Hopper: Why immigrant-loving Canada is suddenly worried about immigration

Canada, by virtually any metric, is the most pro-immigration country on earth.

A 2019 global survey by Pew Research found that Canada was the one country most supportive of the notion that immigration “makes our country stronger.” In 2020, a Gallup survey ranked Canada as the world’s most migrant friendly nation. Last September, a poll by the Environics Institute found that 58 per cent of Canadians backed the notion that their country “needs more immigrants.”

Even as the world grows more suspicious of migration, Canada has remained a place where most people like immigrants in their neighbourhoods, aren’t worried about immigrants integrating into Canadian society, and see immigration as critical to the country’s future. When the Angus Reid Institute recently asked Canadians whether they thought immigrants were taking their jobs, 71 per cent said “no.”

Canadian politics reflect this; the country stands virtually alone among peers in having no anti-immigration sentiment among its political mainstream. Even the country’s Conservative Party — which just elected Pierre Poilievre as its leader — is an open booster of high immigration.“It doesn’t matter if your name is Poilievre or Patel, Martin or Mohamed … you can achieve your dreams in this country,” Poilievre, whose wife immigrated to Canada from Venezuela, told a mostly immigrant crowd in October.

And yet, in recent months Canadians are starting to entertain the uncomfortable thought that all of this might be too much too quickly.

Starting five years ago, the Trudeau government first made public its plans to pursue “the most ambitious immigration levels in recent history.” Annual immigrant arrivals soon surged more than 40 per cent, rising from 286,480 in 2017 to 405,330 in 2021.

Canada is now bringing in more immigrants than at any other time in its history. Last year, a record-breaking 431,645 permanent residents entered Canada — an influx almost exactly equivalent to the entire metro population of Halifax. It’s a level of immigration higher even than the brief period before the First World War when Canada was frantically hustling in steamships full of Eastern European immigrants to settle the prairies.

It’s also well beyond the totals of another historically high immigration country, the United States. On a per capita basis, Canada is now bringing in four times more immigrants than the Americans.

And Ottawa is looking to push it higher still. By 2025, Canada is set to receive up to 500,000 newcomers per year. In just the next three years, Canada is planning to bring in enough new Canadians (1.45 million) to equal the entire population of Manitoba.

While Canadians haven’t abandoned their national love of immigration, there are clear signs that people are nervous about the tempo amid crunches in the health system, housing and other infrastructure.As far back as 2019, when the Angus Reid Institute asked Canadians to name their ideal number of annual immigration, a mere 13 per cent named anything higher than 331,000 — the immigration rate at the time of the survey.  On the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Leger poll found that 63 per cent of respondents wanted Ottawa to slow the immigrant influx before it overwhelmed Canada’s ability to integrate them.

In November, a poll commissioned by the Association of Canadian Studies found that half of respondents believed that Canada was bringing in “too many” immigrants. Even the Canadians who welcomed the newcomers were skeptical; 75 per cent of all respondents expressed “concern” about what the immigration surge might mean for the country’s immediate future.

Countries will often turn against immigration due to worries about cultural integration.But in Canada, most of the recent skepticism on immigration is stemming from a fear that an avalanche of newcomers will only exacerbate two of the country’s most defining current crises: housing affordability and health-care shortages.

And given the numbers, there’s no reason to think this is wrong.

Canada has the most acute housing shortage of any other country in the G7. It’s why, since 2000, Canadian home prices have become completely divorced from the ability of regular people to pay for them. Last year, Canada was dead last in the OECD’s ranking of housing prices as compared to average incomes.

Health-care wait times — which were never a huge point of national pride — are now so bad that Canadians are routinely dying in emergency rooms. Last year, a meeting of all 13 of Canada’s premiers unanimously agreed that health care was the country’s “number one issue.”

High immigration didn’t cause these problems. In fact, a steady stream of foreign-born doctors and homebuilders probably helped to alleviate them.

But without any realistic plan to increase the housing stock or improve health-care delivery, it’s basic arithmetic that pumping an extra 500,000 Canadians into the system each year will just make the shortages worse.

University of Calgary economist Arvind Magesan is a staunch advocate of the economic and philosophical benefits of high Canadian immigration. He’s calculated, for instance, that the average immigrant pays $10,803.73 in federal income tax while receiving only $7,776.80 in government services — a net boon to the Canadian treasury of $3,000.

In an email to the National Post, Magesan wrote, “It’s hard to see how the increased demand for both health and housing that would accompany large increases in immigration (assuming no other policy changes) would not further strain both systems.” Although Magesan added this was not intended as a criticique of high immigration (“we need immigration for other economic reasons,” he wrote), but rather of the government’s unwillingness to plan for it.When Ottawa is asked why they’re bringing in so many immigrants, they’ve been pretty clear that this is all a play for economic growth. “An immigration plan to grow the economy,” is the official title of the Liberal proposal to reach 500,000 immigrants by 2025.

Before the pandemic, meteoric immigration levels were pitched as essential to propping up the tax base in order to support swelling numbers of Canadian seniors. After the pandemic, they’ve been framed as a secret weapon to supercharge the country’s economic recovery.

Meanwhile, federal planners seem to be oddly insulated from any suggestion that this quickened pace might be a bad idea.When the feds conduct public consultations on immigration levels, they don’t poll the general public, they ask a hand-selected list of academics, business owners, non-profits and other “stakeholders.”

And the stakeholders are wildly supportive of rising immigration. In the last federally conducted survey on immigration levels, an incredible 87 per cent of respondents said that Canadian immigration levels were either “about right” or “too few.”

“Government talks about immigrants as if they’re going to the immigrant store and picking up a few,” said Stephen Punwasi, co-founder of the data journalism website Better Dwelling.

Punwasi has been a vocal opponent of Canada’s current immigration scheme on the grounds that it’s a “snow job”; immigrants are brought to Canada in a naked bid to shore up the tax base, only to find themselves being hit hardest of anyone by housing prices and service shortages.“Even people born within a privileged situation in Canada are finding it hard to move beyond renting and working,” he said. “Immigrants are coming and they’re even less privileged.”

As a result, Canada may be incrementally boosting GDP with each newcomer, but Punwasi said much of it is occurring on the backs of newcomers who are paying $900 a month to share a basement apartment 90 minutes away from their place of work.

“That doesn’t seem to be a concern that’s registering with the government,” he said. “It’s a very predatory situation.”

It’s why Canada is already starting to see the return of a phenomenon that was actually quite common in the homesteading era: regret.

In March, a poll by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship found that among recent university-educated immigrants to Canada, nearly a quarter were already laying plans to leave.

Said ICC CEO Daniel Bernhard at the time, “many new Canadians are having a crisis of confidence in Canada — and that should be ringing alarm bells all over Ottawa.”

Source: Why immigrant-loving Canada is suddenly worried about immigration