Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2025/04/10 Leave a comment
Perspectives from economist Mikal Skuterud, focussing on need to focus on high skilled immigrants, Gauri Sreenivasan, CCR, on refugee concerns and myself on the opportunities for rethinking immigration policies and priorities. pdf link not password protected.
Source: Experts urge parties to rethink immigration priorities, pdf
2025/04/08 Leave a comment
More fall-out from the needed policy reversals:
…Sangha is among many economic immigrants selected and nominated by individual provinces for permanent residence, who are caught up in processing delays; that’s largely because the federal government cut the number of new permanent residents for 2025 by 25 per cent to 395,000 and reduced it further in the next two years.
The provincial immigration nomination program was one of the biggest casualties, with its allocated spaces halved to 55,000 in 2025, 2026 and 2027.
Apart from putting newcomers’ lives in limbo, it was a big blow for a program whose aim is to settle economic immigrants outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to places where their skills are needed.
The federal cuts are “one of the factors that’s suppressing the issuance of the actual PR (permanent residence) and the increase of the processing times,” said Calgary immigration lawyer Mark Holthe, on behalf of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association.
Beginning in the late 1990s, the provinces reached deals with Ottawa and started their respective nomination programs to recruit immigrants for local workforce needs. (Quebec has had its own special agreement to select its own immigrants.)
Applicants are screened and then referred to the federal Immigration Department for permanent residence processing. Newcomers are to remain in the province that nominate them.
The current delay in processing provincial immigration applications is only affecting nominees who apply under the “non-express entry” streams, which are not prioritized by federal officials.
Sangha, who came here in 2022 and works in IT for a petroleum company, said it’s unfair that he has to wait 21 months for processing when it takes just seven months for those in the express entry streams….
2025/04/07 Leave a comment
Good overview and series of informative charts:
Canada’s rapid population growth recently has been driven by immigration, which accounted for 97.3 per cent of the 724,586 net growth in the country in 2024.
Since the early 1990s, successive federal governments had maintained a steady immigration level yearly that averaged 0.75 per cent of Canada’s overall population, regardless of the boom-and-bust economic cycle. Skilled immigrants were viewed as an economic stimulant during a recession and as a source of labour supply in time of prosperity.
The number of temporary residents was relatively small. Most international students came primarily to study while foreign workers ebbed and flowed supposedly based on labour needs; those whose time was up had to go home. In the mix were asylum seekers who would become permanent residents if granted protected status.
Riding the popularity of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “sunny ways,” the Liberal government welcomed tens of thousands of displaced Syrians and slowly raised the annual immigrant intake to 0.9 per cent of Canada’s overall population in 2019.
After a nosedive in immigration in 2020 — to 0.49 per cent of the population — due to pandemic border closures, Trudeau not only extended the stay of most temporary residents, but opened the door to more in response to skyrocketing job shortages, which reached about a million vacancies….
It didn’t help that Canada’s immigration system over recent years has prioritized the transition of temporary residents in the country, many toiling in lower-skilled jobs, to permanent residents. Instead of picking skilled economic immigrants with high scores in the point selection system, so-called targeted draws were introduced in 2023 to favour candidates with lower scores but who work in an in-demand occupation or are proficient in French.
“We are not selecting the best of the best,” said Planincic. “The intent is to meet labour market needs, but it really muddies the waters, especially when the categories can change at political whims.”
A better indicator of an immigration candidate’s value to the community and the country, she suggested, is their current earnings, which should be part of the point system….
Immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo attributes much of the system’s chaos to the myriad “ministerial instructions,” temporary directives issued by the minister to address intake, processing, selection, or to create pilot programs.
The extraordinary authority endowed with the minister — introduced in 2008 by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives — has contributed to a patchwork of ad-hoc immigration policies with little transparency.
The ballooning temporary resident population is further fuelled by Canada’s evolving “two-step” permanent residence selection system that favours those already in the country, with Canadian education credentials and work experience. In 2022, 36 per cent of all new permanent residents had previously been in Canada on work permits, up from 19 per cent in 2010 and 33 per cent in 2019.
The population of temporary residents got out of control “because they wanted this mass pool to draw from,” said Bellissimo, adding that immigration officials have been stretched thin handling these student, work and visitor applications, compromising services….
Most people used to look past the struggles of immigrants and focus on the success of their children, but now they expect newcomers themselves to hit the ground running. Paquet said it’s time for Canadians to have a debate about the objectives of immigration.
Immigration had generally been a non-issue in modern Canadian politics because of a consensus that it’s good for the country. Might this federal election be different?
Although Donald Trump and tariffs have dominated the early part of the campaign, immigration has become a major political issue in the last few years of Trudeau’s government.
“How much will the parties talk about it and how much of a central theme will it be?” asked Paquet, research chair in politics of immigration at Concordia. “When a party decides to do that, then that tells us a lot about how the political system is changing.”
Source: Is Canada’s immigration system actually broken? Here’s how it changed under Justin Trudeau
2025/04/04 Leave a comment
Important reminder and lesson:
…The story of this type of Canadian nationalism, which aims to make it possible for young, working Canadians to have a chance at affordable housing, is spelled out in a new study by B.C. housing experts Joshua Gordon, David Ley and Andy Yan.
Gordon is with the digital society lab at McMaster University, Ley is author of Housing Booms in Gateway Cities and Yan is director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program.
They rebut big players in the Canadian development industry and their allies, whom they dub the “growth machine.”
These powerful forces are often guilty of “playing the race card” as an “ideological tactic” to stop the public from realizing how offshore capital and wealthy immigrants have contributed to astronomical house prices in Canada, say the authors.
The trio’s paper, Crafting the Narrative: Wealth migration, growth machines and the politics of housing affordability in Vancouver, is published in The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. It is a direct response to a 2023 article by two prominent B.C. researchers that was published in the same journal.
In their article, University of B.C. professor Nathanael Lauster and Vancouver statistician Jens von Bergmann defended investment of offshore capital in Canadian housing, arguing that opposition to the phenomenon is a baseless “moral panic” in the guise of “housing nationalism,” a movement they deem to be a “hammer in search of nails.”
Lauster and von Bergmann argued in their 2023 paper, which echoed the views of many in the development industry, that such economic nationalism “blames and penalizes the foreign” and, specifically, is “anti-Chinese.”
In addition to their high profiles as commentators in the media, Lauster and von Bergmann were key players in the legal attempt to force the repeal of B.C.’s foreign-buyers tax, which failed. B.C. Appeal Court judges concluded in 2019 the tax didn’t promote racism or reinforce “racial stereotypes” about people from Asia.
The new paper by Gordon, Ley and Yan compiles data showing foreign capital has indeed been a dramatic factor in raising B.C. housing values, a fact they say is often “celebrated behind closed doors by the real estate industry.”
Their paper frequently quotes business speeches by Vancouver condo marketer Bob Rennie, including when he told an audience of developers that buyers from Mainland China were at one point responsible for 90 per cent of the homes sold for more than $2 million on the west side of Vancouver.
The tremendous volume of high-end housing purchases by non-Canadians was confirmed in a 2015 study by Yan. This new paper provides further context. It notes how what was happening to Metro Vancouver was also occurring at the same time in the U.S., which, unlike Canada, keeps track of foreign investment in property.
The U.S., between 2015 and 2018, experienced a six-times surge in the volume of housing purchases made by buyers from China. The multi-billions of dollars were much more geographically spread around than in Canada, however, where the money was concentrated in Vancouver and Toronto.
While acknowledging that some people can indeed be xenophobic, Gordon, Ley and Yan say there is no evidence of that in regard to opposition to excessive foreign capital in Canadian housing. Polls, they say, show popular resistance to these global flows of capital came from across ethnic groups, including people of Chinese ancestry.
The scholars also provide evidence that B.C. residents’ grassroots opposition to “foreign ownership” — a term in which they include “satellite families” who earn most of their money outside of the country, where it’s not subject to Canadian taxation — has come largely from centrist and left-wing people.
They explain how B.C.’s foreign-buyers tax, and the speculation and vacancy tax, have been moderately successful in curbing house-price inflation.
Before the two taxes were introduced in 2016 and 2018 the west side of Vancouver had seen detached house prices jump by 67 per cent between 2014 and 2016. Prices in the same two-year period spiked by a “remarkable” 84 per cent in Richmond.
After the two taxes came into effect, the price of houses in the same parts of the city, which had drawn the most interest from foreign buyers and rich investor immigrants, fell by about one-fifth.
Reflecting on political philosophy, the authors take exception to Lauster and von Bergmann’s claim that opposition to such price jumps came from “reactionaries,” a term normally used to describe right-wing people who oppose progress or reform.
Their article says protective policies like the foreign buyers and speculation taxes have instead had “egalitarian effects, generating tax revenue from landowners, property developers and wealthy buyers that helped support government spending on lower-income individuals, including affordable housing.”
The authors, including Ley, a UBC geography professor emeritus who this week publicly endorsed the candidacy of TEAM’s Colleen Hardwick in Vancouver’s April 5 byelection, recommend a novel idea for governments to go further in limiting foreign wealth in B.C. housing.
“More aggressive action is possible,” they say, “such as property surtaxes that can be offset by income tax paid, with exemptions for seniors, which would more comprehensively tax foreign-capital-based home ownership.”
The authors readily acknowledge the “growth machine” opposes such policy ideas: It would rather continue to “instrumentalize charges of racism to support neo-liberal agendas” and maximize profits.
The trouble, suggest the authors, is that such name-calling taints legitimate debate about housing and the nature of healthy nationalism.
Source: In Canada, ‘housing nationalism’ shouldn’t be an epithet
2025/04/03 Leave a comment
“Floodgate” might be an exaggeration in a macro sense but still notable:
…Concerns over the political climate in the U.S. has opened a “floodgate” of inquiries about moving to Canada, according to recruiter Michelle Flynn.
“The amount of interest has more than doubled over the last several months,” she told CBC.
The COO of CanAm Physician Recruiting Inc., Flynn recruits U.S.-trained physicians to work in Canada and places Canadian specialists in roles in the U.S.
Lately though, she has struggled to get any Canadians interested in moving south.
“I started a position for an [obstetrician-gynecologist] in the U.S. before President Trump was elected,” she said. “We since have had to scrap that idea totally. Nobody is going to the U.S.”
To deal with the influx of inquiries from American physicians wanting to come to Canada, Flynn said she is now conducting interviews five days a week, up from three days a week previously.
“We’re getting 60-plus physicians coming to and registering on our website a month,” she said.
Source: Trump threats open ‘floodgate’ of inquiries from U.S. physicians about moving north
2025/04/03 Leave a comment
Sigh…:
The rollout of a much-anticipated immigration program for nannies and personal support workers was marred by severe technical difficulties when it launched this week – resulting in many prospective applicants losing their only chance at obtaining Canadian permanent residency.
Scores of temporary residents working as caregivers who intended to apply for the Home Care Worker Immigration Pilot encountered error messages and faced challenges uploading documents to the application portal when it first opened on Monday morning. The website is run by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the federal immigration department.
For many, Monday morning was a critical time in their immigration journey: Ottawa had allocated just 2,750 spots each in two immigration streams that would grant permanent residency to child caregivers or home support workers already living and working in Canada. The system took applicants on a first-come, first-served basis…
Source: Launch of immigration program for caregivers marred by website crash
2025/03/31 Leave a comment
Example of any number of articles and commentary by Postmedia columnists warning that the appointment of Mark Wiseman, and to a lessor extent, Marco Mendocino, mean that PM Carney will continue the same high immigration policies of Trudeau. IMO, too early to tell, whether he would continue or expand the restrictions of former Minister Miller, or not. But certainly Wiseman’s appointment could be interpreted as such:
Donald Trump and his tariffs will not be the only key issue that determines who will be prime minister after April, 28. Canada has been plagued by a diverse set of problems for years, all of which will be remembered by voters on election day, including immigration.
Prior to Trump’s election and his decision to threaten Canada, one of the biggest controversies in Canada was the abrupt end of an uncontested pillar in Canadian political culture — immigration. It crumbled as if struck by a sledgehammer after just a few years of the Trudeau government’s careless mass-immigration policies.
The numbers laid bare illustrate Canada’s resulting issues of scarcity. Simply put, Canada is not built to sustain half a million newcomers per year.
Stephen Harper’s government admitted roughly 250,000 permanent residents per year between 2006 and 2015. The Trudeau wave saw those numbers increasing from Harper’s pre-2015 levels, to an average around 334,000, with four years (2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023) exceeding 341,000, at a time when Century Initiative, lobby group that advocates for dramatically higher immigration levels, was at the height of its influence in Ottawa.
In 2018, representatives of the Initiative lamented that Canada’s annual intake of about 310,000 people per year would only increase the population to 53 million by 2100, and called for an increase to 450,000 to reach the goal of 100 million.
Created by former McKinsey executive, Dominic Barton and former BlackRock executive Mark Wiseman, Century Initiative publicly endorsed the Trudeau government’s moves to take in 500,000 new immigrants per year by 2025.
However, the scheme rapidly lost all political currency as the population influx rocked Canada. Immigration-driven demand for housing and services vastly outstripped the supply of both, resulting in a palpable decline in affordability and access to health care, schooling and social services.
Between 2015 and 2024, Canada’s ranking in the Human Development Index plummeted from 9th to 18th, while the country fell behind Italy in the average growth of real GDP per capita.
Western governments since the Great Recession have tried to claim that large-scale immigration is an unambiguous economic benefit. Given the state of the economies of Canada, Germany, and others that embraced mass immigration, immigration has not been a silver bullet to remedy slow growth and stagnation.
Immigrants themselves are not at the root of Canada’s long-standing problems. However, it is also clear that increasing their numbers in such a deliberate fashion failed to make Canada more competitive or improve the lives of its citizens.
There has not been a meaningful increase in the numbers of engineers, physicians, and software developers. In essential services like health care, the ratio of family doctors in relation to the general population has actually worsened. Rather, Canada has imported hundreds of thousands of unskilled international students who stock shelves, deliver food, and flip hamburgers for minimum-wage.
On the other hand, academic institutions have become dependent on this new class of economic immigrant, who often enters the country on a student visa to attend suspect career colleges while paying exorbitant international student fees.
This is not an economic climate that breeds dynamism or healthy growth. Canada needs to be a top choice for highly-skilled immigrants, which means having attractively affordable housing and quality services, neither of which have been rapidly deteriorating.
Even if the restrictions on foreign credentials are loosened in Canada, few trained doctors or dentists from India or South Africa will pick Toronto over Dallas as long as the latter offers substantially higher paycheques and cheaper housing.
In-fact, just 46 per cent of immigrants are now choosing to receive Canadian citizenship, compared to 72 per cent in 1996. Last fall, Ipsos found that just over one quarter of all newcomers plan on leaving Canada within two years, with many citing the lack of affordability. This they have in-common with younger Canadians, many of whom are resigned to bleak and leaner lives than those enjoyed by their parents.
It is therefore concerning that Mark Carney has brought on Century Initiative co-founder Mark Wiseman as an advisor, whose name is ironic considering the results of his lobby group’s ideology. Canadians do not want Century Initiative-inspired ideas anymore, with nearly 60 per cent of residents polled last summer wanting substantially less immigration.
Unlike Europe, where mass-immigration has resulted in a slew of cultural and social clashes between asylum seekers and the established population, the pushback to immigration in Canada still mostly stems from economic factors, particularly housing.
Nonetheless, Wiseman’s presence on the prime minister’s team is political poison. He once even publicly endorsed pushing the Century Initiative’s agenda, even if it caused outrage in Quebec.
For many Québécois, their future is a major source of concern as their demographic place in North America shrinks. The prospect of more mass immigration could be the landmine that blows up Carney’s current run of goodwill in Quebec.
Without Quebec, Carney has little hope of winning a majority government, and even a parliamentary plurality is uncertain. Within hours of Wiseman’s involvement being announced, both the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois went on the attack, in both official languages.
Pierre Poilievre himself attacked the Century Initiative as striving to “bring in people from poor countries in large numbers, to take away Canadian jobs, drive wages down and profits up,” and that Canada should only admit people who can be actually housed and employed
Wiseman’s role will harden the perception that Carney is merely feigning a Liberal shift back to the centre under his leadership. It was a misstep that undercuts Carney’s credibility on immigration caps, which he has nominally pledged to maintain until housing is expanded.
To their credit, the Liberal government significantly scaled back the annual immigration numbers in Trudeau’s final months as PM, if only due to public backlash. A new leader, and Trump’s blustering, has gifted the Liberals a huge opportunity to reinvent themselves as the defenders of the country, while sidestepping hard questions about their thus far poor record in government.
Mark Carney is saying and promising all the right things to pull the Liberals back towards the centre and a genuine pro-growth agenda, earning him plaudits across the political spectrum, even from conservatives. However, if he continues to surround himself with the same crew of advisors and cabinet ministers who sailed Canada into a lost decade, can Carney truly be the captain to right the ship, least of all on immigration?
Source: Geoff Russ: Mark Carney can’t be trusted to get immigration under control
2025/03/31 Leave a comment
A reminder that Canada faces competition from other countries in seeking to attract USA-based talent concerned about the Trump education-related immigration practices:
As the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE seek to reduce the federal workforce and cut spending, some European countries are looking to capitalize on the opportunity by recruiting talent from the scientific community.
The administration’s actions, including eliminating programs and funding for scientific research, are prompting some researchers and scientists to consider leaving the U.S. to live in other countries, such as France, to continue their work.
According to a survey released by the journal Nature on Thursday, more than 1,200 respondents who identified as scientists said they were considering leaving the U.S. and relocating to Europe or Canada because of President Trump’s actions. Approximately 1,650 people completed the survey, which was posted on the journal’s website, social media and an e-mailed newsletter, according to the journal.
Source: Countries boost recruitment of American scientists amid cuts to scientific funding
2025/03/31 Leave a comment
Depressing if not unexpected:
Canadian citizens born in Iran and Afghanistan are being denied entry to the United States after facing intense questioning at the border, immigration lawyers and advisers say, as the Trump administration pursues more aggressive vetting of foreigners.
Legal experts who spoke to The Globe and Mail called on Ottawa to issue a travel advisory warning citizens and residents that they risk being denied entry, having their visas or Nexus cards revoked, or even being detained or deported if they travel to the U.S.
Although there are no up-to-date official figures on the countries of birth of Canadians being refused entry to the U.S., several immigration lawyers said they have been contacted about more border issues since Jan. 20, when newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for more stringent screening of foreign nationals entering the U.S.
To reinforce the order, the Trump administration is reported to be considering formally issuing a complete ban on travel to the U.S. for the citizens of scores of countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Somalia, with further entry restrictions on citizens of Eritrea, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Myanmar and others. The administration has also pledged to deport pro-Palestinian protesters in the U.S…
2025/03/28 Leave a comment
Interesting shift:
Over the last decade, the majority of Canadian immigrants from the U.S. have been either non-U.S. citizens or Americans who previously lived here as temporary residents, says a new study on migration trends.
According to the Statistics Canada analysis released Wednesday, almost all American immigrants in the early 1980s were U.S. citizens, with more than three-quarters born and last residing in the United States. While this share declined in the following decade, it remained above two-thirds until the early 2010s.
Since then, the proportion of non-citizen U.S. residents immigrating to Canada rose sharply from the early 2010s, reaching 45 per cent or 9,307 in 2019 — the year before the COVID-19 pandemic. This group includes legal and undocumented residents in the country.
Meanwhile, the share of U.S. citizens who were previously on temporary permits in Canada also increased significantly during this period, peaking at 54 per cent (6,454) in 2017 and fluctuating in subsequent years.
“As a result of these shifts, the majority of U.S. immigrants to Canada in recent years have been either U.S. non-citizen residents or U.S. citizens who had already been living in Canada,” said the report, “Recent trends in migration flows from the United States to Canada.”
Who occupies the White House does affect American immigration to Canada, in driving U.S. citizens and temporary residents to seek permanent residence north of the border, it said….
Source: Immigration to Canada from the U.S. has been shifting. Here’s how
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Multicultural Meanderings 