Any hope of returning to business as usual after the pandemic may be misplaced

Public support appears to have held, despite the challenges raised by the pandemic. The most recent iteration of the Environics Institute for Survey Research’s long-running “Focus Canada” survey (published in October) revealed that,

[S]trong and increasing majorities of Canadians express comfort with current immigration levels, see immigrants as good for the Canadian economy and not threats to other people’s jobs, and believe that immigration is essential to building the country’s population … By a five-to-one margin, the public believes immigration makes Canada a better country, not a worse one, and they are most likely to say this because it makes for a more diverse multicultural place to live.

In their commentary for this series, the Environics Institute’s Andrew Parkin and Keith Neuman note that this increase in support for immigration “may in part be a counter-intuitive response to the pandemic itself: rather than focusing inward, Canadians are expressing a greater sense of social solidarity in recognition that, in the face of the crisis, ‘we are all in this together’.”

As we move into the second wave of the pandemic, the fragility of this solidarity is clear. Spikes in infections have led to new lockdowns, which, in turn, have slowed the summer economic recovery. Although the national unemployment rate has come down from a high of over 13% in April 2020, it remains stuck at about 9%. Employment growth has stalled and long-term unemployment has increased. Canadians find themselves living through a period of profound economic dislocation, unlike any in recent memory.

Moves aimed at containing the pandemic have also transformed Canada’s approach to migration. Canadians live in a country that has effectively shut itself off from the world. Despite the announcement of ambitious immigration targets, actual admissions shrank by 64% in the second quarter of 2020. The admission of resettled refugees and protected persons declined by 83%. Trips by residents of countries other than the United States to Canada fell by almost 96% from September 2019 to September 2020.

The current status quo is one of extraordinary closure, marked by popular support for strict controls and increased racism

A majority of Canadians appear to support strict border controls. According to a Nanos Research poll, 81% of Canadians “believe the Canada-US border should stay closed for the foreseeable future.” A 29 October 2020 report by the Association for Canadian Studies noted that 52% of Canadians would prefer to maintain currently low levels of immigration over the next twelve months. Only 24% supported “gradually [increasing] immigration levels” over the same period. An August 2020 survey by researchers at McMaster University and Dynata Research arrived at similar results.

Canada’s embrace of territorial closure has coincided with a spike in xenophobia and racism. A July 2020 poll by IPSOS Global Public Affairs revealed that nearly 30% of Canadians reported that they had “personally been a victim of racism, up five points since [2019].” A survey by the Angus Reid Institute noted that 50% of 500 respondents of Chinese descent had been “called names or insulted as a direct result of the COVID-19 outbreak … [A] plurality (43%) further say they [had] been threatened or intimidated.” A Statistics Canada report drawing on responses submitted from “more than 43,000 Canadians … to a crowdsourcing data collection [research project] on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadian’s perceptions of safety” found that

The proportion of visible minority participants (18%) who perceived an increase in the frequency of harassment or attacks based on race, ethnicity or skin colour was three times larger than the proportion among the rest of the population (6%) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This difference was most pronounced among Chinese (30%), Korean (27%), and Southeast Asian (19%) participants.