Immigration | Multicultural Meanderings

Maximum Canada is happening

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Rather naive in terms of minimizing the practicalities of ensuring adequate housing, healthcare and infrastructure, one of the key points that Saunders needed to be addressed in Maximum Canada. And the nation-building aspect overstated, given this gap and persistent low productivity that current policies, with few exceptions, are not addressing. Same large population fallacies:

A lot of people — at least, a lot of people who read this blog — know of Matt Yglesias’ book One Billion Americans. It’s good, you should read it. But not as many seem to know that it’s actually a riff on a book that came out three years earlier called Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough, by Doug Saunders. In fact, the books are pretty different; Saunders spends most of his time justifying the idea of a bigger Canada with appeals to the country’s history, culture, and politics, where Yglesias mostly discusses the practical details of how we’d fit the newcomers into the country.

But what these two books share is that they’re both advocating a certain type of nation-building strategy — the idea of deliberately promoting large-scale immigration in order to expand a country’s population toward a numerical target. This isn’t something the U.S. has really done in the past. We enacted laws to make immigration more or less restrictive, but this was typically done either as an ad-hoc reaction to a wave of immigration pressure from abroad (e.g. in 1924), or out of moral and ideological concerns (e.g. in 1965). To a large extent, we didn’t really have to do this; people were almost always beating down our door to get here, and all we had to do was sit back and decide who to let in. (In the two decades after the Civil War, there was some talk of recruiting immigrants from abroad to populate the Midwest and West, but this was shelved when it turned out lots of people wanted to come of their own accord.)

Canada, for much of its own history, was similar. But in recent years, the Canadian government has begun to set hard targets for immigration, such as last year’s target of 1.5 million more by 2025. And the country is deliberately encouraging more people to come, with one of the world’s most aggressive recruitment strategies.

First, let’s just take a look at the results Canada is achieving. The country’s population has just passed 40 million — a 14% increase from when Doug Saunders published Maximum Canada. The national statistics agency loudly celebrated the achievement. And the country’s population growth rate has just shot up to over 3.5%, which is among the world’s fastest:

Here’s another fun graph, just from Nova Scotia:

And this is all from immigration. The country’s total fertility rate is 1.4, far below the replacement rate. Yet population is booming because Canada is recruiting from abroad.

This isn’t quite Maximum Canada yet, but it’s clearly headed in that direction.

And Canada’s zeal for greater population inflows is matched by its determination to recruit the best and the brightest en masse. The country’s points-based immigration system, the Federal Skilled Worker Program, is well-known, as is the Provincial Nominee Program that allows individual Canadian provinces to recruit immigrant workers to specific locations. But the country keeps adding more programs for grabbing talent. Its latest idea includes an offer of permanent residency to people working in the United States on H-1B visas — basically, poaching America’s own skilled immigrants! Here are some excerpts from the announcement:

As part of Canada’s first-ever Tech Talent Strategy, Minister Fraser announced the following aggressive attraction measures:

the creation of an open work permit stream for H-1B specialty occupation visa holders in the US to apply for a Canadian work permit, and study or work permit options for their accompanying family members

the development of an Innovation Stream under to the International Mobility Program to attract highly talented individuals…

the promotion of Canada as a destination for digital nomads

the creation of a STEM-specific draw…under the Express Entry program…

improvements to the Start-up Visa Program

Canada also has family-based and humanitarian immigration programs like the U.S. does, but the big difference here is that they take absolutely massive numbers of skilled immigrants from all over the world.

All of this adds up to what looks to me like a nation-building strategy. Canada has a clear vision for itself as a multicultural mecca for all of the world’s smart and hard-working people. It’s a bit like Singapore, except more democratic, and without that country’s emphasis on preserving a single ethnicity’s demographic dominance. If you’re smart and you want to work and you like Canadian culture, it doesn’t matter what you look like; you’re in the club.

What’s amazing is that the vast majority of the country’s populace appears to have signed onto this strategy. As Derek Thompson writes, immigration has not produced a big backlash in Canada, outside of some highly localized concerns (like Chinese capital flight buying up property in Vancouver). A little of this might be from the Anglophone majority’s desire to reduce the political influence of Quebec, but much of it is just that multiculturalism and immigration are deeply rooted in the country’s self-defined national identity. And on top of that, the fact that so much of Canada’s immigration is based on employment prospects and skills probably reduces social friction; immigrants are likely to make a lot of money and not commit much crime.

There’s also one additional factor that no one talks about, but which would definitely be on my mind if I were Canadian: national security. Canada has a very large, very powerful, and occasionally politically unstable neighbor to its south. It has already defeated one invasion from that southern neighbor, and while more recently relations between the two countries have been friendlier, you never know when attitudes might shift. A country of 100 million would be a lot more capable of resisting the U.S. than a country of 40 million.

Of course, there are major challenges for Canada’s nation-building strategy. Chief among these is NIMBYism; Canada is huge, but you can’t just scatter your population randomly across the plain (I mean, you can try, but the results are comedic). Modern knowledge-based economies harness clustering and agglomeration effects, which means Canada needs to fit those new millions into its cities. And despite very low crime rates, Canada is having a bit of trouble doing this. Unlike Japan, Canada does not have simple national zoning laws administered by a competent technocratic bureaucracy; instead, local municipalities are free to block housing as they choose.

And block it they do. The Fraser Institute notes that Canada is not building nearly enough housing to house its massive population inflows:

And the mismatch has been getting worse over time:

Jean-François Perrault of Scotiabank notes that Canada has fewer housing units per 1000 people than France, Germany, Japan, the UK, or even the United States. He writes:

A key challenge is finding an approach that can overcome the political obstacles to a better supply response. Very often within city limits, measures to increase density pit current owners versus prospective residents. Municipal councillors are politically responsive to their voters given the nature of the democratic process. What may be great policy from a national perspective, like high immigration, runs into obstacles when it means finding practical solutions at the local level to increase the housing stock…

To get a sense of the main obstacles to a more elastic supply response, we have polled several of our clients in real estate and development across the country to find the cross-cutting factors they see as most limiting supply growth. To no surprise, the key impediments are in the planning and approval process. In many major cities, the entitlement process is very lengthy and unduly political. Many processes can delay or derail development applications and this can be exacerbated by under-resourced planning departments within cities.

Hmm, where have I heard this story before??

Even Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism is starting to come into conflict with its anti-housing NIMBY instincts. The government returned a plot of land in the middle of downtown Vancouver to the Squamish Nation, which promptly planned a very cool dense housing development with solarpunk aesthetics. The project is still going ahead, but urban planners are now starting to complain about the density, and local residents are trying to stop an access road to the development.

This will simply not do. If you let in tens of millions of people, you must house them; there is simply no other option, other than to let rents continue to skyrocket until the people revolt. Canadian leaders would do well to supplement Doug Saunders’ book with Matt Yglesias’ pragmatic tome. If Canada can’t figure out how to beat its entrenched NIMBY instincts and replace its old ideal of quiet pastoral low-rise cities with one of dense, bustling, efficiently functioning metropolises, it will never achieve Maximum Canada.

In the meantime, though, we Americans to the south need to take a hard look at what Canada is doing, and ask ourselves why we can’t do something similar. Like Canada, the U.S. is a highly diverse nation of immigrants. Like Canada, our fertility is below replacement (though not quite as bad), and we rely on immigration for population growth. Like Canada, we face the inherent economic disadvantage of being located far from the world population supercluster in Asia, and thus we will always be fighting an uphill battle to get high-value industries to want to locate here. So like Canada, we should be importing huge numbers of skilled immigrants — especially because our software and finance and biotech industry clusters, and our world-beating research universities, make it easier for us to attract skilled immigrants in the first place. We should be playing to our strengths.

And yet in the U.S., immigration of any kind is now at the center of a vicious culture war. The political right may occasionally claim that they only oppose illegal immigration, or that they want skilled immigration, but when it comes time for actual policy proposals, what they want is just to decrease all types of immigration. The days of pro-immigration Republicans like George W. Bush are gone. In fact, various hard-right figures have specifically railed against immigration from India, which is America’s most important source of skilled immigrants.

Meanwhile, American progressives, unlike their Canadian counterparts, seem generally unenthusiastic about the idea of mass recruitment of high-skilled foreign workers; my suspicion is that they fear the competition the children of these immigrants will provide for their own children in the academic system. Instead, in recent years, some progressives have begun to lean toward the idea that immigration should be viewed as a form of reparations for colonialism, rather than a strategy for nation-building. Naturally, that absurd idea just triggers the right even more.

This is a terrible political equilibrium. Survey after survey finds that Americans very strongly support high-skilled immigration, but because it’s a political football, only centrists like Biden seem interested in doing anything about it. Without a popular political mandate, any nation-building strategy like Canada’s is doomed.

I wish Americans could tell themselves a positive narrative like Canada’s — of immigration as the way to build a multicultural nation. Many of us have tried to tell that narrative, and have foundered on the rocks of America’s age of division. As John Higham wrote, when America is underconfident — when we start to doubt who we are as a people and a nation — we instinctively think about closing the door. Right now, America definitely doesn’t know who we are, as a people and as a nation. Maybe next decade we’ll remember.

Canada, however, does know who they are. And good for them. Now all they have to do is build a bunch of housing, and they’ll be golden.

Source: Maximum Canada is happening

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Derek Thompson, Fraser Institute, Matt Yglesias, Maximum Canada, NIMBY, Noah Smith, USA

Many Finns Party ministers have pointed to replacement theory

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

A HANDFUL of the Finns Party’s ministers have made overt and less overt references to the predominantly white far-right conspiracy theory known as the great replacement or replacement theory.

Helsingin Sanomat on Monday reported that Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Ville Tavio (PS) has pointed to the conspiracy theory in a number of statements in the session hall of the Finnish Parliament.

The theory alleges that left-leaning domestic or international elites are trying to replace the white population with non-white immigrants, enabling non-white majorities to take control of key institutions, destroy cultures and traditions, and ultimately eliminate white populations. The theory has also found its way into, for example, the rhetoric of the Republican Party in the US.The Finnish name for the theory is ‘väestönvaihto,’ which translates directly into population replacement.

Tavio has spoken about “population replacement,” a “population change process,” “foreignisation of the population” and “artificial” population growth through immigration, listed Helsingin Sanomat.

In 2021, he linked the conspiracy theory to the government’s policy toward the EU: “The Finnish population won’t get back its own free land because it has been handed over as a playground for the EU. We’re being depleted and the basis of our population is being changed supposedly in the name of wonderful multiculturalism.”

“The socialist government is advocating its own agendas with no regard for the means and won’t stop until our country has been depleted in the name of climate change and our population has been replaced in line with multicultural ideals,” he stated later during the same session.

Tavio viewed a year earlier that immigration is on track to result in a demographic change that can be likened to population replacement.

“Population growth rests on immigration and the birth rate among immigrants. If this continues, the outcome is a change in demographics. You could also talk about the so-called population replacement,” he remarked according to the newspaper.

Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen (PS) in February used a hashtag related to the replacement theory when sharing a tweet concerning demographic changes in Espoo, Southern Finland, according to YLE.

Two years earlier she appeared to nod at the theory when commenting on a newspaper article about population growth in Africa: “At this rate, Europe will become part of Africa unless the tone and politics change. But some may genuinely want that.”

YLE also reported that her website was recently updated to remove a sentence that played on the Finnish word ‘sinisilmäinen,’ which translates literally to blue-eyed and figuratively to gullible and naive.

“We mustn’t be so blue-eyed that soon we won’t be blue-eyed,” the removed part read according to the public broadcaster.

Minister of Justice Leena Meri (PS) in February stated on YLE A-studio that the National Coalition’s readiness to double the number of work permits granted to non-EU citizens indicates a readiness to replace the population.

Minister of Finance Riikka Purra (PS) argued on Facebook in 2019 that talk about population replacement is not an exaggeration, pointing to a projection about the share of native-born population in Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

“I haven’t acquainted myself with conspiracy theories of the far right that deal with population replacement, and I’m not planning on doing so,” she wrote. “When I talk about an increase in the number of immigrants and foreigners, about population change, turnover, replacement, variation and the kind, I’m referring to a fact depicted in this graph, for example.”

Purra was at the time the first deputy chairperson of the Finns Party.

Meri, Purra and Rantanen on Sunday all tweeted that they do not believe in conspiracy theories. “I’ll state this to be clear: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I also don’t believe in the replacement theory,” wrote Rantanen.

Her response seemed to leave it open to interpretation whether she believes the replacement theory to be a conspiracy theory.

Niko Pyrhönen, a researcher who has specialised in populism and conspiracy theories at the University of Helsinki, on Sunday told YLE that Rantanen has probably employed the term deliberately.

“She chooses and specifically employs the term ‘väestönvaihto,’ which is one of the few that are linked to conspiracy theories and serve as a dog whistle,” he stated.

The Finnish Security Intelligence Service (Supo) has noted that the great replacement is associated with ethnic nationalism, an ideology rooted in the notion of preserving the ethnic uniformity of society. Supo highlighted in its yearbook for 2020 that the theory has been one of the most noteworthy ideological drivers of far-right terrorists.

“This conspiracy theory framework rests on the idea that immigration and multiculturalism pose a fundamental threat to the western white population,” it wrote.

Source: Many Finns Party ministers have pointed to replacement theory

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Finland, Finns Party, replacement theory

She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Housing example of lack of planning for impact of immigration:

Parul Yadav saw Canada as a pathway to her future.

The 23-year-old, who arrived in Toronto alone but bright-eyed in late 2021, had pored over post-secondary programs around the world from her home in Delhi, India, carefully selecting a public relations course at Humber College for its hands-on learning opportunities. Toronto, she was told, was a multicultural city — one where newcomers like her would be welcomed.

What she didn’t expect was a housing crisis, one that would become an ever-present stressor as she began her studies.

She struggled, during those first days in a Mississauga hotel, to even book an apartment viewing without local references who could vouch for her. Even studio apartments were too expensive. Feeling desperate as the first day of classes approached, she signed on for several months of renting a den without a door in a shared apartment.

Today, she has a single room in a basement where two other students rent rooms on the same floor, while their landlord lives upstairs. She counts herself lucky, given how many other international students she’s met who’ve fared worse in Toronto’s housing market.

“I know so may international students who are living in miserable, miserable conditions,” Yadav said, describing groups of two or even three students who she’s known to split single rented bedrooms.

It’s a problem she believes the country needs to reckon with — especially as it aims to boost immigration rates. If Canada and its post-secondary schools are attracting promising young learners, especially to campuses in major cities such as Toronto that are facing rental crunches, how can officials ensure the kind of housing opportunities students need to thrive?

The question of whether Toronto has adequate housing for its international students is, of course, a microcosm of an even broader question: Are we prepared to house all the new immigrants that officials see as vital for Canada’s future? A report from Desjardins Securities recently suggested the answer is no — noting that homebuilding will have to increase by at least 50 per cent nationally through 2024, or a difference of about 100,000 more units starting construction in each of the two years, to keep pace with the expected rate of population growth.

Just weeks ago, the country’s population hit 40 million people for the first time. In Toronto, the provincial Ministry of Finance has forecast the population will surpass 3.3 million people by 2031 and 3.6 million by 2041. International migration is the primary driver of net population gains, city hall housing secretariat director Valesa Faria wrote in a statement to the Star — though city reports have also noted Toronto’s rapidly aging population as a key demographic shift in the years to come.

The federal government hopes to bring in 465,000 permanent residents this year, Faria said, rising to 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025. International student study permits were also on the rise, she said, adding that the 550,150 permits issued last year represented a 75 per cent jump from five years earlier. These newcomers will bring skills and abilities that Toronto needs to sustain its “economic and social vibrancy,” she wrote. But it’s a reality that demands more housing.

“Toronto looks forward to supporting federal targets, however, it is imperative that these go hand-in-hand with new investments in affordable housing so that newcomers can find safe, secure and affordable homes to live successfully,” she wrote.

While being accepted for study in Canada does not guarantee a pathway to permanent residency, it is a common trajectory taken. The prospect of life in this country is a key lure of Canada’s international education strategy — which has uplifted the economy, created a steady immigration pipeline and offered a boost to the country’s colleges and universities amid declining public funding and domestic enrolment.

While schools have eyed increased enrolment in recent years, Faria sees student housing creation as failing to keep pace. Now, institutions such as Toronto Metropolitan University are putting new residence plans on ice, she said, directing blame on rising construction costs.

Student residences did not qualify for affordable housing funds, Faria added, and were therefore offered at market rent rates — which could be prohibitive for cash-strapped students. (Yadav, too, noted the cost of purpose-built residences often ruled them out as an option for her.)

The challenges of home affordability aren’t limited to international students, as students of all origins, in Toronto and beyond, often scramble to find affordable homes — like so many individuals and families with limited incomes. But city hall staff have noted newcomers at its colleges and universities are often making do with the lousiest living conditions, attributed in a recent city housing plan to “significantly” higher tuition and limits on their ability to work.

For Yadav, the doorless den she leased in late 2021 — after days of fruitlessly scouring Kijiji and messaging landlords — made her feel like she was walking on eggshells, with virtually zero privacy between her and her roommate. She tried to be out of the apartment as much as possible, and it wore on her mental health. “I remember I was always so stressed and always so low on energy that my friends would say, ‘Hey, is anything wrong with you?’” she recalled.

“It really does affect the relationships around you, the way you work, the way you study.”

After five months, she decided to test her luck again, with a budget that topped out at $1,500 per month, though she was hoping to keep closer to $1,000. But in Toronto, even studio units were going for higher rates. In the end, she found her single room in the basement of a house, which came with a $700 price tag and two other tenants sharing the floor. Yadav is grateful to have it — she said her landlord upstairs was kind, and really tried to offer students who’d newly arrived in Canada a “homey family environment.”

Many others she knew weren’t so fortunate.

Faria, the housing secretariat director, said international students, especially, can often be in the dark about their rights as a tenant — citing the findings of an ongoing working group tasked with probing student housing problems. “This presents a safety concern, as international students may be more vulnerable to predatory landlords and poor living conditions.”

One particular housing arrangement that has worried Toronto colleges and universities is the unregulated rooming house sector — an area where major changes are looming.

In December, council voted — after many years of debate — to legalize and license rooming houses citywide as of March 2024. This kind of rental, where tenants lease single bedrooms with shared kitchens and washrooms, often come with lower price tags than any other private market option and have long existed across the city. But they were illegal in Scarborough, East York and North York, and could be unlicensed in the old Metro Toronto and Etobicoke.

The idea of legalization, as staff proposed it, was to ensure rooming houses were safer and more regulated. In reports, staff pointed to devastating outcomes in the unlicensed market, with roughly 10 per cent of Toronto’s residential fire deaths from 2010 to 2020 in rooming houses — a grim count that would include the death of 18-year-old Helen Guo, an international student who’d just finished her first year of business management at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. Of the 18 rooming houses where fires caused death or serious injury, 16 were unlicensed. And along with seniors on fixed incomes and low-income households, immigrants and students were seen as the most likely rooming house tenants.

“Students, post-secondary institutions and community members all expressed safety concerns for students living in overcrowded and unsafe living conditions,” the staff report recommending cross-city legalization and licensing read, while also noting that some areas of Toronto located near college and university campuses had seen a particular concentration of student-aimed rooming houses “due to the lack of alternative affordable rental housing options.”

Faria, in her statement, noted that city staff have been asked to develop a post-secondary-specific housing strategy alongside academic institutions. The vision had to go beyond residences, she suggested, noting the city hoped to convince schools to plan new affordable housing for students, staff and faculty on land they own. “It is critical that the post-secondary institutions themselves commit to building new housing as part of their long-term strategic plans in order to attract top students and faculty, and to maintain a global advantage,” she wrote.

Looking back to when she first arrived, Yadav said she wished there was more transparency from schools in their recruitment materials for international students, making sure they knew not only what kind of rental market they would face, but potential traps and pitfalls to look out for when searching for a place to stay. She’d seen people fall for rental scams, having sent money from overseas for a house or room that didn’t exist.

That same openness about the housing reality could apply to officials in Canada’s immigration process, she suggested. “Just be more open and clearer about the crisis that’s going on.”

Yadav is now nearing the end of her two-year program at Humber — a time in which she immersed herself in a student union and found a part-time job with a PR agency that excites her about her future. She hopes to make the jump to a full-time role, and carve out a life for herself in the city. “I’m hoping my salary will be increased enough to sustain myself renting a studio. I’m not even thinking about a one-bedroom right now,” she told the Star one recent afternoon.

She’s seen too many of her fellow international students pack up and leave, not simply because they struggled to find their footing right away, but because — like so many other individuals and families citywide — they felt their long-term housing hopes were simply unattainable in Toronto.

“I know so many people that are moving out of Toronto or Ontario after living here for five, six years because they cannot afford a house. They’re going to Calgary, they’re going to places like Saskatchewan,” Yadav said. “So many people are moving out — even out of Canada and going back home to their countries. Everything comes down to the housing conditions.”

It’s the kind of conclusion she hopes officials take heed of as immigration continues to flow.

“They’re just inviting people in — and they don’t have the right resources to support them.”

Source: She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

Filed under Immigration Tagged with housing, international students

Laying down routes: Here’s what transit in the GTA needs to keep up with Canada’s population boom

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Another example of the disfunctionality in immigration, not planning and implementing for the effects of the large number of immigrants and temporary residents:

Like most immigrants to Canada, when Srikeit Tadepalli first came to Toronto from Mumbai, India, in February, he had a laundry list of things to do to get settled: get his social insurance number and his permanent residency card, apply for OHIP, look for a job and a place to live, and get to know the city.

Arriving in Toronto in the middle of winter without a car, Tadepalli was grateful for Toronto’s well-connected and accessible transit system. But particularly in the beginning, he had trouble navigating it.

“For such a developed transit system, there is very little communication directed towards newcomers about how to get around using transit in the city,” Tadepalli said. “Basic stuff, like: What is a PRESTO card? Where do I get a PRESTO card? … Even to this day, I sometimes struggle with it.”

Tadepalli is just one of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who come to Canada each year, a number that continues to grow, with the federal government pledging last year to welcome 1.5 million more people by 2025. If trends continue, most of these people will settle in Toronto and surrounding municipalities, where immigrants already make up around half of the population.

Even with all of its challenges, Toronto’s transit system is among the best in the world, with several big projects underway promising to make the GTA even more connected. Still, new immigrants and transportation experts say there is more the city can be doing to help newcomers get around: from small tweaks, like better communication targeted at newcomers, to expanding surface transit with a focus on the suburbs. Also crucial to support a growing population will be shoring up the TTC’s finances, with current shortfalls threatening the transit system’s ability to operate with adequate service and maintain a state of good repair.

Tadepalli said basic instructional videos targeted at newcomers about how to use the TTC would have gone a long way when he first arrived. In his first few days in the city, Tadepalli said he got on the streetcar assuming he could pay for his fare on board, then was told he had to come back with exact change or a loaded PRESTO card. He ended up relying on independent YouTubers to show him the ropes.

The TTC is always looking to improve, spokesperson Stuart Green said in a statement, adding the transit agency is creating an “enhanced wayfinding strategy” to make navigating the system simpler. On maps and signage, the TTC uses words, symbols, colours and numbers to help all customers, Green added. The TTC’s website also has a Google translate function which can translate to over 100 languages.

Transportation is one of the most critical aspects of Canada’s infrastructure for newcomers. It serves as a gateway for economic participation, getting people to school or work, gives immigrants access to important services such as health care and language lessons, and allows people to travel to enjoy different aspects of city life.

Already people in Canada’s densest city are finding it harder than ever to get around, especially in a downtown core paralyzed by construction. Toronto’s traffic congestion ranks among the worst in the world. It’s taking almost as long to travel by car as it did before the pandemic, even with fewer vehicles on the road, according to city data.

Meanwhile, the city cut TTC service and hiked fares this year to make up for lagging ridership on the transit system, which faces a $366-million operating shortfall this year. Unless the provincial and federal governments step up, the TTC will not have enough money to run the system at current levels or replace aging trains and buses.

When newcomers first come to Canada, they are more likely to rely on public transit, cycling and walking than established immigrants and Canadian-born people, said Valerie Preston, professor of urban social geography at York University. That means that expanding and investing in the TTC and regional transit, as well as building walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods, will be essential for supporting more immigration.

“If we’re going to have half a million people arrive every year, and we’re also trying to meet our climate goals, those people need to be able to live in places where they can either use transit, and it’s efficient to use transit, or they can walk to and from work,” Preston said.

It’s not all bad. Toronto is beginning to invest in public transit after several decades of neglect. The 15.5-kilometre Ontario Line subway, when complete in about a decade, will run from Exhibition Place to the Ontario Science Centre through the heart of downtown, bringing 227,500 more people within walking distance to transit, according to Metrolinx, the provincial agency overseeing the project.

While locals are quick to complain about the TTC, which can be unreliable and crowded, many who come here marvel at the efficiency of the system.

“The connection, from buses, to GO trains, to trams, everything is very, I would say, flawless,” said Akbar Siddiqui, who came to the city one month ago from Mumbai and lives with his wife in Etobicoke. “I come from a country where the transportation network is a little flawed. There are a lot of delays. Everything is very congested primarily because in India, back in Mumbai, there are a lot of people, in a relatively small area.”

Still, Toronto is not where it needs to be to move a growing population, said longtime transit watcher and blogger Steve Munro.

“We have to stop assuming that building a couple of subway lines will solve our transportation problems.” As the city becomes more populated, and living downtown becomes less affordable, people are increasingly being pushed further from the city, meaning the demand for transit is becoming more diffuse, Munro said.

In 2021, the distant suburbs (30 minutes or more from downtown) of Canada’s three biggest cities — Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal — grew at a faster rate than the urban fringe or suburbs closer to the core, according to StatCan.

Newly elected mayor Olivia Chow has promised to invest in transit and active transportation, including by reversing recent TTC cuts and creating a dedicated busway in Scarborough. But the TTC is facing a significant money crunch that cannot be solved at the city level alone. The TTC relies on the farebox to fund about two-thirds of its operating costs, and ridership is currently just 74 per cent of what it was before the pandemic. On top of this year’s $366-million deficit, the transit agency anticipates an “operating pressure” next year as high as $600 million, according to a recent CEO report to city council.

The TTC is also short on money to maintain, and invest in, capital. The TTC recently cancelled a Request for Proposals for new subway trains because it did not get the funding it needed from the provincial and federal governments. The trains it had intended to replace are currently between 24 and 27 years old, with an intended life of 30 years.

“The combined operating and capital investments required to sustain the level and quality of transit service required to support Canada’s largest city cannot be supported solely through expenditure reductions, or revenue streams currently available to the TTC,” the recent CEO report warned. Ottawa announced in April that it would chip in $349 million to help the TTC buy more electric buses, but no new money to help run them.

“We need to really think about how we’re going to move hundreds of thousands more people with the same amount of road space,” said Steve Farber, transportation geographer and spatial analyst at the University of Toronto. Farber and Munro agree that the best way to accommodate a growing population over the short term is to invest in the city’s bus network, and to give those buses the right of way, so that more people can move more efficiently.

“We have to think about making transit a more desirable option for a much larger number of potential trips,” Farber said. “So, in the short run, get buses moving faster and more frequent everywhere. I think that will move the needle quite a lot.”

Tadepalli said even with its shortcomings, the TTC has been a lifeline for him since he got to the city, and continuing to invest in it will be crucial for future immigrants to thrive.

“Without affordable, accessible and clear information about transit, a lot of immigrants tend to not engage with the city and to stay home.”

Source: Laying down routes: Here’s what transit in the GTA needs to keep up with Canada’s population boom

Filed under Immigration Tagged with levels, transit

How we can right-size Canada’s health system as the population grows

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Good illustration of the impact of current and planned high levels of permanent and temporary immigration, offering little hope in the near and medium-term:

Last year, while knocking on doors during her campaign to be mayor of Whitby, Elizabeth Roy got a firsthand feel for the community’s top concerns.

The town of 150,000, on the shore of Lake Ontario about 50 kilometres east of Toronto, is among the fastest-growing communities in the country.

As she fielded questions about building new roads, preserving green space and upgrading infrastructure, Roy also heard resident after resident describe how difficult it was to get much-needed medical care, with many saying they feared the situation would get even worse amid Whitby’s population boom.

“Whether it was a young family needing a doctor for their newborn or a senior who just had their doctor retire and was left stranded, about one out of every five residents expressed concern about some type of medical care that they required,” says Roy, who is serving her first term as mayor after 17 years as a member of council.

“It’s clear we have gaps in our health-care system, and they need to be dealt with now, today. We need to start being proactive.”

The population of Durham Region, which includes Oshawa, Ajax and Pickering as well as Whitby, is likewise swelling rapidly. It’s expected to almost double over the next 20 years, surging from about 697,000 in 2021 to 1.2 million by 2041.

Municipal and health-care leaders worry its health system, straining to meet the community’s needs even now, won’t be able to cope with the influx of new residents.

Already, Durham faces an escalating family doctor shortage. Figures from the Ontario College of Family Physicians reveal more than 44,000 Durham residents don’t have a family doctor, though a recent report from the Town of Whitby puts the number much higher, citing estimates that suggest a third of the region’s population — some 230,000 residents — lack a family physician who practises in Durham.

Lakeridge Health, the region’s medical network, is unable to keep up with demand. Its four acute-care hospitals typically operate above capacity and wait times in its ERs continue to be “higher than usual,” according to a June alert to the community. The hospital system, Roy notes, will need 1,793 beds by 2041 — more than double its current count.

Noting that it’s primarily a provincial responsibility, Roy says “One would think that at the municipal level health care wouldn’t be a concern for us to be advocating for. It’s actually far from that. It’s actually the reverse. Daily, I hear about the health care needs in our community.”

With Canada’s population recently hitting 40 million — a milestone that arrived faster than expected — and the country set to welcome 500,000 people a year by 2025, health policy experts are warning that bolstering our fragile system, still recovering from years of pandemic pressures, has never been more important.

Across Ontario, where the head count is racing toward 16 million, communities face struggles similar to Whitby’s. More than 2.2 million people do not have access to a family doctor or a nurse practitioner, which puts their long-term health at risk and makes them more likely to visit the ER, placing further strain on the system.

Hospital emergency departments continue to overflow; the most-recent data from Ontario Health shows that patients admitted to the hospital from the ER wait an average of 19 hours before getting a bed.

And despite efforts to strengthen the health-care workforce, ongoing shortages are triggering temporary closures — and in a recent case in Minden, the permanent shuttering — of some of the province’s hospital emergency departments.

“We are in an extremely difficult moment in our health system in Ontario,” says Dr. Jane Philpott, former politician and dean of Queen’s Health Sciences and director of its medical school.

“It’s probably in a more critical state than at any other point in the four decades that I’ve been involved in health care. The only thing that makes me hopeful is that it’s reached such a state of crisis that there is a broad public and political imperative to find solutions and to do the things that we should have done long ago.”

Among the first steps to propping up the system in the near term — and preparing it for future demand — is to ensure everyone in the province is connected to a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

“It’s the only way we’re going to be able to cope,” Philpott says. “We need to get a very firm commitment from all orders of government to establish a primary-care-for-all system.”

Across the country, calls are growing for targeted reforms to primary care, including the expansion of team-based care, which connects patients to interdisciplinary groups made up of pharmacists, social workers, dietitians and other health-care professionals, in addition to nurses and physicians. Evidence suggests such teams improve patient outcomes.

Health leaders also want to see primary care shift to a geographic model to ensure every resident has access to a family doctor within a 30-minute drive of where they live or work. As well, there is a push to allow patients in a team-based environment have a non-physician health professional co-ordinate their care.

Such reforms are necessary given the scale of primary-care needs in the province, says Dr. Rick Glazier, scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Health Services and Policy Research.

Even as the need grows for more family doctors to fill the gaps, research shows about 17 per cent of Ontarians are attached to a physician over the age of 65 who is nearing retirement. Glazier says there aren’t enough MDs graduating medical school to replace the aging workforce.

“We don’t have the generation coming behind those people who are retiring,” says Glazier, a family doctor at St. Michael’s Hospital, a part of Unity Health Toronto.

“We will need these interprofessional teams for primary care. We will not be able to do this with doctors alone.”

Dr. Andrew Boozary, a primary-care physician and founding executive director of the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network, agrees governments must firmly commit to primary-care expansion and reform.

Finding new ways to connect people to a family doctor or nurse practitioner will be key, not only in anticipation of the growing population but also because of the country’s aging demographics, as older patients typically have greater health care needs.

Boozary sees an expanded role for community health workers in primary care, noting that they played a crucial part during the pandemic by bringing health services including COVID-19 vaccines into neighbourhoods, building trust with residents who wouldn’t otherwise have easy access to health care.

“Through the pandemic, community health workers supported people in apartment buildings, in parks and basketball courts, in religious settings,” Boozary says. “They brokered the trust. They had the lived experience and understanding of the needs of their communities.”

Including such workers in primary-care delivery would lead to more equitable access and could mean helping patients connect with social supports, accompanying them to medical appointments, helping with medication (including adherence to prescription renewals), and working closely with a nurse practitioner.

This kind of model could be especially important in marginalized communities, Boozary says, including refugee and newcomer populations.

“We can’t say we have a universal health-care system when millions of people don’t have access to primary care,” Boozary says. “This mirage of universality was exposed during the pandemic and has been further eroded.”

In his role at CIHR, Glazier is leading an initiative that’s mobilizing research teams to better understand the country’s health-care workforce. That data, he says, will be used for “evidence-based planning” to help Canada meet its future health-care needs.

Ivy Bourgeault, a professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa and lead of the Canadian Health Workforce Network, says when political and health leaders talk about capacity within the health system, they are primarily talking about its workers.

“This is a labour-intensive industry,” she says. “Three-quarters of the costs of the health system are related to the workforce, which means that health system responsiveness — in wait times, in backlogs — it’s the workforce that’s the rate-limiting factor.

“Primary care issues. Long-term-care issues. These are workforce issues.”

Boosting nursing numbers is among the top priorities, Bourgeault says. This includes finding ways to retain nurses working in the system, bring back those who left (through retirement or a profession change or dropping to part-time), and strategically recruit new nurses to fill gaps in the system.

All of this, though, is to only solve the crisis at hand, she says. Preparing for the more-populous future will require understanding the gaps in the system, collecting and analyzing workforce data and studying and evaluating new models of care.

“We need to build a culture of planning,” Bourgeault says. “The most expensive situation is continuing to do what we do now: Not plan. Not retain. Just constantly trying to recruit to fill a system that is like a sieve.”

Sara Allin, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, says Canada doesn’t track health-workforce numbers thoroughly enough. Data that is available is often fragmented, inconsistent between regions and not easily available to policymakers.

And while having a view of regional and professional gaps in the workforce is key, Allin says it’s also imperative to collect data on patients’ medical needs to help inform planning. For example, she says, an aging population, the rise in chronic disease, such as diabetes, and social risk factors, including food insecurity and unsafe housing, all play into population health.

“We need to project and model our future medical needs and map those against future capacity,” Allin says, adding that there is currently a “mismatch” between the two. “Good data is fundamental to both exercises. And we’re not able to accurately and effectively measure these things right now.”

Given the health system’s current “precarious” state it will be difficult to meet the needs of the growing population, she says. This sentiment is shared by Farah Ahmad, an associate professor in York University’s School of Health Policy and Management, who agrees solutions must be found to the workforce challenges ahead of the country’s projected population growth.

“We are going to have a lot of newcomers, which is great for our overall economic development,” she says. “But if we are not preparing our health system, who will take care of them?”

Ahmad points to the most recent figures from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that show Canada has only 2.8 physicians for every 1,000 residents, a rate well below other countries. In the 2021 OECD data, Canada also graduates far fewer physicians than other countries, ranking 33rd out of 36.

While Canada’s immigration goals provide a partial solution to the country’s worker shortage by bringing in internationally trained professionals, Ahmed worries too much burden is being placed on newcomers. “The answers, they cannot all come from new immigrants.”

Philpott, a family physician and a former federal health minister, says the country should be able to build and train its own health-care workforce even as it removes barriers to let internationally educated professionals work here, also an important strategy.

She points to a unique initiative from Queen’s University and Lakeridge Health, designed to train and graduate family physicians, as one type of solution. In September this program will see 20 medical students interested in family medicine train in Durham, with the goal of having them graduate and set up their practice in the region.

Eight months into her term as mayor, Roy says advocating for more health-care services gets pushed higher and higher on Whitby Council’s list of priorities.

Last month, council approved funding to help support the Queen’s-Lakeridge Health MD Family Physician Training Program as well as a plan to establish an incentive program to recruit and retain family doctors to the region. And Roy herself is advocating for the province to approve a $3-million planning grant for a new hospital in Whitby, the location recommended by an independent task force.

She notes a provincial task force in 2015 recommended a new acute-care hospital for somewhere in Durham. Eight years later, and with the region’s population ballooning faster than ever, that plan remains stalled.

“This crisis is one that’s here today,” says Roy. “Lakeridge Health Oshawa is operating at one and a half times what it was first built for, and it will take at least 10 years after approval for that hospital — anywhere in Durham — to open its doors.”

Roy fears that as time passes, and the population grows, the health-care gap in the community, already stark, will continue to widen, putting residents health even further at risk.

“I’m really concerned,” she says. “We have to have a community that provides all the health-care supports. But if we don’t have them in place, we may end up having residents whose ailments are further along, their cancer diagnosis not diagnosed at an earlier stage, that it takes longer for treatments or medications to be prescribed.

“We know early intervention is key. And that may be at risk.”

Source: How we can right-size Canada’s health system as the population grows

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Dr. Andrew Boozary, Dr. Jane Philpott, Dr. Rick Glazier, healthcare, Ivy Bourgeault, levels, Sara Allin

Why Canada’s New Work Permit Isn’t a Death Knell for U.S. Tech Industry

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful reminder of policies that USA needs to consider and that Canada shouldn’t take for granted its current advantages:

In a move aimed at attracting top tech talent, Canada’s Immigration Minister announced Tuesday the creation of an open work permit stream for H-1B visa holders in the United States. The program will allow 10,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S. to work in Canada and provide study or work permits for their family members as well.

The new initiative, which is part of the country’s new Tech Talent Strategy, is set to launch on July 16, 2023. Under the program, approved applicants will receive an open work permit valid for up to three years. This permit grants them the freedom to work for any employer anywhere in Canada, offering increased flexibility and opportunities.

Although the plan has the potential to attract top talent in the tech sector, there are several factors that may limit its effectiveness in poaching workers from the United States. These include:

High Taxes and Cost of Living: Canada’s high taxes and cost of living, particularly in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver, may deter some entrepreneurs and tech workers from moving there permanently. The United States has a wider range of affordable cities to live in, which could be more appealing to prospective immigrants.
Strong Existing Tech Ecosystem in the U.S.: The United States already has a well-established tech ecosystem with massive tech hubs in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin. The networks, infrastructure, and resources available in these hubs may still be more attractive to tech talent and entrepreneurs.
Talent Mobility and Dual Intent: Talented individuals who secure Canadian citizenship may choose to return to the United States once they have more secure immigration status. The U.S. may still be perceived as a more lucrative market for career development, so achieving Canadian citizenship could be a stepping stone rather than a final destination.
Limited Scope of Canada’s Initiative: The new program will remain in effect for one year or until 10,000 applications are received. This is a limited scale compared to the size of the tech industry in the United States.
Brand and Perception: The global brand and perception of the United States as a land of opportunity and the center for innovation could continue to attract talent even with competition from Canada.

What the U.S. Can Do:

Reform Immigration Policies: The U.S. could reform its immigration policies to make it easier for highly-skilled talent to obtain visas. This includes reducing processing times, increasing visa quotas, and providing clearer paths to permanent residency and citizenship.
Encourage Investment in Emerging Tech Hubs: Encouraging investment in emerging tech hubs in the U.S. through tax incentives, grants, and other supportive policies would create more options for tech talent.
Engage with the Tech Industry: By engaging with tech companies and understanding their needs, the U.S. government can develop policies that directly address the concerns of the industry.
Educate and Train: Invest in education and training programs that build a domestic talent pool that can complement the foreign tech workforce.
International Partnerships: The U.S. could forge closer ties with other countries to develop international technology partnerships that could benefit both the U.S. and foreign talent.

While Canada’s new strategy is commendable and may attract some talent, it doesn’t mean the U.S. will be left with few tech workers. The U.S. has the ability to adapt and respond to competitive pressures by leveraging its established tech ecosystem and enacting policies that are supportive of high-skilled immigration and innovation.

Source: Why Canada’s New Work Permit Isn’t a Death Knell for U.S. Tech Industry

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Boundless, H1-B, tech, Tech Talent Strategy

Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Good overview of some of the issues:

Debbie Douglas was 10 when she came from Grenada to join her parents in Canada.

On her first day of school in 1973, her family had to fight with the principal, who wanted to put her back a year and have her take ESL because she spoke English with a Grenadian accent. In the end, she was allowed to attend Grade 5.

“But by the end of the first week on the playground, I got called the N-word, and it shook me to my core,” Douglas recalls. “And I looked around to see if anybody had heard and nobody said anything … In a school of 500, there were three Black kids and I don’t recall any other kids of colour.”

Despite a degree in economics from York University, her stepfather could only find a job as a financial planner. Her mother, a teacher back home, ended up working in a nursing home.

But if you were to ask Douglas’s mother what her migration experience has been, Douglas says, she would say Canada has been very good to her family.

“My parents worked hard. We went to school. We now have a middle-class life. It’s a great migration story,” Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, told a forum about Canada’s immigration narrative this past May.

“Great” has never meant “easy” for newcomers arriving in this country. Douglas says the stories of immigrants’ struggles and sacrifice were just often not heard.

Yet Canada has long maintained its status as a destination to which newcomers aspire. The immigration story that’s told has, for decades, been one of perceived success — both from the perspective of those forging new lives here, and from the viewpoint of a country eager to grow.

Today, that national narrative appears to be under new strains that are threatening the social contract between Canada and its newcomers.

Canada’s population has just passed the 40-million mark, and it’s growing thanks to immigration.

Immigration accounts for almost 100 per cent of the country’s labour-force growth and is projected to account for our entire population growth by 2032.

Governments and employers from coast to coast have been clamouring for more immigrants to fill jobs, expand the economy and revitalize an aging population. The more, the merrier, it seemed, even during economic recession of recent years.

Post-pandemic, Ottawa is set to bring in 465,000 new permanent residents this year, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025 to boost Canada’s economic recovery after COVID.

Amid this push, there have been critiques that immigrants are too often being reduced to numbers — to units meant to balance the equations of our economy. While it is clear our economy needs immigration, what is it that newcomers need of Canada to ensure they can settle and thrive here? Are those needs being met?

Meanwhile, the federal government’s plan to bring in a historic level of immigrants has been met with some reservations domestically, as Canadians struggle with stubbornly high inflation amid global economic uncertainty resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and volatile geopolitics.

There is a sense of scarcity emerging in Canada, despite the country’s seemingly great wealth — whether it manifests in the housing crisis, a strained health-care system, or in the lack of salary increases that keep up to inflation.

While a national dialogue about Canada’s immigration strategy is overdue, some fear anti-immigrant or xenophobic backlash amid news, op-eds and social-media conversation that ties immigration to the strains already being felt.

One poll by Leger and the Association of Canadian Studies last November found almost half of the 1,537 respondents said they believe the current immigration plan would let in too many immigrants. Three out of four were concerned the levels would strain housing, health and social services.

“Canada is at a crossroads in terms of being able to continue to be a leader in immigration. It’s at a crossroads in its ability to provide the Canadian dream to those who move to the country,” says University of Western Ontario political sociologist Howard Ramos.

“It’s at a crossroads in terms of the infrastructure that’s needed to support this population, and it’s at a crossroads potentially at having widespread support for immigration.”

How Canada got to 40 million

Canada’s immigration strategy has long been about nation-building to meet both the demographic and economic aspirations of the country.

In 1967, Canada introduced the “points system,” based on criteria such as education achievements and work experience, to select economic immigrants. It was one of a series of measures that have gradually moved the immigration system away from a past draped in racism and discrimination.

The point system shifted a system that favoured European immigrants and instead helped open the door to those from the Global South for permanent residence in this country. The 2021 Census found the share of recent immigrants from Europe continued to decline, falling from 61.6 per cent to just 10 per cent over the past five decades.

Ottawa had turned the immigration tap on and off depending on the economic conditions, reducing intake during recession, until the late 1980s, when then prime minister Brian Mulroney decided to not only maintain but to increase Canada’s immigration level amid high inflation, high interest rates and high unemployment.

“There are real people behind those numbers — people with real stories, real hopes and dreams, people who have chosen Canada as their new home,” Mulroney’s immigration minister, Barbara McDougall, said back in 1990 of a five-year plan to welcome more than 1.2 million immigrants.

The plan, too, was met with what today sound like familiar criticisms of the country’s ability to absorb the influx of people.

“We don’t think the federal government is taking its own financial responsibility seriously. The federal government is cutting back. They’re capping programs,” Bob Rae, then Ontario’s NDP premier, commented.

“They’re not transferring dollars to match the real cost, whether it’s training, whether it’s (teaching) English as a second language, whether it’s social services.”

Another big shift under Mulroney’s government was the focus on drafting well-heeled economic and skilled immigrants to Canada, which saw the ratio of permanent residents in family and refugee classes drop significantly from about 65 per cent in the mid-1980s to about 43 per cent in 1990s, and about 40 per cent now.

Mulroney’s measures severed Canada’s immigration intake from the boom-and-bust cycle of the economy. Successive governments have stuck to the same high-immigrant intake, regardless of how good or bad the economy was performing.

It has set Canada apart from other western countries, where immigration issues are often politicized. Coupled with the official multiculturalism policy introduced by the government of Pierre Trudeau in 1971 in response to Quebec’s growing nationalist movement, it has contributed to Canada’s image as a welcoming country to immigrants.

Public support for immigration has remained fairly high and Canada seemed to have fared well despite such economic challenges as the burst of the dot-com bubble from the late 1990s to mid-2000s, the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, and the economic downturn driven by the oil-price slump in the mid-2010s.

Observers, however, note the challenges and circumstances of those economic fluctuations were different than what we see today: there was enough housing stock in the 1990s and the impacts of the crashes in the financial, tech and oil markets since were sectoral, regional and temporary.

Canada’s infrastructure problem

Except in Quebec, which has full control over its newcomer targets and selection, immigration is a federal jurisdiction in Canada, planned in silo from other levels of governments that actually deliver health, education, transportation and other services. Yet the impacts of immigration are felt locally in schools, transits and hospitals.

A lack of infrastructure investments and the rapid immigration growth have finally caught up with the country’s growth. “We spent decades not s upporting our communities,” says Douglas.

“We were not paying attention to building infrastructure. We were all under-resourcing things like community development and community amenities. We haven’t built adequate affordable housing.

“It’s now become a perfect storm. We have all these people and not enough of what is needed for everybody.”

While the majority of newcomers have historically settled in the big cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, a growing number are moving to smaller cities and towns that in some cases are not ready for the influx. The share of recent immigrants settling in the Big Three dropped from 62.5 per cent in 2011 to 53.4 per cent in 2021, with second-tier cities such as Ottawa-Gatineau, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, London and Halifax seeing significant growth.

“I don’t think it occurred to them that they need to build infrastructure to be able to welcome people in. It’s a lack of planning. It is a lack of funding,” Douglas says.

“We’ve raised these immigration numbers without paying attention to what it means, what it is that we didn’t have. We are already facing a crisis and we are bringing in more people without addressing the crisis.”

Canadian employers are champions for more economic immigrants. Half of employers surveyed told the Business Council of Canada they were in favour of raising the annual immigration targets — provided there are greater investments in the domestic workforce, as well as in child care, housing and public transportation.

Goldy Hyder, the council’s president and CEO, says many of the day-to-day challenges Canadians and immigrants face are in fact driven largely by labour shortages, whether it’s in health care, housing, or restaurants and retail.

Around the world, he says, countries build infrastructure to spur population — and economic — growth, but in Canada, he contends, it’s been vice-versa.

Hyder sees this moment as a crucial one for raising immigration targets and maintaining public support. “We are at a seminal moment in the life of this country, because we’re at a seminal moment in the life of the world right now,” he says.

Hyder says the country’s immigration policy shouldn’t be just about bringing in people, it should be part of a bigger workforce and industrial strategy to ensure skills of all Canadians and immigrants are fully utilized in the economy in order to maintain the public support for immigration.

“We need to plan better. We need to be more strategic in that plan. And we need to work together to do that: federal, provincial, municipal governments, regulatory bodies, professional bodies, business groups,” he says.

“Let’s address the anxieties that Canadians are facing. You don’t sweep them aside or under a rug. We must have honest discourse with Canadians, fact-based about what we’re trying to do to make their lives better.”

The tradeoffs that come with population growth

The case made for increased immigration is often an economic one. That said, research has generally found the economic benefits of immigration are close to neutral. That’s because when it comes to population growth, there are always tradeoffs.

While bringing in a large number of immigrants can spur population growth and drive demand for goods and services, it will also push up prices even as the government is trying to rein in out-of-control costs of living, warn some economists.

When more workers are available, employers don’t have to compete and can offer lower wages. Further, just adding more people without investing into social and physical infrastructure such as housing and health care is going to strain the society’s resources and be counterproductive, economists say.

“For housing and health care, it takes a long time to catch up with the increased demand,” says Casey Warman, a professor in economics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, whose own family doctor is retiring. (He is now on a wait list seeking a new one, with 130,000 ahead of him.)

One of the main metrics of economic success has traditionally been a country’s overall GDP. Immigration and population growth can fuel the pool of labour and consumers and boost the overall GDP.

But there’s an emerging chorus of economists arguing that there is a better reflection of the standard of living and economic health in a country. That’s GDP per capita — productivity per person. The growth of Canada’s GDP per capita has been quite flat over the recent years, growing marginally from $50,750.48 in 2015 to $52,127.87 last year. Despite the recovery and high inflation amid the pandemic, it’s still below the $52,262.70 recorded in 2018.

Uncertainty about rapidly changing economic conditions, as well as the fast pace of technological adjustments, have also created uncertainty about what skills and labour will be in demand as the country moves forward.

“One big unknown now is how automation and especially AI is going to change the landscape for labour demand in the next five, 10 years … Is it going to decrease demand for labour?” Warman asks.

How to adapt in the face of this uncertainty, and how immigration should be approached in light of it, is a conversation Canada needs to have, experts say.

Ivey Business School economics Prof. Mike Moffatt says that who Canada is bringing in matters as much as immigration levels, and what’s happening with the economy is nuanced.

Economic, family and humanitarian classes are the three main streams of permanent residents coming to Canada, and each group has different impacts on the economy, generally with those who come as skilled immigrants having the highest earnings and weathering economic downturns best.

The profiles of the incoming immigrants and their ability to integrate into the economy matter, says Moffatt. Bringing in foreign-trained doctors and nurses who can’t get licensed from stringent regulators, for example, won’t help address the health-care crisis.

Still, Moffatt says his critique of Canada’s immigration plan is less about the ambitious targeted numbers than the pace of the increases, as well as the short notice for provinces and cities in planning for the influx.

“Whether it be on education, immigration support programs, labour market programs, all of these things, there’s no time to adjust,” says Moffatt, senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute, a think tank with a stated goal of advancing solutions for a stronger, cleaner economy.

“I do think we can have robust increases in the targets. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, but let the provinces and cities know what you’re doing.

“There’s no collaboration. There’s no co-ordination. They are not working with the provinces and municipalities and the higher-education sector in order to come up with any kind of long-term thinking. It’s very short-term in nature.”

Should Canada cap international students and migrant workers?

Aside from questions about the immigration plan Canada has, there are also questions about the plan it doesn’t have.

The national immigration plan sets targets for the number of permanent residents accepted yearly, but leaves the door wide open for temporary residents.

That has become a bigger issue over the years as Canada has increasingly shifted to a two-step system to select skilled immigrants who have studied and worked in Canada, bringing in more international students and temporary foreign workers than permanent residents.

According to Statistics Canada, there were close to a million (924,850) temporary residents in Canada in 2021, making up 2.5 per cent of the population.

The majority of them, including asylum-seekers, can legally work here; the remaining 8.7 per cent who don’t have work permits includes visitors such as parents and grandparents with the so-called super visa, who can stay for up to five years.

Temporary residents, who don’t have credit history for loans and mortgages in Canada, are more likely to be renters and public transit users (but eligible for some provincial health care), says Anne Michèle Meggs, who was the Quebec Immigration Ministry’s director of planning and accountability before her 2019 retirement.

“In the past, it wasn’t an issue, because we had a relatively small temporary migrant population, so we managed, even though we took the approach that we just bring them in and we don’t look after what happened to them afterwards,” says Meggs, whose book “Immigration to Quebec: How Can We Do Better” was recently published.

“That’s fine. That population wasn’t out of control. So that’s why we still successfully managed and it didn’t become a crisis.”

However, under tremendous pressure from post-secondary institutions to recruit international students, and from employers to quickly bring in foreign workers, she said the balance has tipped. To not set targets for temporary immigration is to get into trouble, Meggs warns.

“We want people to come and we want people to stay. You want things to be good for everybody, including immigrants and including children. And I think the objective has to be to make sure that everyone gets treated with dignity,” she says.

“Immigrants are not just sources of labour or sources of financing of institutions or spending money to increase our national GDP. These are people. We have to get back to talking about the immigrants and not just immigration.”

Canada ‘cannot afford to allow for polarization’

Canada immigration overall has been a success in terms of forging positive public attitudes toward immigration and the political participation by immigrants, says Andrew Griffith, a retired director general of the federal immigration department.

He feels Canada now has the maturity to have an honest and informed conversation about immigration without the fear of being labelled as racist and xenophobic. The focus of the discussion, he says, should be on Canada’s capacity to ensure a good quality of life for those who are already here and those who will be coming.

“It’s not about keeping the immigrants out. It’s more that if we’re going to do this, we have to do it right,” says Griffith. “We have to make sure we have the right infrastructure, the right housing policies and everything like that.”

Any immigration plan, Griffith says, should go beyond the intake levels but study the potential socio-economic impacts and include inputs from provincial and municipal governments.

Canada has grown to become a country of 40 million, and it has not always been smooth sailing.

But Canadians have worked hard to make immigration work for everyone and the success has come down to how the growth has been managed and how the public support for immigration has been maintained.

“We cannot afford to allow for polarization, populism and xenophobia to kick in here because it’s a very slippery slope,” says Hyder, whose family arrived in Calgary from India in 1974 when he was seven. “Other countries have seen it. It can go downhill very fast.

“Immigration is part of the arteries of our soul. It is who we are as a people.”

Source: Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with Andrew Griffith, Anne Michèle Meggs, Brian Mulroney, Casey Warman, Debbie Douglas, Goldy Hyder, Howard Ramos, levels, Mike Moffatt

Canada’s housing policy is failing citizens and newcomers alike

2023/06/30 Leave a comment

Need also to question the demand side of the equation, which includes high levels of permanent and temporary residents:

Canada recently reached a milestone of 40 million people after growing by more than one million people in one year for the first time in 2022. But while we’re adding people at record levels, the same can’t be said about homes.

According to recent research, while the number of people Canada-wide has accelerated in recent years, the number of housing units completed has stagnated and even fallen to levels well below previous peaks. Specifically, from 1971 to 1980, Canada’s population grew by 283,737 people annually on average while an annual average of 226,524 housing units were completed.

By comparison, from 2013 to 2022, Canada’s population grew by 427,439 people annually on average yet only 196,872 housing units were completed annually on average. Put differently, during the 1970s, roughly four housing units were constructed for every five new people in Canada, compared to slightly less than one housing unit constructed for every two new people in recent times.

In short, fewer homes are being built for a larger, faster-growing population.

These dual trends spell trouble for many Canadians, especially those already struggling to find affordable housing. The severe imbalance between the number of homes available and the number required have squeezed many renters and would-be homebuyers who increasingly find themselves bidding for a dwindling supply of available units.

The result? Higher rents and home prices, and not just among the “usual suspect” communities in the greater Toronto and Vancouver areas, but in small- and medium-sized cities across the country. Last year, communities including London, Ont., Waterloo Region, Peterborough, Ont., Hamilton, Ont., Kingston, Gatineau, Quebec City and Halifax all saw their rental vacancy rates (a measure of rental unit availability) fall below 2 per cent, which places them in the same league as Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. And when vacancy rates fall, rents rise.

Canada’s shortage of housing has negative consequences for almost everyone, from the most vulnerable individuals and families to employers struggling to find workers. It also hurts newcomers to Canada – the single largest group contributing to Canada’s population growth. Most new arrivals to Canada rent their homes, leaving them especially exposed to rapidly tightening rental markets. Rising rents and worsening availability hamper their prospects – and indeed the prospects of all renters or would-be homeowners – of achieving upward mobility, arguably one of Canada’s main draws.

Thankfully, solutions are available, although policymakers must act big and act fast. There’s tremendous opportunity to open up more neighbourhoods to help achieve the levels of homebuilding required to adequately house a growing Canada. Several cities have already started implementing policies making it easier to add housing units. For example, Edmonton is overhauling its zoning bylaws to allow more housing options citywide, including duplexes, secondary suites and small apartments in current low-density residential areas. Similarly, Toronto City Council recently adopted plans to allow up to four units per lot citywide without the need to rezone. And elsewhere in Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia, provincial and local governments are making similar changes.

However, such policies are only the first of many necessary steps, and their effects will only be felt over the longer term so there’s no time to waste.

As Canadians and policymakers ponder our 40 million demographic milestone, they should give honest consideration to Canada’s worsening housing situation. In the right circumstances, a growing population can bring numerous benefits – economic, cultural and more. By not allowing homebuilding to keep up with population growth, however, governments across the country have hampered prosperity for both existing Canadians and newcomers. Governments, especially municipalities, must change the way they plan for and approve the millions more homes we need today and in the future if we’re to restore the promise of a thriving Canada with upward mobility.

Josef Filipowicz and Steve Lafleur are senior fellows at the Fraser Institute.

Source: Canada’s housing policy is failing citizens and newcomers alike

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Fraser Institute, housing, Josef Filipowicz, Steve Lafleur

John Ivison: Ottawa’s tech-talent drive finally puts some economic elbows up

2023/06/30 Leave a comment

Positive commentary on the new streams:

It’s been said that moving to the U.S. is part of Canada’s culture.

But times change. Social media was humming this week with reaction in the U.S. to a new immigration policy launched by the Canadian government. American high-tech entrepreneur Srinivasan Balaji tweeted to his nearly one million followers that work visa holders in the U.S. who are “stuck in an endless green card line” should be aware of a new program in Canada that is attempting to lure engineers that the U.S. is “repelling.”

Another user said: “Canada is eating our lunch. This is bad news for America.” The policy in question was unveiled by Immigration Minister Sean Fraser, at the Collision tech conference in Toronto on Tuesday.

As part of a new Tech Talent Strategy, Canada will open a work permit stream for holders of the H1B visa, which allows U.S. employers to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations.

Other strands include bringing in employer-specific work permits for up to five years in companies the government deems “innovative”; a digital nomad strategy to allow people working for foreign companies to stay in Canada for six months; and the option for people waiting for permanent-resident status to apply for a work permit while their application is processed.

“There is no question that we are in a global race for the same pool of talent with competitors around the entire world,” Fraser said.

The Trudeau government has been loath to view the world in competitive terms, preferring to hand out participation medals. The consequences of de-prioritizing competitiveness and productivity are apparent in this country’s GDP-per-capita numbers, which are sliding — as is, consequently, our relative standard of living.

But Fraser was speaking in terms that will encourage those who despair about the country’s economic future. He said he is enthusiastic about the “ambitious goals” being set “because they are not just about numbers, they are strategic.”

The news was greeted with enthusiasm by Mikal Skuterud, economics professor at the University of Waterloo, who hailed the policy as one that is “at long last, aimed at leveraging immigration to boost real economic growth.”

The Liberal government has been enthusiastic about raising immigration rates for a number of reasons, ranging from the popularity of its family reunification policies in politically important seats around our big cities, to the impact on economic growth of bringing in a million people a year, as happened last year.

But while GDP rises almost in lockstep with population growth, such a dramatic influx puts strains on services like health and on the housing market. Critics of unplanned immigration, like Andrew Griffith, a former director general at Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada, have long argued that the country should “bring in fewer people and treat them better.” But he said the new tech strategy is a good initiative to tap into the available talent pool and into frustration with the U.S. immigration system.

“It should bring in immigrants that boosts productivity, rather than drains it,” Griffith said. He pointed out that this is a government that has found it much easier to make announcements than manage complex systems.

Fraser talked of streamlining and fast-tracking the International Mobility Program for talented individuals, but this is still an immigration system with an 800,000-case backlog across all lines of business. Frustration with the U.S. immigration system could very quickly become exasperation with Canada.

But the intentions are good. Twenty years ago, the numbers of permanent residents coming to Canada outnumbered the temporary residents, according to numbers compiled by Griffith. Last year, the 437,000 new permanent residents were a fraction of the 1.6 million temporary residents, half of whom were covered by the International Mobility program or the Temporary Foreign Workers program; half of whom were students. It is open to debate whether it is responsible for the government to bring in so many low-skilled people when the impact on health and housing systems is so clearly deleterious.

That discussion is likely to get more pointed if, as the OECD suggested this week, unemployment starts to rise. But it is long overdue that Canada gets its elbows up in the global battle for talent.

Source: Ottawa’s tech-talent drive finally puts some economic elbows up

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Andrew Griffith, H1-B, Innovation stream, John Ivison, Mikal Skuterud, tech

Semotiuk: U.S. H1-B Visa Holders Targeted By Canada’s New Immigration Program

2023/06/30 Leave a comment

Good explainer:

It is a fact that H1B visa workers from countries such as India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines face legitimate concernsabout their long-term status and stability in the United States. For example, America offers no automatic path to permanent residence for H1-B workers, their work visas are only temporary, H1-B spouses and children cannot work without authorizations, and there is a low numerical limit of H1-B visas available per year despite a high demand – such American H1-B program shortcomings prompt H1-B visa holders sometimes to explore other options.

Canada’s government, led by Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship, recently recognized the potential of attracting these talented individuals. The Canadian program recently announced not only aims to fill Canada’s immediate skill shortages but also focuses on attracting these talented individuals to foster the growth of tomorrow’s jobs.

Four Key Canadian Pillars

Four key pillars introduced by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) offer a glimpse of a more promising future for high-skilled workers. These pillars provide U.S. H1-B visa holders a better sense of security and long-term prospects on offer in Canada than what currently is available in the United States.

1. Streamlining Canadian Work Permits For H-1B Visa Holders

Starting from July 16, 2023, U.S.-based H1-B workers and their immediate family members will be able to apply for open Canadian work permits of up to three years, enabling them to explore employment opportunities with almost any Canadian employer.

2. Innovation Stream Under The International Mobility Program

Acknowledging persistent labor shortages in key tech occupations, Canada plans to launch the Innovation Stream by the end of 2023. This stream will exempt highly skilled workers from the labor market impact assessment process, (similar to PERM labor certifications in the U.S.) thereby streamlining the hiring process for high-growth employers in alignment with Canada’s innovation priorities and high-tech industries. Whether through employer-specific work permits or open work permits for in-demand occupations, these workers will have the opportunity to contribute to Canada’s thriving tech sector and settle their status with greater certainty.

3. Promoting Canada As A Destination For Skilled Workers And Their Families

Canada recognizes the value of attracting skilled workers and their families, regardless of their country of origin. As remote work becomes more prevalent, Canada aims to position itself as an appealing destination for skilled professionals. The government plans to collaborate with public and private partners to explore additional policies that attract workers seeking to relocate to Canada and integrate into its thriving job market. With the potential for temporary work permits and pathways to permanent residence, these workers will be able to find stability for themselves and their families.

4. Strengthening Existing Programs For High-Skilled Tech Workers

Canada is also focusing on improving existing immigration programs designed to benefit high-skilled tech workers. The Global Skills Strategy, launched in 2017, offers quick access to highly skilled talent from around the world, with reduced processing times for work permit applications. Additionally, the Start-up Visa Program provides a pathway to permanent residence for foreign entrepreneurs with the support of designated Canadian venture capital funds or angel investor organizations.

Staying In America

While these are attractive offerings, there are reasons for staying in America. While it is true that Canada features a universal health care system, a reasonable system of education, and beautiful landscapes, the fact remains that Canada cannot compete with America’s Ivy League universities, America’s warm southern climate, and the business and economic strengths of the American economy. Still, the United States should take note of Canada’s innovations and consider similar measures.

America desperately needs to reassess and revise its H1B visa program to ensure the program remains competitive. Long term stability, career growth, and a supportive environment for families are things America must provide. Retaining H1-B workers should be a priority for the U.S. because they contribute to economic growth, foster innovation, and maintain the nation’s position as a leader in technology and industry. If America is not to fall behind, it is important for the country to urgently address the concerns of these workers, revisiting its immigration policies and programs to create a more conducive environment that retains and attracts the best global talent, ensuring continued success and prosperity in the ever-evolving technological landscape.

Source: U.S. H1-B Visa Holders Targeted By Canada’s New Immigration Program

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Andy J. Semotiuk, H1-B, Innovation stream

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The tradeoffs that come with population growth

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Canada’s housing policy is failing citizens and newcomers alike

John Ivison: Ottawa’s tech-talent drive finally puts some economic elbows up

Semotiuk: U.S. H1-B Visa Holders Targeted By Canada’s New Immigration Program

Four Key Canadian Pillars

1. Streamlining Canadian Work Permits For H-1B Visa Holders

2. Innovation Stream Under The International Mobility Program

3. Promoting Canada As A Destination For Skilled Workers And Their Families

4. Strengthening Existing Programs For High-Skilled Tech Workers

Staying In America

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