — here’s how immigration could help

2026/04/29 Leave a comment

The Arctic argument (only about 300 Permanent Residents in 2025, about 1,000 TRs IMP):

…Immigration and migration are usually considered part of economic policy. In the Arctic, they’re also a security strategy.

Research shows that immigration can help address demographic and labour challenges in rural and northern regions. However, attracting newcomers is only part of the equation — retaining them remains a major challenge.

Statistics Canada data shows that retention rates vary widely across regions, with northern and smaller communities often struggling to keep newcomers over the long term.

This matters for security. A temporary workforce doesn’t build resilient communities. Long-term settlement does. If newcomers to the North stay, they contribute to infrastructure development, local economies and essential services. They become part of the social fabric that supports everything from search-and-rescue operations to climate adaptation efforts….

Canada’s Arctic sovereignty has long been associated with geography and military presence. But sovereignty is now also about resilience — the ability of communities to live, work and thrive in the North.

The Centre for Immigrant Research, a Calgary-based Canadian think tank, argues in its recent work on the North that immigration and migration — when thoughtfully designed and implemented in partnership with Indigenous and territorial governments — can play a key role in strengthening regional resilience and national sovereignty.

Therefore, Canada has an opportunity to rethink its approach. While defence investments are essential, they aren’t sufficient on their own. In the Arctic, security ultimately depends on people — and on ensuring they are able to build and sustain long-term lives in the North.

Source: Canada’s Arctic security depends on more than defence — here’s how immigration could help

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Beinart: What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel

2026/04/29 2 Comments

Good commentary:

…Mr. Carlson is more subtle. But he, too, often attributes Israel’s behavior to what he sees as its anti-Western religion. Last October, he claimed that “the Israeli position is ‘everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children.’ That’s not a Western view. That’s an Eastern view. That’s a non-Christian — that’s totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization.” Earlier this year Mr. Carlson said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had tried to punish members of Mr. Carlson’s family because Mr. Netanyahu “believes in blood guilt, Amalek. You know, when someone commits a crime against you, you punish not just him but his family, his bloodline. There’s no idea that’s less Western than that, more anti-Christian than that. Christians reject that.”

Mr. Carlson is implying that Israel’s punishment of the Palestinian people stems from something particularly Jewish — or “non-Christian” — about its misdeeds. Such civilizational generalizations are false; many Christian and Western leaders practice collective punishment. The United States was founded on the same kind of land theft that Israel is committing against Palestinians.

Combating the anti-Israel right’s conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well.

But progressives must not blur the distinction between viewing Israel as a state, which practices forms of oppression and aggression that can occur in states of every ethnic and religious type, and viewing Israel as the product of a peculiarly Jewish pathology. It is understandable that some progressives, who are rightly eager to end America’s support for Israel’s human rights abuses, might be tempted to see figures like Mr. Carlson as allies. But the struggle for Palestinian freedom should not indulge bigotry of any kind. That includes the bigotry of figures like Tucker Carlson, who blame Israel’s crimes on its Jewishness so they can pretend that America and Christianity are morally pure.

Source: What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel

Filed under Antisemitism Tagged with , , ,

Griffith: Canada’s citizenship drift

2026/04/28 Leave a comment

My latest:

Canada’s citizenship policies need to strike the right balance between granting access and fostering belonging and identity. 

The process for obtaining citizenship should be attainable but also ensure prospective citizens are genuinely committed to Canada’s laws, values and social norms.

In Canada, citizenship policy has increasingly favoured facilitation over meaningfulness. This is a departure from the Harper era, when the government made citizenship harder to obtain and easier to lose. 

The recent shift reflects Liberal government policy choices, court rulings and sustained advocacy pressure. While spending restraint has driven some of these changes, they do not appear to be a key driver of changes to the citizenship program itself.  

What has got lost in the policy shift is the importance of fostering belonging and identity. Citizenship should have value beyond merely instrumental benefits, such as protection from deportation or access to a Canadian passport.

This diminished focus on cultivating Canadian identity and belonging can be seen at all stages of the citizenship journey: who becomes a citizen; how prospective citizens are tested; and how new citizens are celebrated.

Who becomes a citizen

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada used to measure how many permanent residents (PRs) became citizens, or the desired outcome. Their goal was for 85 per cent of all PRs to become citizens. 

However, it did not measure citizenship uptake for recent immigrants, those who became citizens within five to nine years after arrival where Statistics Canada has highlighted a significant decline.

IRCC has abandoned even this loose outcome standard in favour of output standards focused on processing time and quality assurance. As a result, IRCC is avoiding needed scrutiny on the decline of immigrants becoming citizens.

Court decisions have also contributed to a perception that citizenship is of diminishing value. 

In 2023, the Federal Court of Canada struck down a law that denied automatic citizenship to children born abroad if their Canadian parents were also born abroad.

The Liberal government chose not to appeal and adopted overly expansive legislation in response. It now allows for retroactive citizenship to be granted almost automatically to anyone with a direct Canadian ancestor, no matter how far back. 

In effect, Canada has adopted a more European jus sanguinis (bloodline) framework layered onto its traditional jus soli (place of birth) model, weakening the requirement for direct, lived connections to Canada across generations.

This hybrid approach risks combining the weaknesses of both systems. 

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will face greater administrative complexity to assess more distant ancestor links and residency over longer time periods. The end result will be to reduce the meaning and connection to citizenship, particularly for those claiming citizenship through distant, earlier generations.

The government has also taken no action to curb “birth tourism,” where non-citizens intentionally travel to Canada before birth to ensure their child gains citizenship. But data and studies show this is an increasing practice.

Citizenship tests

Prospective citizens are required to take a citizenship test before being granted citizenship.

To help them prepare,the government provides individuals with a citizenship study guide, Discover Canada, which provides basic information on Canadian history, rights and responsibilities, society and geography. 

This guide has not been updated since it was first published in 2009, despite commitments as far back as 2016 to do so, and despite concerns that the guide is not current on topics such as LGBTQ and Indigenous issues. 

The current immigration minister has not commented publicly on the matter. Her transition briefing only says the guide is “near-ready for release.”

It is also not clear whether Ottawa has taken steps to minimize the possibility of citizenship test fraud. The most recent public data indicate a pass rate of 92 per cent on the test, up from a low of 81 per cent in 2010.

Administering multiple, rotating versions of itscitizenship test would reduce the possibility of test takers simply memorizing responses. The government reportedly introduced this safeguard following anecdotal concerns about mnemonic test-taking among some Chinese-origin applicants. It is not clear whether this safeguard is still in place.

These tests are also now mostly administered online, rather than in person, reducing opportunities for shared experience among new Canadians.

Ceremonies

During the pandemic, Ottawa understandably shifted from holding in-person citizenship ceremonies to virtual ones. 

But years after the pandemic, this practice continues. Virtual ceremonies now account for about 55 per cent of all citizenship ceremonies. In 2025, Ottawa even ended funding for enhanced in-person ceremonies delivered by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

This is unfortunate; in-person ceremonies more meaningfully celebrate immigrants’ journeys and inclusion in the Canadian family. 

The government has also proposed allowing self-affirmation of the citizenship oath, rather than in collective ceremonies. While these proposals have not been implemented, they have not been formally abandoned either. 

For many new Canadians, citizenship is driven by practical benefits, but it also fosters belonging and participation. While efficiency-focused administrative changes are welcome, they should not come at the expense of the experience and meaning of becoming Canadian. 

Citizenship is not just a transaction; it is a key part of the integration journey that strengthens newcomers’ sense of belonging and pride. It should be celebrated publicly, not processed in isolation before a computer screen.

Source: Op-Ed: Canada’s citizenship drift

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with

Luciani: The rise of the progressive bureaucrat and the fall of the efficient state

2026/04/28 Leave a comment

A bit simplistic but the fundamental point, more public servants with experience in program delivery and client service than policy development.

And of course, previous generations of public servants reflected the attitudes of the day, whether respect to women, visible minorities, Indigenous, LGTBQ:

…Universities like to present policy training as politically neutral, but no school is neutral when its dominant assumptions are absorbed from the surrounding progressive culture in higher education.

Graduates with MPPs and MPAs are no different. They see the world through the values of their generation. They learn the language of inclusion and identity and bring those values to their work. When Statistics Canada asks in surveys what gender you were assigned at birth, you can be certain the department was influenced by a new generation of policy advisors. A public service staffed chiefly by people trained to think in slogans will inevitably produce a slogan-driven government.

Canada needs smart people less enamoured of theory and ideology, and more rooted in the unglamorous work of delivery. More importantly, we need to restore ministerial responsibility. MPs and ministers should be judged on what happens in their departments. And universities should stop imagining that another wave of credentialed policy analysts will repair what politics has allowed to decay.

Source: The rise of the progressive bureaucrat and the fall of the efficient state

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Karas: Canada needs an immediate reset on immigration

2026/04/27 Leave a comment

More commentary arguing for greater emphasis on program integrity and security:

…The federal government must therefore recalibrate all immigration programs. That means stronger pre-arrival screening, improving intelligence-sharing with allies, conducting in-person interviews where warranted, and ensuring that background checks are proportionate to risk. It means holding educational institutions accountable for the students they admit. And it means enforcing existing laws when visas expire or conditions are violated.

Above all, it means acknowledging that public support for immigration depends on confidence in the system’s integrity. When Canadians believe the rules are applied inconsistently—or not at all—support inevitably weakens. A sustainable immigration program requires both generosity and discipline.

Canada can remain open without being careless. It can welcome newcomers while insisting on higher standards, better vetting, and meaningful enforcement. Failing to do so does not serve immigrants, refugees, or Canadians alike. It simply invites cynicism—and risks undermining one of the country’s most important national projects.

Source: OP-ED: Canada needs an immediate reset on immigration

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

← Older posts