How productive is the public service? We’ll never know | Denley

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

Some things easier to measure than others but productivity in service delivery, HR, finance and property management should be doable and are needed:

…One need be only moderately cynical to identify the reason for rejecting productivity measurement. There’s a big clue in the task force’s report. The advisory group states, “Without reliable data, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of government services or identify areas for improvement.”

That might seem like a problem to concerned taxpayers, but for those in government, it’s an ideal situation.

The problem with assessing performance is a political downside. If you set a goal and don’t meet it, that’s a visible failure. Better to keep it vague and talk only about the volume of money spent. Easier, too. It saves all the thinking about how to actually accomplish things, as opposed to just promising them.

What little reporting the federal government does on its own effectiveness illustrates the pitfalls of telling people how you are doing. A recent report by the Treasury Board showed that government departments that deliver high-volume services fell woefully short of expectations in 2024-25.

It’s pretty obvious that effective digital service delivery is critical to productivity and expanding output per worker, but in 2024-25, only 52 per cent of those high-volume departments met digital service standards, down from 55 per cent the year before. The target is 80 per cent, in itself a pretty modest number.

The Treasury Board report says the 80 per cent target “reflects Canadians’ expectations of simple, secure and efficient delivery of services and benefits.” If so, those expectations would be dramatically less than the ones we have of Amazon.

The underlying problem can be seen in the percentage of government business applications “assessed as healthy.” That number was only 38 per cent in 2024-25 and the target is a mere 40 per cent. Not exactly a recipe for efficient and effective service delivery.

Let’s put all of this in a broader context. In Canada, the federal, provincial and municipal governments combined employ more than 20 per cent of the population, and their spending equals 40 per cent of gross domestic product.

If those governments don’t use money productively, they are a drag on the whole economy, wasting people and money that could be more effectively deployed in the private sector.

Instead of spending so much time on the issue of where public servants work, the Carney government should focus on the far more important problem of what they do and whether it’s done effectively. The public service is too big, expensive and important to be run by guesswork.

Source: How productive is the public service? We’ll never know | Opinion

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Geoff Russ: Immigration made affordability worse. Liberals gaslighted us all

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

I lean more to incompetence and overly political objectives. But the debate is here, largely focussed on the practicalities of housing, healthcare and infrastructure, which are shared between immigrants and Canadian-born but with some increase of concern over values, with some of the excesses of pro-palestinian demonstrations and activities, likely contributing to those concerns:

…So what happened to Miller and Trudeau’s demands that Canadians ignore the changes wrought by millions of newcomers who arrived under their government?

There are two unflattering possibilities.

First, they may have been dishonest. Swelling the number of people living in Canada superficially boosts GDP and allows the Liberals to brag about growth while ignoring worsening GDP per capita. Many skeptics correctly termed this trick “human quantitative easing.”

The second possibility is simple incompetence. Perhaps they believed that demand for housing and supply would magically align if enough potential construction workers entered the country, and municipalities would build at a scale unseen since the Second World War.

In either case, the people who noticed that both were nonsense received scolding and spin in return.

In 2023, Maclean’s published a piece defiantly declaring that “limiting immigration isn’t the solution,” and suggested that blaming the surge of newcomers was to shoot at an “easy target,” while also noting that the population had grown by over a million people in 2022 due to temporary and permanent immigration.

On the hard left, arguments that there was too much immigration were slandered as a moral panic, with critics instead blaming the evils of capitalism, and castigating those asking questions for apparently scapegoating foreigners.

Trying to ignore the relationship between the numbers of immigrants, government policy, and negative economic pressure is akin to ignoring the connection between peanuts, people with allergies, and anaphylactic shock.

Do you notice the sleight of hand? It is perfectly acceptable to believe that bad housing policies are to blame, and that zoning, fees, and the lack of purpose-built rentals all matter.

But if you so much as imply that historically outsized immigration levels worsened the lot of everyday Canadians, you are suspect, and those suspicions were endorsed by the Liberals.

This is why the pivot matters. The Liberals were eventually forced to half-admit their mistakes, or malpractice, with Trudeau confessing his government “didn’t get the balance right” on immigration after the pandemic, as if it were a mediocre martini with too much vermouth. They spent years denying that population growth was a central pressure on rising housing prices, and now want to congratulate themselves for changing course when most young Canadians are deeply pessimistic about their future.

Advocates for mass immigration have lost the economic argument, and most Canadians want a reduction in the annual numbers. After years of Ottawa and its ideological allies minimizing the material effects of immigration, Canadians should insist on an honest second conversation about the social and cultural consequences of rapid change.

Surveys show Canadians want sterner expectations regarding assimilation and mainstream national norms, and they deserve that debate without being smeared for noticing the changes around them.

The supposed Canadian exceptionalism when it comes to the pitfalls of immigration and multiculturalism is winding down. For those who want a truly responsible approach to both subjects, now is the time to keep pushing the boundaries of debate and discourse.

Source: Geoff Russ: Immigration made affordability worse. Liberals gaslighted us all

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Lederman: The antisemitism you might have missed over the holidays 

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

Depressing list:

…There is no question that the war in Gaza has been catastrophic. But Jews around the world deserve to live without discrimination. No other form of racism would be justified in this manner. Nor should it. All Jews are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. Nor are all Israelis. Just like all Americans are not responsible for what Mr. Trump is doing in Venezuela (which the acting Venezuelan president, by the way, said had “Zionist undertones”) – and may be about to do elsewhere.

Back to Winnipeg. Two days after the synagogue incident, a Palestinian-owned restaurant was also hit with hateful vandalism. Its front windows were smashed, and there was a disturbing note: “Leave our country terrorists.” 

I wish I was in Winnipeg right now so I could walk through the front door of the Habibiz Café, order a hummus and shawarma plate and tell its owner, Ali Zeid, how sorry I am that this happened. We Canadians need to have each other’s backs and stand up against hatred of the other. As the world around us darkens, this is one thing we can do together.

Source: The antisemitism you might have missed over the holidays

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Older, 70% white, plunging fertility and lost faith: Who Canada is now

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

Good detailed overview of Census 2021 (albeit years late). Possibly preparing for debates and discussions regarding the 2026 Census:

Numbers can tell a story. Canada is home to 41.58 million people, according to the latest population estimates, and the average age was 41.7. At the time of the last census, just over half were women and girls, and just under half were men and boys. Of the nearly 30.5 million people 15 and older, 100,815 (0.33 per cent) were transgender or nonbinary. The average household size was 2.4 people. Five per cent of the population — 1.8 million people — self-identified as Indigenous. Almost one-quarter, or 8.4 million people, were immigrants, many hailing from the three leading places of birth: India, the Philippines and China. Of the 450-plus ethnic or cultural origins reported, “Canadian” was tops at 5.7 million people.

The last census conducted by Statistics Canada in 2021, and released in stages throughout 2022, revealed the ways Canada stands out among the G7, including fastest population growth (mostly due to people moving here from elsewhere), most educated workforce (again, thanks in large part to immigrants), highest proportion of common-law couples and, at almost one-quarter, the highest proportion of foreign-born people who are now citizens.

In December, it was revealed that Canada’s population decreased for the first time in about five years — thanks again to immigration or, rather, a drop in its numbers. Driven by caps on international students and temporary foreign workers, the country’s population as of Oct. 1, 2025, declined by roughly 76,068 people, or 0.2 per cent, from July 1, when the population was estimated to be 41.65 million….

Source: Older, 70% white, plunging fertility and lost faith: Who Canada is now

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Polansky: The uncomfortable reason antisemitism is festering in Canada

2026/01/07 2 Comments

Hard to imagine these protests, intimidation and disruption being tolerated if against another religious or ethnic group:

…It is only an emphasis on hatred, however, that would conflate these two disparate cases. Moreover, if there are specific threats against Jews that have arisen within Canada (as it seems there are), that is the result of policy failures. And all of these public gestures in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack represent a refusal to attend to those failures.

This refusal produces a number of externalities. The first is the substantial constriction of both public and private Jewish life within Canada. For cultures do not flourish under police protection. The second is the diminution of Canada’s sphere of genuine liberalism. For liberalism entails the tacit promise that disagreements can be managed peaceably via the political process. Not just violence, but the persistent threat of violence, is (as Hobbes would remind us) merely warfare by other means.

The problem then is not the hatred that lies in the human heart (except perhaps in the most generic sense). The problem is the attenuation of genuine liberalism within liberal societies, and this is a general problem. For Jews do not require special protection; they require the ordinary protections that liberalism is already designed to confer.

Meanwhile, the cause of this problem is not hard to identify: favoured groups, either on ethnic or political grounds, have declined to accept the impositions of liberal norms of behaviour, as both Muslims within Toronto and leftist fellow-travelers have taken to harassing Jewish institutions (and general passersby) as a kind of expanded theatre of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

This is an uncomfortable fact for those who have committed themselves to multiculturalism or general progressivism, and political authorities are understandably wary of the optics should they finally crack down after months of inaction. As a result, both municipal and provincial authorities have declined to enforce the relevant public square laws in the absence of compliance. This is, in other words, a profound failure to uphold basic liberal protections under the guise of liberalism.

That failure, in turn, has downstream effects as increasingly ugly and antisocial behaviours become normalized. Indefinitely occupying public areas opens the way for marching through Jewish neighbourhoods, which in turn opens the way to ripping down mezuzahs from the doorways of Holocaust survivors.

To blame all this on hatred is to avoid the hard choices of governance. It is plain that the reigning governments find it either politically inconvenient or merely bothersome to enforce their mandate to keep public order. But they, too, ultimately answer to their constituents.

The larger question is whether ordinary citizens themselves will continue to suffer rulers who defer the real obligations of ruling to committees, legal counsel, and so on. And it is ultimately the avoidance of those political obligations, rather than the power of amorphous hatreds, that has led to our present situation.

To paraphrase Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, these daily outrages stand in our weakness, not their strength.

Source: The uncomfortable reason antisemitism is festering in Canada

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These international students in Canada didn’t submit test scores because they weren’t asked to. Now, their work permits are refused

2026/01/07 1 Comment

Significant oversight in the online app. Lack of user testing or feedback? Students have a case for reconsideration:

…Over the last few months, immigration experts are seeing a growing number of international graduates like Xu being refused postgraduation work permits for failing to upload language test results, losing their legal status in Canada. They have to stop working immediately and face possible removal.

While many have asked officials for reconsideration, others have reapplied with the faint hope that they would get a second chance. 

“It may sound stupid, but I trusted the system, because I’ve been doing my own study permit and visa applications many times over the years,” said Xu. The Chinese student came here in 2016, first to improve her English before pursuing her master’s degree and PhD.

“There’s no reminder or alert in the system to tell you where to upload the language scores. It should not allow applicants to submit an application when a required document is missing.”

Only now did the 34-year-old woman learn, after the refusal, that the instruction on how to upload the test result had been buried on the Immigration Department website on a separate page that few would have spotted.

Students urge Minister Diab to intervene

An online petition has been launched to urge Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab to reinstate students’ refused applications.

Although the language requirement took effect in late 2024, Vancouver immigration lawyer Will Tao said the issue only emerged this fall due to excessive processing delays. It currently takes more than 210 days for work permit applications submitted inside Canada.

Despite what the Immigration Department called the “technical limitations” that prevent the application portal from installing a new direct upload field for language test proof, Tao is baffled as to why officials can’t just put a simple note there to inform applicants where to upload it.

“That appears only in a separate policy document that does require a lot of searching and digging to find,” he noted. “It’s all automated and now people are getting refused en masse for not uploading a document that you didn’t ask me to upload.”

(Soon after the Star’s inquiry to the Immigration Department about these refusals based on missing language proficiency proofs, Tao noted that officials had placed the upload information on three other webpages, but still not on the application portal.) 

Hundreds of permit applications refused

The department said it has received 162,000 postgraduation work permit applications since the inception of the mandatory language requirement; 815 had been refused up to September due to missing documents that may include the language proficiency proof…

Source: These international students in Canada didn’t submit test scores because they weren’t asked to. Now, their work permits are refused

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Elkouri: Quand le populisme a la cote

2026/01/07 Leave a comment

More on the lack of grandfathering/grandmothering of those impacted by Quebec’s cancellation of the PEQ (equivalent of PGWP):

…On pourrait croire que de passer de 100 % à 50 % sur l’échelle du bouc émissaire, c’est une façon de mettre de l’eau dans son vin ou d’épargner un peu le bouc. Le fait est que cette cote revue à la baisse est à certains égards encore plus grossière. Car en répondant à la question de Jean-René Dufort, le premier ministre ne s’en est pas pris aux politiques d’immigration, mais bien aux immigrants eux-mêmes.

Dans le contexte de la suppression du PEQ, on parle d’étudiants et de travailleurs francophones ou francisés que le Québec a tenté de séduire à coups de campagnes publicitaires et de missions de recrutement à l’étranger avant de rompre inopinément ses engagements. Des gens qui contribuent déjà à la société québécoise, que ce soit dans le domaine de la recherche scientifique, où l’on compte une majorité d’étudiants étrangers, ou sur le marché du travail. Dans nos hôpitaux, nos CHSLD, nos écoles, nos garderies… Les inviter à déposer leurs rêves au Québec pour ensuite leur fermer la porte au nez en les accusant d’être responsables de 50 % des maux de la société, c’est pour le moins injuste.

Le gouvernement a évidemment le droit d’adopter de nouvelles règles d’immigration plus restrictives. Mais il a aussi le devoir de tenir parole. 

Dans ce cas, cela veut dire au minimum de prévoir des mesures transitoires pour les orphelins du PEQ déjà installés au Québec et plongés dans la détresse et l’incertitude.

« Je me sens jetable, je me sens trahie, et je me sens profondément blessée », confiait une orpheline du PEQ à ma collègue Suzanne Colpron2. De telles histoires crève-cœur se suivent et se ressemblent depuis novembre. Je croule moi-même sous les témoignages. Les dénonciations sont quasi unanimes.

Une pétition qui a récolté 26 000 signatures en un temps record a été déposée à l’Assemblée nationale. Du maire Bruno Marchand à la mairesse Soraya Martinez Ferrada en passant par le maire de Trois-Rivières, Jean-François Aubin, et l’ex-ministre péquiste Louise Harel, du député solidaire Guillaume Cliche-Rivard au député libéral André A. Morin, des chambres de commerce aux cégeps et aux universités, des experts aux citoyens solidaires, on ne compte plus le nombre de voix qui s’élèvent pour dénoncer cette injustice et réclamer une clause de droits acquis.

À ces voix indignées, il faut aussi ajouter celles de 25 retraités du ministère québécois de l’Immigration, libres de dire tout haut ce que leurs anciens collègues, tenus à un devoir de réserve, doivent penser tout bas. Dans une lettre ouverte publiée avant Noël, ils demandent au gouvernement de faire preuve de décence envers ceux qui étaient admissibles à ce programme avant son abolition3.

Jusqu’à présent, le gouvernement Legault a refusé de les entendre. Pour respecter ses nouveaux seuils d’immigration sans obtenir 0 sur 10 en matière de promesses tenues, des solutions sont pourtant possibles. Le premier ministre pourrait s’inspirer de ce que l’ex-ministre de l’Immigration Christine Fréchette préconisait elle-même en 2023 : placer les candidats au volet « diplômés » du PEQ hors seuils….

Source: Quand le populisme a la cote

… One might think that going from 100% to 50% on the scapegoat scale is a way to put water in your wine or spare the goat a little. The fact is that this revised downward rating is in some respects even coarser. Because by answering Jean-René Dufort’s question, the Prime Minister did not go against immigration policies, but on immigrants themselves.

In the context of the abolition of the PEQ, we are talking about Francophone or French-speaking students and workers whom Quebec tried to seduce with advertising campaigns and recruitment missions abroad before breaking its commitments unexpectedly. People who already contribute to Quebec society, whether in the field of scientific research, where there is a majority of foreign students, or in the labor market. In our hospitals, our CHSLD, our schools, our daycare centers… Inviting them to drop off their dreams in Quebec and then close the door in their face by accusing them of being responsible for 50% of society’s ills, it is unfair to say the least.

The government obviously has the right to adopt new, more restrictive immigration rules. But he also has a duty to keep his word.

In this case, it means at least to provide for transitional measures for PEQ orphans already settled in Quebec and plunged into distress and uncertainty.

“I feel disposable, I feel betrayed, and I feel deeply hurt,” confided an orphan of the PEQ to my colleague Suzanne Colpron2. Such heartbreaking stories follow one after the other and have been similar since November. I myself collapse under the testimonies. The denunciations are almost unanimous.

A petition that collected 26,000 signatures in record time was filed with the National Assembly. From Mayor Bruno Marchand to Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada, through the Mayor of Trois-Rivières, Jean-François Aubin, and former Péquista Minister Louise Harel, from Solidarity MP Guillaume Cliche-Rivard to Liberal MP André A. Morin, from chambers of commerce to CEGEPs and universities, from experts to citizens of solidarity, we can no longer count the number of votes that rise to denounce this injustice and claim a clause of acquired rights.

To these indignant voices, we must also add those of 25 retirees of the Quebec Ministry of Immigration, free to say out loud what their former colleagues, bound by a duty of reserve, must think in a low voice. In an open letter published before Christmas, they call on the government to show decency to those who were eligible for this program before its abolition.3

So far, the Legault government has refused to hear them. To respect its new immigration thresholds without getting 0 out of 10 in terms of promises kept, solutions are nevertheless possible. The Prime Minister could be inspired by what former Minister of Immigration Christine Fréchette herself recommended in 2023: placing candidates for the “graduate” component of the PEQ outside the thresholds….

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Robert Brym: Avi Lewis and Independent Jewish Voices are gaslighting Canadians about antisemitism

2026/01/06 Leave a comment

Needed dose of reality:

…Some white people use the N-word, despite the fact that doing so is deeply offensive to Black people. Black people are entitled to call such individuals racists. By the same token, anti-Zionists may think it’s legitimate to call for the destruction of the Jewish state in Israel. However, most Jews are entitled to call such people antisemites because, for them, support for the existence of the Jewish state is part of what it means to be a Jew.

Finally, based on the results of a 2024 survey, Lewis and Balsam assert that 49 per cent of Canada’s Jews are not Zionists. This claim is misleading. The poll found that 51 per cent of Canadian Jews consider themselves to be Zionists, 15 per cent express ambivalence about referring to themselves as Zionists, seven per cent say they “don’t know” and 27 per cent say they are not Zionists. However, the survey also found that 94 per cent of Canadian Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

According to standard dictionaries and general encyclopedias, Zionists are people who support the existence of a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland. Such supporters remain Zionists even if, like me, they favour the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state, oppose the extent of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, express outrage at Jewish settler attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and support equal rights for all citizens of Israel, including Arabs. 

What, then, does it mean when 94 per cent of Canadian Jews are Zionists by the dictionary definition yet 49 per cent of them decline to call themselves Zionists? 

I decided to find out by conducting a follow-up survey in 2025 asking the participants in the 2024 poll to clarify the matter. The follow-up revealed that many participants are reluctant to call themselves Zionists because the term has developed a strongly negative connotation, under the weight of frequent and often extreme attacks against everything connected to Israel in the media, schools, universities, workplaces and in the streets. 

Nearly all Canadian Jews are Zionists by the dictionary definition, but nearly half of them don’t want to be called Zionists because the term has become a pejorative. According to the poll, a mere one per cent of Canadian Jews say they are anti-Zionists like Lewis and Balsam.

It seems clear that Lewis and Balsam’s interpretations are guided by ideological animus. Antisemitism is a major problem in Canada. Rhetoric and actions denying the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state are antisemitic according to the great majority of Canadian Jews. With the exception of a tiny minority, including Lewis and Balsam, Canadian Jews remain steadfast in their support for a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

Source: Robert Brym: Avi Lewis and Independent Jewish Voices are gaslighting Canadians about antisemitism

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ICYMI: L’Algérie réforme sa loi sur la citoyenneté dans la controverse

2026/01/06 Leave a comment

Of note, with likely impact on those of Algerian descent in Canada (about 90,000 according to the 2021 census):

Sous couvert d’une réforme visant à faire face aux « nouveaux défis sécuritaires », les élus algériens ont voté le 24 décembre dernier pour une modification de la loi sur la citoyenneté qui vise à faciliter la déchéance de nationalité de citoyens accusés de porter atteinte aux intérêts de l’État algérien.

La mesure est perçue comme une menace pour les diasporas algériennes partout dans le monde. Elles voient, dans la démarche, une nouvelle arme répressive ciblant une opposition et une dissidence au régime autoritaire du président Abdelmadjid Tebboune, forcées depuis plusieurs années de s’exprimer depuis l’étranger.

« Le message envoyé à la communauté internationale et aux opposants du régime en exil est d’une clarté brutale, a commenté un des membres de cette diaspora vivant au Royaume-Uni sur les réseaux sociaux cette semaine. [Cette mesure] est une preuve incontestable que toute opposition au régime militaire est assimilée à une opposition à l’État algérien lui-même, dans une confusion volontaire entre institutions de l’État et le régime. Elle est aussi la preuve que la seule opposition tolérée en Algérie est celle qui est contrôlée, encadrée ou neutralisée par le régime. »

Porté par le député Hicham Sifer du Rassemblement national démocratique, troisième parti en importance sur l’échiquier politique algérien, et formation proche de la présidence, l’amendement voté mercredi dernier par l’Assemblée populaire nationale élargit ainsi les motifs de révocation de la nationalité algérienne pour les citoyens binationaux. Elle inscrit désormais cette déchéance pour « atteinte à la sécurité ou à l’unité de l’État », « allégeance à une puissance étrangère », « fourniture de services à un État étranger dans l’intention de nuire aux intérêts nationaux », « assistance à des forces militaires étrangères » ou encore pour « participation, y compris financière ou propagandiste, à des organisations terroristes ou subversives à l’étranger ».

Le ministre algérien de la Justice, Lotfi Boudjemaa, a qualifié ce texte d’une « grande importance » en rappelant qu’il « vise à faire face à ceux qui, de l’extérieur du territoire national, veulent porter atteinte à la nation, manquant ainsi à leur devoir éthique et légal vis-à-vis de la mère patrie ».

Source: L’Algérie réforme sa loi sur la citoyenneté dans la controverse

Under the guise of a reform to face the “new security challenges”, Algerian elected officials voted on December 24 for an amendment to the citizenship law that aims to facilitate the deprivation of nationality of citizens accused of harming the interests of the Algerian State.

The measure is perceived as a threat to Algerian diasporas around the world. They see, in the approach, a new repressive weapon targeting opposition and dissent to the authoritarian regime of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, forced for several years to speak from abroad.

“The message sent to the international community and opponents of the regime in exile is of brutal clarity,” commented one of the members of this diaspora living in the United Kingdom on social networks this week. [This measure] is indisputable proof that any opposition to the military regime is assimilated to an opposition to the Algerian State itself, in a voluntary confusion between state institutions and the regime. It is also proof that the only opposition tolerated in Algeria is the one that is controlled, supervised or neutralized by the regime. ”

Carried by Deputy Hicham Sifer of the National Democratic Rally, the third largest party on the Algerian political chessboard, and a formation close to the presidency, the amendment voted last Wednesday by the National People’s Assembly thus expands the grounds for the revocation of Algerian nationality for binational citizens. It now registers this forfeiture for “undermining the security or unity of the State”, “allegiance to a foreign power”, “provision of services to a foreign State with the intention of harming national interests”, “assistance to foreign military forces” or for “participation, including financial or propaganda, in terrorist organizations or Subversive abroad”.

The Algerian Minister of Justice, Lotfi Boudjemaa, described this text as “of great importance” by recalling that it “aims to face those who, from outside the national territory, want to harm the nation, thus failing in their ethical and legal duty towards the motherland”.

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See attractions, get attracted: This is one way Canada is trying to help new immigrants decide to stay

2026/01/06 Leave a comment

More coverage for the latest “Leaky Bucket” report (catching up on the report issued last November, CBC only covered this week):

…Highly educated immigrants are leaving faster than those with lower education levels, while those with doctorates are more than twice as likely to leave as those with a secondary education or less, according to the report.

But ICC research shows the antidote to the skilled immigrant exodus is a sense of belonging and optimism about life in Canada, the factor most closely tied to whether newcomers stay long term.

While financial struggles and concerns push many to leave, the data found that the strongest driver of immigrant retention is optimism about the future, measured by immigrants’ confidence in their personal and family prospects, plans for long-term residence in Canada and belief that friends and family can succeed here. 

Even a one per cent increase in optimism boosts the likelihood of staying by 28 per cent, according to ICC data.

“Immigration is a long game. It isn’t just about inviting people to come to Canada as immigrants,” said Shamira Madhany, managing director for World Education Services Canada. “What really matters is how included people feel and how inclusive the system is.”

The Canoo app, which aims to support and promote an early sense of connection among newcomers, has had more than 420,000 members since it was created in 2010. …

Source: See attractions, get attracted: This is one way Canada is trying to help new immigrants decide to stay

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