Why One of the Causes of Falling Birthrates May Be Prosperity

2025/07/25 Leave a comment

Interesting and I think good analysis:

…People in rich countries have fewer children

There are many factors that can contribute to lower fertility rates. China and India, for example, both had decades-long government programs designed to lower their birthrates. And experts have suggested that many other aspects of modern life — birth control, shifting marital patterns, increased career and education opportunities for women, and perhaps even smartphones — could also play a role.

But the statistics are very clear. As economies get richer, children get rarer. Today, nearly all developed countries have fertility rates between 1.2 and 1.8 births per woman, significantly below the “replacement level” of 2.1 that allows populations to remain stable over time.

The social and economic changes of the last 50 years mean that many people now have more choices, and the ability to freely make them. In the past, laws that banned contraception and abortion and limited women’s ability to own property often caused families — and women in particular — to have more children than they wanted.

But that is not the whole story. Survey data shows that around the world, people consistently have fewer children than they say they would like to have. Gallup opinion polling has found that Americans’ ideal number of children per family has averaged about 2.5 since the late 1970s, even as the actual fertility rate has fallen much lower. Financial concerns are the most commonly cited reason for this gap.

What’s going on here? It may seem paradoxical that people would claim to be less able to afford children as their countries become richer. But as economies grow, several things happen.

Wages rise, which means that the opportunity cost of unpaid activities like parenting also goes up. The more parents can earn in paid work, the more of a sacrifice it becomes to spend their time on unpaid parenting instead.

Parenting also becomes more labor-intensive, because developed countries tend to put a greater premium on education and human capital, which require more effort and attention from parents. In most developed countries, parents now spend roughly twice as much time on child care as they did in the 1960s.

There are also big changes that take place as developed countries build a social safety net. In less-developed economies, children often work for family farms and small businesses from a young age, then support parents in their later years. But as countries get richer, they tend to tax working adults to pay for retirees’ benefits. That means today’s children grow up to support everyone’s parents, not just their own, but individual parents still bear the vast majority of the costs of raising children. That puts parents at a financial disadvantage in comparison to their peers who have fewer or no children.

The end result: As countries get richer, parenting shifts from being a way to save for retirement and be better off financially to being an obstacle to financial well-being.

Even the most generous welfare states do very little to defray those costs. Nordic countries, which are famed for their subsidized child care and maternity leave, for example, actually have some of the highest parenting costs in Europe, once parents’ time and out-of-pocket costs are taken into account.

Of course, becoming a parent is not strictly an economic decision. Children bring joy and meaning, and the loving bonds between a parent and a child, or between siblings, are among the most rewarding human relationships. But even the most loving and dedicated parents are still subject to economic reality.

Even if they have one child or two, they may decide not to have more, because they love the ones they already have and want to give them the best lives possible. That might explain why more than three-fifths of the decline in birthrates comes from people having fewer children, not from people opting to remain childless, a recent working paper found.

The problem or the cause?

For those who believe women should return to traditional gender roles, falling fertility has become a convenient way to argue that women’s participation in the work force is a threat to the survival of humanity. But the reality, unsurprisingly, is more complex.

Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist who won a Nobel Prize in 2023 for her work on women in the work force, found in a recent working paper that birthrates have fallen especially steeply in countries like Japan, South Korea and Italy, where economic growth rapidly sent more women into the workplace, but gender attitudes failed to adjust to that shift. In those countries, women began working more hours outside the home, but men did not do more housework or child care, leaving women with a heavy double burden.

In that situation, Dr. Goldin writes, “women must reduce something,” and that something turned out to be children. In South Korea, for example, fertility rates plummeted from an average of six children per woman in the late 1950s to just 0.75 in 2024 — the lowest in the world….

Source: Why One of the Causes of Falling Birthrates May Be Prosperity

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Premiers push for more power over immigration as Ford takes aim at federal minister 

2025/07/25 Leave a comment

Best commentary to date below by Campbell Clark:

Premiers say they plan to take more control over immigration as Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticized the federal Immigration Minister and said he would be issuing his own work permits in the province.

At the conclusion of the three-day premiers’ meeting on Wednesday, provincial and territorial leaders called for an increase to economic immigration levels to meet their labour needs and said they would use powers under the Constitution to seize more control over immigration, including to issue work permits.

Mr. Ford, who is wrapping up his time as chair of the Council of the Federation, which comprises all 13 premiers, criticized federal Immigration Minister Lena Diab, accusing her of not being on the same page as Prime Minister Mark Carney on giving premiers more autonomy over immigration.

“We need the Prime Minister to be very, very clear with his minister. She needs to work with the provinces and territories to fix Canada’s immigration system and make it more responsive to economic and market needs,” Mr. Ford said at the closing press conference in Ontario’s cottage country.

Support among the Canadian public for rising immigration has dropped in recent years. To address that and to alleviate pressure on housing and public services, the previous government of Justin Trudeau reduced targets for the number of permanent and temporary residents – including international students – that Canada will accept. 

On Wednesday, the premiers stressed that provinces and territories – and not Ottawa – are best placed to gauge whether migrants are needed to fill jobs. They said they would use a seldom-invoked power under Section 95 of the Constitution, which allows provinces to make laws on immigration, including to issue work permits. 

“I’ll speak for Ontario. We will be issuing our own work permits. We aren’t going to sit around and wait for the federal government,” Mr. Ford said.

At the press conference, Quebec Premier François Legault said there are now consistent demands from each province to have more jurisdiction over immigration. He said that when it comes to processing asylum claims, “it makes no sense that it takes three years to assess a file, whereas in other countries, such as France, it takes three months.”

This puts a strain on public services and housing, and he said he was glad the federal government is “at long last” acting to reduce backlogs in the asylum system. Ottawa has introduced the Strong Borders bill which, if it becomes law, would restrict who could claim asylum and give Ottawa more power to cancel applications.

Mr. Ford said Ontario has a large number of asylum seekers living in hotels who are healthy and willing to work, but unable because work permits take too long. Last year, there were close to 100,000 asylum seekers in Ontario, he said….

Source: Premiers push for more power over immigration as Ford takes aim at federal minister

Regg Cohn’s take:

…After trumpeting his friendship with Carney , Ford made it clear that he wants everyone singing from the same song sheet. Now, after buttering up the PM for months and signing MOUs with his fellow premiers, Ford is calling in his first IOU.

He complained publicly and pointedly that Diab “wasn’t on the same page as her prime minister — we need the prime minister to be very, clear with his minister, she needs to work with the provinces and territories to fix Canada’s immigration system.”

There’s no time to waste — or wait.

“I’ll speak for Ontario — we will be issuing our own work permits,” Ford asserted.

“I have a tremendous amount of asylum-seekers that are up in Etobicoke and in the hotels. They’re healthy, they’re willing to work hard, working people, but they’re waiting over two years, and they’re just sucking off the system, non-stop,” he continued.

Source: Opinion | Being Mark Carney’s buddy won’t release Doug Ford from the pull of political gravity

Campbell Clark and Mikal Skuterud’s excellent critique:

…But Mr. Trudeau’s last immigration minister, Marc Miller, took some strong steps in 2023 and 2024 to repair some of the damage. He capped the number of foreign students and slashed the number of provincial nominees.

That hasn’t fixed all that ails the immigration system, but it was a step forward. 

But on Wednesday, the premiers asked Ottawa to undo it. They want the numbers of provincial nominees to be doubled, to bring them back up to their previous level.

Premiers like to be able to tell local businesses they can deliver workers. Or to tell aging communities newcomers will arrive.

But Waterloo University economics professor Mikal Skuterud notes that it is a bit of a mirage. “There’s no way to restrict the mobility of immigrants, nor should we want to,” he said. That leads to potential immigrants seeking the provincial program with the lowest standards but moving elsewhere.

The premiers’ own justification for asking for bigger numbers of provincial nominees – that they know their own labour markets better – is itself a good reason to reject their request.

Using immigration to try to plug holes in labour markets, by recruiting foreigners to fill current job openings, is a failed approach. By the time they arrive, those occupations might not be in high demand. They might be outdated in a few years. Micromanaging the labour market doesn’t work. Supply and demand, and the adjustment of wages, takes care of that.

That’s why Canada’s economic immigration system turned to a different approach almost 25 years ago to focus on human capital. A system was developed that granted points for criteria such as education, experience and language skills.

That’s one of the things that Mr. Trudeau’s government mucked up. It introduced new categories, often for short periods, that gave more points to certain types of workers who didn’t meet the points standards, including hairdressers and estheticians.

That was on top of the expanding provincial nominee programs. Quebec has had powers to select immigrants since the 1970s, intended as a power to preserve its language and culture. But after 2001, other provinces made agreements with Ottawa for nominee programs. Most have lower criteria that squeezed out applicants with more points for their human capital.

All those things have turned an economic-immigration system that was supposed to be based on predictable scores into a hodge-podge of programs built on the desires of lobby groups. 

To potential immigrants, that made Canada’s immigration system look random.

“The consultants and immigration lawyers love this because it complicates the system and makes it more like a lottery, or something that has to be gamed,” Prof. Skuterud said.

A foreign student or temporary worker might not meet the criteria for permanent residence, but they might one day become eligible under a new category or provincial program. That encourages people who might be ineligible for permanent residence to take a gamble on coming to Canada as a temporary resident – and it doesn’t always work out.

We don’t need more of that complicated mess. We need less of it. …

Source: The last thing Canada needs is premiers mucking up immigration even more






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Rempel Garner: For youth, AI is making immigration cuts even more urgent.

2025/07/24 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if the annual levels plans makes any reference to expected impacts of AI. Valid concerns and need for further thinking about appropriate policy responses, shorter and longer-term:

…So at writing, the only consensus on what skills will make someone employable in a five to ten year period, particularly in white collar jobs, are advanced critical thinking and problem solving ability acquired through decades of senior level managerial and product creation experience. So the question for anyone without those skills – read, youth – is, how can someone acquire those skills if AI is taking away entry level research and writing jobs? And how can they do that while competing with hundreds of thousands of non-permanent foreign workers?

While many parts of that question may remain without clear answers (e.g. whether current public investments in existing modalities of education make sense), there are some that are much more obvious. Where Canadian employers do have a need for entry level labour, those jobs should not be filled by non-Canadians unless under extremely exceptional circumstances, so that Canadian youth can gain skills needed to survive in a labour market where they’re competing against AI for work.

And translating that principle into action means that the Liberal government must (contrary to Coyne’s column) immediately and massively curtail the allowance of temporary foreign labour to continue to suppress Canadian wages and remove opportunity from Canadian youth. It’s clear that they haven’t given the topic much thought. Even their most recent Liberal platform only focused on reskilling mid-career workers, not the fact that AI will likely stymie new entrants to the labour market from ever getting to the mid-career point to begin with. While older Liberals may be assuming that the kids will be alright because they grew up with technology, data suggests AI will disrupt the labour market faster and more profoundly than even offshoring manufacturing did. Given that context, immediately weaning Canadian businesses off their over-reliance on cheap foreign labour seems like a no brainer.

But on that front, Canada’s federal immigration policy, particularly its annual intake targets, fails to account for the anticipated labor market disruptions driven by artificial intelligence. This oversight may have arisen because many of those setting these targets have had the luxury of honing their skills over decades in an economic landscape where life was far more affordable than it is today. Or, because it’s easier to listen to the spin from lobbyists who argue that they have the right to cheap foreign labour than to the concerns of millions of jobless Canadian youth. Nevertheless, the strategy of allowing Canadian youth to languish in this hyper-rapidly evolving and disruptive job market, while admitting hundreds of thousands of temporary low-skilled workers and issuing work permits to an equal number of bogus asylum claimants, demands an urgent and profound rethink.

Indifference to this issue, at best, will likely suppress wages and opportunities as the economy transitions to an AI integrated modality. At worst, it may bring widespread AI precipitated hyper-unemployment to an already unaffordable country, and all the negative social impacts associated with the same: debt, crime, and despair.

So the Liberals can either immediately push their absurdly wide open immigration gates to a much more closed position while they grapple with this labour market disruption out on behalf of Canadians, or pray that Canadians forgive them for failing to do so.

Source: For youth, AI is making immigration cuts even more urgent.

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StatsCan: Recent trends in immigration from Canada to the United States

2025/07/24 Leave a comment

Important study highlighting retention issues for high skilled immigrants to Canada:

….In recent decades, a significant decline in permanent migration from Canada to the United States has been observed. The average number of Canadian-born individuals granted U.S. permanent residency fell by 30% from the late 2000s to the late 2010s. In contrast, the number of U.S.-born immigrants to Canada has increased. Overall, Canada experienced a net loss in the exchange of permanent residents from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. However, since 2018, the difference in permanent resident flows between the two countries has become relatively small.

Data from U.S. labour certification applications reveal that Canadian temporary workers seeking permanent employment in the United States were highly educated and concentrated in computer, mathematical, architecture and engineering occupations, though the overall educational attainment of these applicants has declined over time. By 2024, foreign-born Canadian citizens made up 60% of all Canadian citizen applicants for U.S. labour certification, and the median wage offers for these positions remained high, though slightly lower than a decade earlier.

The continued movement of highly skilled Canadians—both Canadian-born and foreign-born—into the U.S. labour market has important implications for both countries. For Canada, these findings highlight retention issues for skilled immigrants. In the United States, the influx of highly skilled Canadian workers continues to bolster key sectors, but the overall decline in Canadian immigration suggests tightening competition for global talent.

Source: StatsCan: Recent trends in immigration from Canada to the United States

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Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People

2025/07/24 Leave a comment

All too true:

…But how legitimate is it? Third-country deportations often sidestep due process and violate international law, under which it is forbidden for states to deport such people to any place where their life or liberty would be at risk. It is also plainly unethical, imposing additional stress on people who have undergone traumatic journeys and who are then dumped in far-off, unfamiliar places.

Several of the countries slated as deportation destinations have bleak human rights records and are unsafe for all civilians, let alone foreign deportees, who are likely to be targets of abuse and exploitation. In the worst instances, as with U.S. deportees in El Salvador, they can find themselves in jails where the authorities routinely inflict physical and psychological violence on inmates.

These deportation deals also have corrosive consequences for international politics. They encourage smaller, weaker countries to engage in transactional behavior, commodifying human life by trading immigrant bodies for cash, development aid, diplomatic support and international impunity. They may even strengthen the impunity of authoritarian regimes that violate the human rights of their own citizens. In the case of El Salvador, for example, deportees from the United States reportedly included some leaders of the criminal gang MS-13, who were thought to be in a position to expose links between President Nayib Bukele and the gang.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, a network of international instruments, institutions and norms have acted as guardrails, if imperfect ones, to ensure that refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants are treated humanely. Now it seems as though the president is looking to rewrite the rules of this system to one in which people are pawns.

By expanding the practice of forced relocation, Mr. Trump is using migrants as currency in a global network of geopolitical negotiation. His administration is normalizing the use of vulnerable people as bargaining chips to extract better deals with friends and foes alike. He is setting a dangerous precedent for other democratic countries by ignoring the moral and reputational cost of shipping desperate people into terrible conditions. As Mr. Trump works to bring this new paradigm to life, leaders the world over will be watching closely. If he can pull it off, so can they.

Jeff Crisp, an expert on migration and humanitarian issues.

Source: Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People

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$68M project to secure, revamp Canada’s asylum system shut down unexpectedly, documents show

2025/07/24 Leave a comment

Complex cross organization IT project. Responded to clear need for common platform across silos, even if only partially successful.

Not convinced by arguments against such projects by advocates as current systems and approaches make asylum system more costly with more complex management and oversight.

Advocates continuing to argue for “more resources” are simply denying reality:

A $68-million project led by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) that was meant to revamp Canada’s outdated asylum system and enhance the integrity of the country’s borders was quietly shut down last year — an “unexpected” move for some in the government because it was only partly completed, internal documents show. 

Now, some critics fear the outcomes that were achieved may be more harmful than beneficial for people seeking protection in Canada.

IRCC’s “asylum interoperability project” began in 2019 and was supposed to wrap up by 2022. It came during a surge of asylum seekers entering Canada, putting pressure on an already struggling system that relied heavily on paper files. Its launch followed calls for major reform.

The main goals of the project was “to transform the asylum system” into a digital one, automate data and create real-time information sharing between three departments — IRCC, Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB).

If these tools are so effective and being implemented, then why do we still have this backlog?- Wei Will Tao, immigration and refugee lawyer

It also hoped to “enhance integrity, security and deterrence within the asylum system,” while improving efficiency and service to claimants, documents show.

It allocated about $48.4 million to IRCC, $15.5 million to CBSA and $3.8 million to the IRB over several years to meet these goals, an internal document shows. IRCC said it had used 75 per cent of its allocated funds.

Through access to information documents, CBC News has learned the project was abandoned in February 2024 after it failed to get another extension from the Department of Finance. 

But just months after prematurely halting this project, then Immigration minister Marc Miller told the House of Commons immigration committee: “I want to reform the system. It’s not working in the way it should.”

At the time, he said Canada’s asylum and refugee system was still struggling due to volume and inefficiency.

According to records obtained by CBC, about 64 per cent of the interoperability project was accomplished. IRCC either scrapped or “deferred” the rest of the tasks to future major IT projects.

“The decision to close the project was unexpected,” reads a 2024 CBSA briefing note.

The latest IRB data shows a backlog of 288,198 pending applications as of last month — a historic high that’s nearly tripled since June 2023, when the interoperability project was well underway.

“The first question is, if these tools are so effective and being implemented, then why do we still have this backlog?” said Wei Will Tao, an immigration and refugee lawyer.

Automation, online portal among goals achieved

All three departments operate their own IT systems, “causing program integrity risks” and delays, a project document reads.

While incrementally rolling out improvements until its shutdown in 2024, the project faced “capacity issues,” “black-out periods” in IRCC’s internal application processing tool Global Case Management System (GCMS), and a “downgrade” in priorities which led to delays past its 2022 finish date, records say.

The project still managed to build an online refugee application process, and automated case creation, data entry and admissibility checks, according to documents. For IRB hearings, the project also allowed more real-time information exchange between departments.

The process to detain and remove people from Canada was also “enhanced,” according to a CBSA briefing note, citing the ability to automatically cancel valid work or study permits when a removal order is issued, among other improvements. 

But there were several wish list items the project couldn’t make happen — like a CBSA officer portal and online applications for pre-removal risk assessments (an application for people facing removal from Canada.)

Another task that was skipped — a function to “view notes associated with a claim in one place,” which would have helped officers’ workflow, CBSA records show.

In a closing note, one government official noted that “the project did deliver on every benefit identified but not all to the depth it aimed to.” 

IRCC declined an interview. The department didn’t specify which tasks it was unable to complete, but said in an email those may be part of future projects. IRCC has hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to digital modernization in the coming years.

Impacts felt, but questions remain

“The actual project itself and the fact that there’s huge funding … that came to us as a bit of a surprise,” said Tao, who’s part of a collective of experts monitoring AI and technological advances in Canada’s immigration system.

Tao said he didn’t “want to deny the positivity” of some digital advancements. But he raised questions around transparency, the kind of information being exchanged between the three departments and how it’s being used by each partner — especially because the IRB is an arms-length, independent tribunal.

“What if there’s information that’s being transmitted behind the scenes that we’re not a party to, or that could implicate our clients’ case without us knowing?” asked Tao, founder of Heron Law Offices in Burnaby, B.C.

Despite multiple followups, the IRB did not respond to CBC’s requests for information. IRCC wrote to CBC that the IRB maintains its adjudicative independence.

“We do have serious concerns about this interoperability — being yes, an efficiency tool and a way for things to be streamlined — … [but] is our ability to contest these systems being altered, or even perhaps barriered, by these tools?” Tao asked.

“Digitization is not the answer,” said Syed Hussan, spokesperson for the Migrant Rights Network. “These so-called streamline mechanisms are actually making life harder for people.”

Hussan said the digital-focused application system has “caused immense havoc” for some people with technological barriers. He also questions the “enormous focus” on sharing private information between agencies and the oversight of that.

“What is framed as a technical step forward is actually a series of policies that make it harder for refugees to gain protection,” said Hussan. “It’s part of a broader turn rightward towards Trump-like policies in the immigration system.”

Hussan said what the system actually needs is more resources for settlement organizations and claimants who need protection.

“Instead there’s actually just mass firing of federal civil servants as well as underfunding of settlement agencies and money being put into these digitization projects — which largely seem to be about streamlining removals rather than ensuring rights,” Hussan said.

Canada enforced more removal orders in the past year than in any other 12-month period since 2019 — 18,048 in the 2024-25 fiscal year, according to CBSA data.

Source: $68M project to secure, revamp Canada’s asylum system shut down unexpectedly, documents show

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Keller: Trump wants to deport millions. What impact will that have on Canada?

2025/07/22 2 Comments

Legitimate concern:

…Which brings us back to Canada. Over the last two weeks at the main border crossing south of Montreal, more than 1,500 people drove up and asked the Canada Border Services Agency for asylum. Under the STCA, most of those people will likely be quickly returned to the U.S. There are some narrow exemptions, but beyond them, the STCA is clear. It is designed to stop people coming from the U.S. to make an asylum claim. 

The foundation for the STCA is that the U.S. is a “safe” country for refugee claimants. It’s a rule-of-law country, just like Canada, that treats refugee claimants humanely and according to the rule of law, just like Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the STCA on that basis.

But things can change. Look who’s in the White House. Look what he’s doing.

A court challenge arguing that the STCA should be struck down because the U.S. is no longer safe might succeed some day, but not soon. It would take years to work its way through the courts, by which time who knows who will be in the White House, or what U.S. immigration policy will be.

But Mr. Trump has the power to rip up the agreement right now, or ignore it, if he wants to. So far, we’ve seen no evidence of any intent to do that. Nor have we seen signs of wanting to load up buses bound for the Canadian border. The administration is offering people $1,000 to self-deport, but it’s not sending them anywhere in particular.

By 2024, Texas had spent US$148-million busing migrants to blue states. That sounds like a lot of money, until you notice that in the new U.S. budget, there’s US$165-billion for immigration enforcement, including US$75-billion for ICE. 

The Trump administration is putting in place the conditions for a massive forced displacement of people. And we’re the next-door neighbours.

Source: Trump wants to deport millions. What impact will that have on Canada?

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Judge halts non-binary person’s deportation to the U.S. as Trump dismantles trans rights

2025/07/21 Leave a comment

Conditions have changed and assessments need to be updated but with nuance:

A Federal Court judge halted a non-binary American’s deportation from Canada pending review. Advocates say the ruling sets “an important precedent” for 2SLGBTQ+ immigrants and refugees coming to Canada from, or through, the U.S.

…Jenkel was scheduled to be deported from Canada this month. But a Federal Court judge issued a stay of removal, arguing the immigration officer who examined their case failed to take into account their role in caring for their fiancé, or the “current conditions for LGBTQ, non-binary and transgender persons” in the U.S.

Advocates for 2SLGBTQ+ migrants say this could set a precedent for other cases like Jenkel’s, and help change the way Canada’s immigration system deals with applications from the U.S.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRRC) declined to comment on Jenkel’s case, citing privacy concerns.

…Deportation order ‘failed to reflect the current reality’

Jenkel was ordered to be deported on July 3 after an initial risk assessment determined they didn’t face a credible threat in the U.S.

But Justice Julie Blackhawk halted that deportation, pending review. In her ruling, she wrote Jenkel’s risk assessment was “flawed and unreasonable.”

That’s because the immigration officer conducting the review used outdated information — a government dossier on the United States that was last updated in January 2024, says Jenkel’s lawyer.

“It’s a marked recognition that the conditions have deteriorated … since the Biden administration has left office,” Sarah Mikhail, of Smith Immigration Law in Toronto, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.

“These changes are significant enough that, when assessing trans and non-binary individuals’ circumstances in Canada, this is something that needs to be taken into consideration.”

Source: Judge halts non-binary person’s deportation to the U.S. as Trump dismantles trans rights

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Immigration fuels Atlantic Canadian ‘economic renaissance,’ authors argue

2025/07/21 Leave a comment

Of note. In talking to friends who know Atlantic Canada, reasonably accurate picture although much of the growth is in the urban centres, not rural Atlantic Canada, who also note that governments and others have made considerable efforts to prepare the host population to understand the value of immigration:

Canada is struggling with the effects of an unprecedented immigration boom: Housing shortages, youth unemployment, overtaxed social programs and more.

But in Atlantic Canada, those irritants are largely overshadowed by a much different story: the transformation of moribund and stagnant economies that made the region Canada’s poor cousin.

The authors of a new book detail the dramatic improvements newcomers are bringing to the East Coast — and argue this is no time to swerve. They argue only for a more strategic immigration policy, one that reflects the region’s economic needs.

In Toward Prosperity, The Transformation of Atlantic Canada’s Economy, former pollster Don Mills and economist David Campbell highlight how increasing immigration in the past five years has boosted the economy of a stagnant region with the oldest population in the country.

“Provincial governments across Atlantic Canada have finally understood the implications for an aging population and the need for population growth: all four provinces in the region now have population growth strategies, with immigration as a core focus of those strategies,” they write.

Nova Scotia seeks to double its population to two million by 2060, and New Brunswick, where the population was pegged at 854,355 last year, is aiming for one million people within the decade, according to their 2025 book published by Halifax-based Nimbus.

“Most of the region’s largest municipalities now have their own population growth strategies as well,” Mills and Campbell write. “All these population strategies acknowledge the critical role of immigration to drive labour force and population growth.”

Last year, after three years of especially rapid growth in Canada’s immigration population, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau announced they were reducing the number of permanent residents admitted to the country by 21 per cent. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to cap the total number of temporary workers and international students to less than five per cent of Canada’s population within two years.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre this month called for “very hard caps” on the number of newcomers allowed into the country. He told reporters the country has struggled to integrate newcomers and he wants to see more people leaving than coming in “while we catch up.”

“We have millions of people whose permits will expire over the next couple of years, and many of them will leave,” Poilievre said. “We need more people leaving than coming for the next couple years.”

In 2022, the Canadian population rose by over a million people for the first time in history — and then kept growing faster. According to Statistics Canada, the population reached 40,769,890 on Jan. 1, 2024. That was an increase of 1,271,872 people in a single year — a 3.2 per cent jump, marking the highest annual population growth rate in Canada since 1957.

In an interview, Mills said Atlantic Canada needs smarter and targeted immigration.

“I believe in growth under control,” Mills said. “It got a little out of hand under the Trudeau Liberals. They opened the gates too quickly and it really hurt the housing market and put strains on our health-care and education systems for sure.”…

Source: Immigration fuels Atlantic Canadian ‘economic renaissance,’ authors argue

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Rempel Garner: 50K+ jobs to foreign workers in Q1. Why?

2025/07/19 Leave a comment

Interesting list of which companies and organizations, and for which occupations, had approved LMIAs (Rempel Garner neglects to mention Kenney’s earlier mistake and rhetoric regarding expanded access for Temporary Foreign Workers but his correction was both quick and efficient).

The chart below shows the overall shift to lower skilled occupations, particularly a greater shift to the lowest skill levels, with some correction in the latter half of 2024:

…The Q1 List of Shame

To illustrate the dysfunction, consider these (few) examples (there are many, many more, and I encourage you to look through the list yourself):

Companies and public sector entities that got approved to hire entry-level and food services labour:

Companies and public sector entities that got approved to hire white collar jobs with TFWs (my personal favourite here is the Grain Growers of Canada(a lobby group) receiving a positive LMIA decision for a communications position….come on guys, for real??):

Immigration consulting firms that often help companies get approved for TFWs got approved for TWFs too:

Companies that got approval to fill trades jobs with TFWs:

The arguments that many companies most commonly use to justify their use of the TFW program (particularly the low-skilled stream) are that:

  • Canadians don’t want to do the work
  • That only a foreigner could do the job, or
  • That government benefit programs often prevent people from taking jobs. 

In many cases, these arguments wouldn’t pass the smell test for an ordinary Canadian, so they shouldn’t for the Liberal government either.

In reality, outside of a very few regions where unemployment levels significantly defy the current national rate of 6.9%, and in certain segments of the seasonal agricultural industry, many of these jobs can and should go to available Canadians. And, there won’t be change unless the Liberals stop buying into bunk arguments for temporary foreign labour and find ways to reform the program, or, as the case may be, incent Canadians to work. Wages that aren’t suppressed by an open floodgate of low skilled temporary foreign labour would probably be a good place to start.

Ironically, on that front, all the Liberals had to do upon taking office in 2015 was not bend to the will of powerful corporate lobbyists clamouring for the reversals of program changes made by the former Harper Conservative government. I was in cabinet at the time and remember the gnashing of teeth and wailing from employers that were accused of seriously abusing the program.

Nonetheless and to his credit, Jason Kenney, as Minister of Employment and Social Development, introduced major reforms to the TFW program and LMIA process in 2013 and 2014. In 2013, key changes included requiring employers to pay temporary foreign workers at prevailing wages, introducing processing fees for LMIA applications, extending job advertising periods to recruit Canadians first, and adding scrutiny on outsourcing impacts. The 2014 overhaul was more comprehensive: it imposed a 10% cap on low-wage foreign workers per worksite (phased in from higher limits), barred low-wage hires in regions with unemployment above 6%, limited low-wage worker stays to two years, introduced moratoriums in sectors like food services, boosted inspections and fines for violations, and split the TFW program from the International Mobility Program to reduce overall reliance on foreign labor, leading to an 80% drop in low-skilled approvals.

Source: 50K+ jobs to foreign workers in Q1. Why?

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