Colby Cosh: Nonsense for Trudeau to open immigration, but not the economy

Recent immigrants themselves are starting to become disillusioned with the promise of Canada, and pollsters say the broad public is beginning to balk at the “more, more, more” approach to immigration — no wonder, because our per-capita economic output is now in active decline. Our multi-decade embrace of super-high immigration was supposed to flood our country with entrepreneurs and innovators; the practical overall result appears to be stagnant labour productivity, along with frank inattention to research and development on the part of our businesses. Everywhere you look it is economists who are shooting warning flares into the sky, and even the central bank is making Marge Simpson dissatisfaction noises. Only federal politicians, fearful of a third rail that may soon be totally disconnected from any power, remain quiet.

Something maddening struck me for the first time while reading Vieira’s piece, even though there’s nothing in it you and I don’t know. It’s that when it comes to economic policy, Canada’s philosophy has strong, inherited cultural-nationalist premises. In law, large parts of our economy are protected from the taint of foreign capital, lest it serve as a wedge for the destruction of our precious sovereignty.

Some of the economic ills I just mentioned are attributable to this. We’re subject to a strangling oligopoly in telecom services because our phones, for some damn reason, require cultural protection (culture is the explicit legal pretext for the foreign-ownership limits in that line of business). Our news industry, up against similar fences, grows ever leaner; our airlines subject us to unapologetic unredressed abuse; the internet, a realm of unlimited bandwidth, turns sludgy before our eyes as our government quarrels with foreign “tech giants” of a sort we could never grow here. And if I so much as mentioned foreign corporate involvement in a super-protected setting like health care, I’d probably be picketed by my own readers before the end of business.So let me ask: isn’t this double stupidity? How can our besetting economic nationalism be reconciled with haphazardly controlled mass immigration? Something called our “economy” is a precious national treasure that might come to harm if we let Verizon or Gannett or KLM trod our sacred soil. But when it comes to nose counts, no one will admit that anything valuable, anything distinctively Canadian, is at stake or might be threatened by unruly immigration. (Such as, say, your ability to afford a house or find a doctor.)

I’m a libertarian: I think the classic economic story of immigration’s benefits is essentially true, or can be true in a free and liberal economy. But Milton Friedman is supposed to have once remarked that you cannot have both free immigration and a welfare state. I suspect that’s right, but what seems especially clear, whether you regard Friedman as a hero or a devil, is that you really cannot have both free immigration and economic nationalism. And why would you want that? For one purpose we are Fortress Canada, and for another closely related purpose we have walls made intentionally from Kleenex?

Source: Colby Cosh: Nonsense for Trudeau to open immigration, but not the economy