Not sure whether I would use the word “intense” but yes, greater debate, discussion and questioning part of a needed new normal. As I have repeatedly emphasized, debate need not be xenophobic or racist as the concerns relate to issues that affect all, immigrant and non-immigrant alike: housing, healthcare and infrastructure:
When I was asked to address members of the immigration division of the Canadian Bar Association, I expected an audience of maybe 25 to 50 lawyers.
But last Saturday, 400 immigration lawyers showed up at the Victoria Convention Centre to hear what three Canadian journalists and a think-tank member had to say about the media’s impact on migration.
The panel was asked to address immigration lawyers’ fears that heightened media coverage is “sparking intense public debate” and influencing “how immigrants are perceived and how decisions are made.”
In addition to offering our thoughts, panel members learned there are actually more than 1,200 immigration lawyers in the Canadian Bar Association, with their numbers mushrooming in the past 15 years.
I noted there are another 13,000 licensed immigration consultants in Canada, a doubling in just seven years. The lawyers in Victoria let us know, justifiably, that the “consultants” are not as highly trained as lawyers, or as regulated.
On top of these private players employed in the migration sector, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has doubled its staff in a decade to more than 13,000 employees.
Altogether, these professionals and workers add up to an army of more than 27,000 immigration specialists (about the same as the number of soldiers and staff employed by Canada’s Department of Defence).
All make their living helping migrants navigate the complexities of becoming a foreign student, temporary worker, reunified family member, investor immigrant or permanent resident of Canada.
In addition, the C.D. Howe Institute maintains another huge cohort that does somewhat the same thing. Unlicensed agents — from the fields of travel, education and labour — also take fees for advising clients on how to get into Canada and stay there.
The institute’s Tingting Zhang and Parisa Mahboubi, therefore, maintain there should be many more licensed consultants — and that the government should offer better aid to the roughly six million people whose applications are each year processed for entry into Canada.
In other words, the 400 lawyers who gathered last week at the Victoria Conference Centre represented just a fragment of the immigration business in Canada. No wonder it’s called one of the country’s biggest industries.
Understandably, the gathered immigration lawyers, the slight majority of whom were women, wanted to do everything they could to help the clients in Canada and around the world who come to them.
Their questions and comments all revolved around the hope that borders be more open and the often-labyrinthine migration process easier.
They also worried about declining support for immigration. A Leger poll this spring found 58 per cent of Canadians believe migration rates are “too high”. Even half of those who have been in the country less than a decade feel that way.
Given the lawyers’ desire to assist their clients, many were wary that in the past two years more journalists have been digging into migration policy and its impact.
That’s in large part because former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doubled immigration levels and increased the number of guest workers and foreign students by five times. Almost three million non-permanent residents now comprise 7.3 per cent of the population, up from 1.4 per cent in 2015.
The lawyers noted that, after decades in which journalists essentially avoided migration issues, many more articles were being written about such topics as the sudden jump in asylum seekers, tens of thousands of international students not attending school, businesses exploiting temporary workers and population pressures on housing and rents.
Two panelists, Toronto Star immigration reporter Nicholas Keung and Steve D’Souza of CBC’s Fifth Estate, emphasized the value of talking to migrants to develop poignant “human interest” stories. They have also investigated how bosses, fly-by-night colleges and some migrants have taken part in scams.
In response to CBA’s concerns that Canada’s media were producing “stories that have become a lightning rod for public sentiment, shaping how immigrants are perceived and how decisions are made,” the journalists on the panel explained it’s our duty to cover migration stories, and all stories, in a way that is “fair, balanced and accurate.”
Although panelist Daniel Bernhard, of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, correctly said that some journalism about migration is superficial, I suggested it’s generally a good thing Canada’s long-standing national taboo against reporting on and debating migration policy has eased.
Although some politicians, migration lawyers, consultants and other agents may not always like it, I also said journalists’ goal is to responsibly probe to the truth of a matter and, beyond that, to “let the chips fall where they may.”
Since my Vancouver Sun editors about a dozen years ago asked me to produce more analyses about migration, I have learned covering the beat essentially amounts to writing about the “winners and losers” of migration policy, which in Canada is put together behind closed doors.
Some examples. Applied ethicists point to how it’s one thing for Canadians to worry about a “brain drain” — about losing talented citizens to places like the U.S. and Singapore. The more worrisome flip side, for countries in Africa and East Asia, is that Canada is actively draining away their brainy people, be they physicians or entrepreneurs.
Then there are the 2.8 million temporary workers in Canada, many of them international students paying exorbitant school fees. Some have been winners, getting solid educations and decent jobs in their homelands or permanent residency in Canada. Others have been exploited for their willingness to work for low wages — which has, in turn, been a losing proposition for other low-skill workers in Canada.
The job of tracking migration policies’ winners and losers is endless, including covering the squeeze that rapid population growth and the trans-national migration of foreign capital is putting on those trying to pay Canadian housing costs and rents.
Suffice it to say, journalists’ job is to shine as much light as possible on this vast system, which impacts millions. The ultimate goal is to encourage the creation of policies that best serve the most people, which is one way to advance the common good.
One discussion point that has arisen in social media is the extent that Harper-era changes, making citizenship “harder to get and easier to lose,” are responsible for the decline.
The 2021 study is based upon the 2011-15 period, when all immigrants have met the residency requirements (5-9 years since landing). So while the Conservative government changes to language and knowledge were implemented in 2010-11, increased residency requirements and fees were not implemented until 2015, thus not impacting this study.
One area that needs to be considered is for the settlement sector to provide citizenship test preparation courses, given that the study confirms that lower levels of language fluency and education attainment correlate with lower naturalization.
It is unlikely that the current government will implement its 2019 and 2021 election commitment to eliminate citizenship fees (virtue signalling) but there is a case to waive these fees, at least partially, for lower income applicants.
… The findings confirm the worrisome trends identified by the research of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship that found a strong decline in the “market value of becoming Canadian.”
“No matter which way you look at it, it’s clear that Canada’s appeal in the eyes of immigrants is fading. And if our growth strategy continues to be dependent on immigrants, that’s a real problem for our future viability.”
Although office lockdowns and public health restrictions have caused backlogs and contributed to the disruptions of citizenship application processing, Statistics Canada said that only accounted for 40 per cent of the decline between 2016 and 2021.
The study compared the citizenship takeup among recent immigrants who arrived in Canada five to nine years before each census. It found that 75.4 per cent did so in 1996 and it gradually declined from 2006, when the Conservatives took power.
In the decade with the Tories at the helm, the “knowledge of Canada” test was strengthened, language requirements increased, citizenship application fees rose and the physical presence requirements for citizenship were changed from three of four years preceding application to four of six years. The naturalization rate subsequently dropped to 60 per cent.
After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came into power, the federal government restored the residency requirement to three of five years, and moved the upper age limit for the exemption to the language and knowledge test from 64 back to 54, the report notes. The citizenship fee for minors was also reduced in 2018.
“Other more global events also likely play a role,” said the report. “Significant economic development in some source countries, such as China and India, could encourage immigrants from these regions to maintain their source-country passports and reduce their motivation to become Canadian citizens.”
The study also found the fall in citizenship rates over the past 25 years varied by demographics:
•Families with household income between $10,000 and $30,000 annual saw a 35.9-percentage-point drop, compared to a 13.5-point decline among those making over $100,000 a year;
•Those who did not complete high school saw a 39-percentage-point drop compared to 29 points for those with a university degree;•Newcomers whose mother tongue was not an official language registered a 32-percentage-point decline in naturalization rate versus just a 19-point fall among those with English or French as first language;
•Before 2006, StatCan calculated that the group of immigrants with all three characteristics of low income, education and language skills was more likely to acquire Canadian citizenship than the most advantaged group, but the pattern reversed after that; in 2021, the citizenship rate was 1.5 times higher among the most advantaged group than among the disadvantaged.
•Immigrants from some non-western countries who traditionally were more likely to acquire Canadian citizenship now more closely resembled their counterparts from developed nations in citizenship uptake.
Bernhard said the report speaks to the need for greater policy intervention to address the question of why people want to become Canadian, as well as their experience here and commitment to the country, and what they’re getting from and giving to Canada.
Some advantages that used to be reserved for citizens such as jobs in the federal government and military are now open to permanent residents, which removes the incentive for some to acquiring citizenship, said Bernhard, adding that immigrants need to have positive experiences and strong connections to feel belonged.
“That’s the difference between residency and citizenship,” he said. “That’s the difference between, you know, Dubai and Canada, both of which have large foreign-born populations. Only one of them allows you to be an owner of the society.
“That’s Canada, where citizenship remains very accessible. And if that ownership is no longer desirable, that’s a really shocking signal to the rest of us that we have deeper issues to reflect upon and resolve.”
Starting up my blog again, highlighting some of the articles I found of interest.
Past Imperfect: J. L. Granatstein’s prescient warning
Agree, both the good and the bad:
Also regrettable is that Granatstein did not offer a more pointed rationale for learning history. He argued that an understanding of the subject was “the prerequisite of political intelligence” but without going further. The cost of not knowing history is much deeper, in my view. It creates a real disquiet and robs the community of its ability to find nuance in any dispute. Indeed, one could argue that the incoherence of a vast array of policy areas in this country — from cultural and global affairs to housing and homelessness — can be explained only by a general loss of historical consciousness.
To talk historically about any episode — a court case, a medical issue, a construction problem, even a love dispute — is to inquire about “what really took place last time.” It naturally invites subtlety, attention to context, and storytelling that can lay the groundwork for compromise. It calls for clarity in sequencing events and necessarily examines what’s behind the story: “Well, we didn’t have the tools” or “Our thinking was wrong” or “We simply didn’t know.” It can build respect and, not least, modesty. But it can also bridge solitudes and open the road to cooperation, better understanding, and perhaps even reconciliation and forgiveness. No one who studies history seriously can be insensitive to the anxieties and cruelties of humanity or unimpressed by its resilience, creativity, and kindness.
But that sort of discipline has been evacuated from popular culture. For over a dozen years now, history departments have seen their student numbers decline. Consequently, new hires are even rarer than before. Governments seldom consider the failures and successes of previous policies; museums dedicated to the past are shrivelling without money for new exhibits and programs. Historians, terrified of being misunderstood, refuse to engage in public debates that could bring nuance to policy issues. Canada is not in a state of post-nationalism but is rather a place of hiber‑nation — a country that has fallen asleep and forgotten its past.
This is dangerous. Historical awareness bolsters democracy and democratic instincts. Take away history and you undermine the ability to discuss, to debate, and to share knowledge on how things evolved. Without such skills and knowledge, democracy as we know it will wither and die
Local citizenship judge wins Community Impact Award – Thorold News
A reminder of the power of in-person ceremonies:
The ceremonies to which she is referring are citizenship ceremonies. For just over five years Ivri has been a citizenship judge with Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada. In an average week in this role she swears in between 1,200 and 1,500 new Canadians.
In the relatively short time that she’s been one of nine judges in the Niagara and Hamilton offices of the department, she has welcomed more than 100,000 newcomers to Canada. Besides her family – husband Eldean and children Elijah, Zachariah, Ezekiel and Michaiah – she says it’s the most rewarding thing she’s ever done.
Ivri herself comes from an immigrant family. Her mother Valerie came to Canada to visit an uncle in 1967, leaving behind her husband Roosevelt and their son back in Jamaica. On leave from her job as a customs officer there, Valerie went to a Canadian immigration office to extend her visa. An officer there suggested she instead apply for citizenship, so she did.
Shawn Taylor: Are Immigrants Falling out of Love with Canada? (And is it Because We Feel the Same?)
Overly negative but not without merit:
The evident decline in Canada’s citizenship rates may say more about the attitudes and habits of existing Canadians than those of newly-arriving immigrants. The federal bureaucracy’s failure to meet its own published service standards is certainly a self-inflicted wound. As is the proposal to solve this problem by eliminating much-loved citizenship ceremonies. The effect of both situations is to debase the perceived status of Canadian citizenship by emphasizing the transactional over the transformational. Then there’s the Roxham Road debacle, which offers migrants the opportunity to illegally sneak into our country via a dead-end road rather than at a regular border crossing and still be recognized as refugee claimants, with all the official support and standing this entails. If Canadian citizenship is supposed to be so valuable, it seems foolish to further cheapen the reputation of the entire immigration system in this way.
Beneath these obvious failures of governance and policy, however, lurks an even deeper and more insidious problem. As Bernhard explains, becoming a citizen is akin to joining a team with all other Canadians. A “club,” so to speak, that is exclusive to those who wish to be identified as Canadian and who intend to participate in its promotion and maintenance by voting and performing other civic duties. If we accept such an analogy, then it clearly matters how we advertise and promote this club to new members. So what sort of stories do Canadians tell about their own country these days? And do they amount to an effective marketing strategy?
“The story of Canada that our major institutions tell has increasingly become one that focuses on only the most negative aspects of our country, such as oppression, racism, discrimination and dispossession,” observes Christopher Dummitt, an historian at Trent University’s School for the Study of Canada in Peterborough, Ontario. Common examples of this new tendency are factually-dubious claims, often from officially sanctioned sources, that Canada has committed and continues to commit genocide against the Indigenous population, is systemically racist towards black people, was once a slave country, and on and on. “It is a deliberate distortion of our actual history,” says Dummitt in an interview.
This sense of national self-loathing has become so encompassing that official multiculturalism, once billed as an unquestionable Canadian value, is now considered evidence of an “unjust society premised on white supremacy,” as two University of Calgary education professors absurdly argued last year. Even professed supporters of Canadian identity, such as ICC co-founder Ralston Saul, now casually declare that “Canada has failed on many fronts.” As for how such a perspective might work as a branding exercise, Dummitt says, “If the story about Canada is that it was an institutionally corrupt nation beset by the original sin of colonialism, then why would anyone want to become a citizen of that?”
Dummitt has been pushing back against the now-pervasive narrative that Canada is, at its core, morally bankrupt. In 2021 he organized a rebuttal signed by many eminent Canadian historians condemning the Canadian Historical Association’s (CHA) unilateral declaration that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples was “genocidal.” In making such a claim, Dummitt’s rebuttal stated, the CHA was “insulting the basic standards of good scholarly conduct.” He has also spoken out against the practice of tearing down statues honouring Canada’s founding fathers, and is currently fighting Toronto’s plans to scrub the name of 18th century British parliamentarian Henry Dundas from its streets and public squares on the (entirely bogus) assertion that he was an ally to the slave trade. “We need to call out these nonsensical claims,” Dummitt states determinedly. “And we need politicians who are willing to celebrate the Canadian nation in diverse ways.”
With this sort of self-hatred being expressed by current citizens, is it any wonder immigrants are having second thoughts about joining Club Canada
Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2C Journal. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
On Nov. 7, the same day that Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa resigned amid corruption allegations pertaining to lithium contracts, federal officers in Brazil raided the Portuguese Consulate in Rio de Janeiro.
The Brazil raids were not connected to the Lisbon investigation, a spokesperson said. Instead, according to Brazilian police, they were part of a separate investigation into the falsification of documents in collusion with applicants seeking Portuguese visas and citizenship. Since the 1990s, amid periods of economic downturn and social instability, large numbers of Brazilians have struck out for Portugal. When the country began its “golden visa” program in 2012, wealthy Brazilians became the second largest group to take advantage of it.
Portugal’s golden visa grants European Union access to foreigners in exchange for investment. From its inception in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, it has faced backlash, and the criticism has only grown more vocal in recent years. Chiefly, it is blamed for contributing to a severe housing crisis that has made affordable housing unattainable for most Portuguese.
In early October, Costa’s Socialist government finally passed a law that took aim at the issue, removing the real estate investment pathway from the golden visa program. Previously, people who invested in a qualifying property worth at least 280,000 euros (about $305,000) were eligible. The change, almost a year in the making, has ricocheted around the world of global elites, many of whom had come to regard Portugal as a foothold into Europe. Although more than 30,000 foreigners have benefited from Portugal’s golden visa, its benefits for the Portuguese themselves are less clear.
German State Saxony-Anhalt: No citizenship without supporting Israel’s existence
Hard to see how this will work in practice:
The decree instructs authorities to pay close attention to whether an applicant exhibits antisemiticattitudes and states that “obtaining German citizenship requires a commitment to Israel’s right to exist.”
In a letter to local authorities, the Saxony-Anhalt state Interior Ministry said naturalization is to be denied to foreigners who engage in activities directed at Germany’s liberal democratic order as outlined in the country’s Basic Law. The denial of Israel‘s right to exist and antisemitism are included among such activities.
Local authorities have been instructed to deny an applicant’s naturalization request if they refuse to sign the declaration. A refusal is also to be documented in the individual’s application filing for future reference.
Agree with his litany (rant?) of policy failures in housing, healthcare, labour markets etc.
But most of the commentary and analysis notes that large increases in permanent and temporary immigration have contributed to all these problems by not factoring the impact of a larger population, driven by immigration.
Given the time lags to address these so long-neglected issues, it is only responsible to advocate for a freeze and/or a reduction of current levels that takes account of housing, healthcare and other impacts, rather than current governmental immigration planning which largely ignores these:
Despite record levels of polarization, it seems pundits and politicians of all stripes agree on one thing nowadays: no matter the problem, immigrants are the cause.
Housing crunch? Too many immigrants.
Health care squeeze? Ditto.
Wages too low? International students flooding the labour market.
These arguments are lazy, dangerous and, most of all, incorrect. Yet somehow, they’re everywhere.
But even a cursory glance at these arguments shows that the people making these claims haven’t given the evidence even a cursory glance.
For example, the housing crisis far predates the recent immigration boom. In hot markets like Toronto, residential home prices more than doubled between 2000 and 2014. Immigration rates during that period were more than 30 per cent lower than they are now. The last time immigration levels skyrocketed like they have recently was between 1985 and 1995. House prices didn’t boom in those years; they crashed more than 25 per cent.
Let’s put some uncomfortable truths on the table.
Immigrants didn’t subsidize property speculation with public funds by exempting housing investments from capital gains taxes. Successive federal governments did that.
Immigrants didn’t block zoning reform for decades, making it illegal to build more housing. City councils did that.
Immigrants didn’t remove some 130,000 homes from the rental market to become quasi-legal hotels on Airbnb. Profiteering investors did that, often illegally, while governments looked the other way.
Immigrants aren’t responding to recent housing price drops by holding up the construction of more than 8,000 housing units in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area until prices go back up. Developers are doing that.
Immigrants are not causing the cataclysmic deterioration of our health care system. In Ontario alone, an estimated 20,000 internationally trained nurses are sitting on the sidelines, prevented from healing patients because of bureaucratic holdups to their accreditation that provinces have known about forever, but have chosen not to resolve.
Immigrants are not suppressing wages. Companies like Uber did that, performing the world’s greatest Pinocchio routine by claiming, incredulously, that their work force neither wants nor deserves basic protections like minimum wage or a reliable place to pee while on shift. Even more incredulous is the reaction of governments across the land, which just sat back and watched as these American companies boastfully broke the law and drove down wages while paying no corporate taxes. As with Airbnb, governments eventually changed the laws to fit the crime, locking a generation of people, disproportionately immigrants, into low-wage servitude for California corporations.
Increasingly, this labour force is made up of international students, who desperately need the money because provinces permit rapacious colleges and universities to charge outrageous international fees for what is too often a useless education. Why do the students pay? Because post-study work permits are a reliable pathway to permanent residency, which the federal government keeps wide open. When the fees got to be too much, the feds lifted work restrictions for international students. Now they study even less while paying even more to subsidize the rest of us.
Immigrants didn’t cause our failings. We did that all by ourselves.
In fact, strategic immigration is our best chance to solve many of these challenges.
Tens of thousands of immigrant health care professionals have passed their Canadian exams and are eager to reinforce our failing system. If we simply let them contribute, we could relieve huge pressure from the front lines, practically overnight.
The extra 2.3 million new homes we need to build by 2030 won’t build themselves, yet Canada will lose 700,000 skilled workers to retirement between 2021 and 2028. Unless you’re hoping to find a few hundred thousand Canadian-born tradespeople in the couch cushions, immigrant expertise is the only way to get us anywhere close to meeting our housing goals.
Blaming immigrants for our homegrown problems is a double defeat. It opens the door to the horrifying mainstream xenophobia that contemporary Canada has so far escaped, while closing the door on the very people who are our best chance at overcoming these challenges, resulting from decades of made-in-Canada complacency and neglect.
To the many opinion leaders now casually calling out Canada’s supposed immigration excess: please do your homework. Check the evidence. And open your mind to the fact that while Canada’s problems may be far-reaching, their origins are hardly far-flung.
Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.
Needless to say, I disagree with the logic and the false parallel with the situation over a century ago.
The problem with asserting the issue is the lack of a “can do” attitude is that while the government can turn up the needle on permanent and temporary migration, housing, healthcare and infrastructure have longer timelines.
While it is helpful that the Century Initiative and others are acknowledging these challenges, the reality is that little progress is being made and thus the calls for restraint:
There is a new fashion among the commentariat of questioning whether Canada has the capacity to accommodate greater immigration, particularly in housing and health care. The underlying defeatism of this position – the belief that we’ve achieved all we can – would leave Clifford Sifton depressed and ashamed.
In 1896, prime minister Wilfrid Laurier tasked this enterprising, 35-year-old Manitoban to “populate” the Prairies with European farmers, following years of net emigration from Canada. Laurier envisioned an agricultural powerhouse to provide an abundant, reliable food supply for our nascent country while solidifying Canada’s claim to the region.
Sifton met this challenge with a radically simple plan: find immigrants with experience farming similarly harsh terrain – people made of “the toughest fibre” – and lure them to Canada with free land.
After considering various candidates, he settled on Eastern Europeans, who had farmed inhospitable steppes like ours for generations. Sifton dispatched agents across Europe circulating ads in Polish, Czech and Ukrainian, promising “160 acres of free land in Canada,” and paid them generous commissions.
We need not condone that Indigenous nations were illegally displaced from this land to appreciate the sheer audacity of Sifton’s achievement. Within five years, he doubled the Prairie population. Within 10 years, annual immigration to Canada increased 840 per cent. And 125 years later, the farms these immigrants established feed not just Canada, but much of the world.
Contrast Sifton’s can-do optimism to the despondent attitude of pundits today, who are unsure how we might handle immigration levels that, at around 1 per cent of the population, are half the rate they were in Sifton’s era.
There are growing calls to constrict immigration until the housing crisis is “resolved” – imprecise though that is. We would be wise to recall what Sifton knew. Immigrants are not the cause of Canada’s failings. Actually, they’re a big part of the answer.
Immigrants don’t simply occupy existing housing. Fact is, they built most of our current housing stock and could build even more. Each worker occupies one home (less, if they share) and builds dozens more for everyone else – an irrefutable net gain.
Yet even when we grasp this seemingly obvious fact, our response falls short. Ontario recently announced that it will almost double the number of skilled workers it welcomes each year, to 18,000 by 2025. Yet even this seemingly ambitious plan is not designed to succeed. If current trends continue, about 6,000 of those will be construction workers. Yet Ontario Labour Minister Monte McNaughton has saidthat in “construction alone we’ll need 100,000 skilled workers over the next decade.”
Six thousand is not an appropriate target; 60,000 is closer to the mark.
A recent federal plan to specifically prioritize construction workers for immigration applications is similarly enlightened yet tepid. It comes with no targets. Were we genuinely committed to solving the housing crisis, we would aggressively recruit the people who can do so, and in huge numbers.
Where would they live upon arrival? Are we really so bereft of purpose and creativity? In Sifton’s day, newcomers lived in government-operated immigration halls until they found their feet. Hardly glamorous, but sufficient. Calgary is pioneering the conversion of vacant office space to residential use. Given the severity of the housing emergency, we should also consider unconventional options, including convention centres and military facilities. It just makes sense to house those whose labour could house us all.
As with housing, newcomers are not the cause of Canada’s health care failures. But they could be an answer. For example, Ontario reportedly needs 24,000 more nurses. That’s just 5 per cent of the 465,000 permanent residents Canada will welcome in 2023. Strategic immigration could eliminate this shortage in mere months.
Some might call these proposals naive: simplistic attempts to impose a 19th-century frontier mindset onto today’s stifling, maximally bureaucratized reality.
These are the weak excuses of the undetermined. We need not inhabit Sifton’s era to honour his ethos: a confident belief that we can overcome existential threats to Canada’s viability. We cannot (and should not) give the most in-demand newcomers stolen Indigenous land, but we can offer other perks, like expanded and expedited family reunification privileges. Intransigent provinces? Withhold transfer payments. Intransigent medical guilds? Show the public who is keeping much-needed help from reaching the front lines of care. These are emergencies. We should act accordingly. Do whatever it takes.
Housing and health care failings pose existential threats to Canada. The only shortage more acute than that of skilled people to provide these vital services is the shortage of audacity to believe that we are capable of solving these problems: the confident ambition to make big dreams come true.
Irfhan Rawji is managing partner of Relay Ventures. Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.
Further interest by conservatives on self-administered citizenship oaths, along with concerns over declining naturalization rates, the latter reflecting a longer-term trend, the steep increase in citizenship fees under the Harper government, and the shutdown and slow recovery of citizenship in 2020 and 2021. Dual citizenship prohibitions appears to be less of a factor except for Chinese immigrants.
Understandably, but unfortunately, Shawn Taylor then argues that it is more the “sense of self loathing” and negative narratives that explains the decline with little to no evidence (no public opinion research that I have seen substantiates this claim). He then praises the existing citizenship guide, Discover Canada, developed under the Harper government, which was a vast improvement over its predecessor but overly reflected the ideological bias of that government:
New Canadians may soon face a brand-new obstacle on their path to citizenship. Beyond interminable delays and hefty fees, by June they could also find themselves having to prove they’re not a robot by clicking on every image that contains a motorcycle. Or a parking meter. Or a horse
Last month Ottawa announced plans to eliminate the long-standing requirement that citizenship applicants publicly swear (or affirm) Canada’s Oath of Citizenship at an official ceremony before receiving their citizenship papers. Such oath-taking ceremonies have been a requirement since 1947. And while they went virtual during Covid-19, they’ve always been public events overseen by a citizenship judge or other designated Crown representative.
Now, with massive waiting times afflicting the entire immigration system, the federal Liberals are proposing to speed up this last stage in the process via a “secure online solution.” Immigrants will simply have to left-click their computer mouse to complete their oath and thus become citizens of Canada. It seems an uninspiring culmination to what should be an important, if not life-changing, event.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government unveiled this time-saving proposal quietly in the Canada Gazette on February 25, but it has since attracted plenty of high-profile outrage from Canada’s Liberal elite. Former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson said she was “horrified” by the idea of doing away with citizenship ceremonies, calling them the “mark of a civilized society.” Sergio Marchi, federal immigration minister during the Jean Chrétien years, called it “a misguided idea” that would add “insult to injury!” (Exclamation in original.) Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi added that it was “a terrible idea.”
“Becoming a Canadian citizen is a transformational event,” explains Daniel Bernhard, CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), in an interview. “This is truly a special ‘once in a lifetime’ occasion – you can get married more than once, you can have more than one child but you can only become a Canadian once. We should celebrate it as such.” Bernhard worries that turning the final stage of citizenship into a “box you tick” will degrade its significance by making it indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill online transaction.
The ICC, founded by Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul in 2005, is an advocacy group focused on integrating and celebrating new Canadians. To this end, it hosts lavish citizenship ceremonies in iconic locations, such as Toronto’s Pearson International Airport or in national parks, and encourages existing Canadians to attend in order to create a broader sense of community engagement. “Everyone is invited to the party,” Bernhard says. “We want to extend a collective welcome and make it a moment for reflection and celebration. Citizenship isn’t just something on your passport. It should exist in your heart as well.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is actually over-staffed when it comes to processing immigration applications. ‘IRCC is estimated to have 65% more staff than would be required to meet the goal’ of its own service standards, the PBO reports.Tweet
It is, of course, impossible to know what exists in Ottawa’s heart. But the federal government appears determined to make the citizenship process dramatically less special – downright banal, in fact. And for reasons that are of its own creation. While the federal government’s current service standard states that a citizenship application will be processed in 12 months, new applicants are currently being told it will take two years to complete, including a three-month wait to schedule a citizenship ceremony.
What’s causing the delay? Waiting times have exploded across the federal bureaucracy, and it can’t be blamed on a lack of resources. According to a recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is actually over-staffed when it comes to processing immigration applications. “IRCC is estimated to have 65% more staff than would be required to meet the goal” of its own service standards, the PBO reports.
Set against such evidence of bureaucratic ineptitude, it seems downright satirical for Ottawa to suggest that new Canadians will “enjoy time savings…[of] approximately 90 minutes” by not having to sit through a formal citizenship ceremony they would likely have remembered for the rest of their lives. “This government has a problem providing the basic service of immigration applications,” snaps Bernhard. “The ceremony is not the problem.”
An Even Bigger Citizenship Problem
When it comes to the state of Canadian citizenship, however, Bernhard has bigger worries than the mere loss of public formalities. Top of the list is the fact new arrivals to this country appear to be falling out of love with the idea of becoming Canadian in the first place. Earlier this year, ICC asked Statistics Canada for an update on the rate at which immigrants become citizens.
In 1991, 68.6 percent of immigrants holding a permanent residency card achieved citizenship between five and nine years of arriving. (Permanent residents can apply for citizenship after spending five years in Canada.) This figure rose above 75 percent in the next two censuses. It has since fallen dramatically. In 2016, only 60.4 percent of permanent residents became citizens within the stated time period. And according to the latest 2021 census data provided by Statcan, it’s now down to 45.7 percent. In other words, fewer than half of recent immigrants are choosing to become Canadian citizens once they’re eligible.
Falling out of love with Canada? According to recent Statistics Canada data, fewer than half of recent Canadian immigrants choose to apply for citizenship after their five-year wait period is up.
“The figures are shocking,” says Bernhard. He considers the trend a fundamental blow to Canadian identity: “One of the ways Canadians see themselves as being unique in the world is in how we welcome immigrants. It is a tradition that goes back to before the founding of Canada.” As proof, he cites an 1840 speech by pre-Confederation Quebec politician Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, who declared that Canada’s strength lay in welcoming “various populations which come from diverse portions of the globe” and making them “like ourselves, Canadian.”
Now, however, the data suggests a decided lack of interest among new arrivals in joining what Bernhard calls “the team that is Canada.” If immigrants decide they don’t really care about signing up for membership in Team Canada, “then we’ve got a big problem.”
Mobile Free Agents or Pressure from Communist China?
Canada has a lot invested in immigration. Earlier this year, the Trudeau government announced new targets for in-migration that are unprecedented in the modern era. After accepting fewer than 200,000 permanent immigrants in 2020, the Liberals now plan to increase intake to 465,000 in 2023 and 500,000 by 2025. Such a tidal wave of new residents clearly is already straining the capacity of the housing market and likely fuelling inflation as well. Nonetheless, immigration enjoys strong support across all political parties and regions, if somewhat tempered in Quebec. This national consensus appears to be holding because the needs of the labour market are so great. But if all these newcomers feel no particular attachment or affection for their new country, then the economic argument for immigration becomes much weaker.
Chinese immigrants must now choose one passport or the other when they arrive in Canada. If they can’t have both, it appears most are deciding to remain Chinese citizens even after they settle permanently in this country.Tweet
Bernhard admits he doesn’t have an answer to why new arrivals seem to be increasingly disenchanted with becoming Canadian, and he’s hoping Statcan will soon offer more clarity on the issue. From his perspective, the worst-case scenario is if these ambivalent immigrants are mostly highly-educated, high-income “free agents” who are prepared to pull up stakes and move to another country as soon as something better comes along.
Bolstering this fear is a recent poll conducted by ICC of new Canadians showing that nearly one-third of 18-34-year-olds and one-quarter of those with a university education considered themselves likely to move elsewhere in the next two years. As these potentially wealthy – and wealth-creating – individuals offer a substantial economic advantage to whichever country they settle in, Canada has a strong incentive to retain them. Getting them to become citizens seems the surest way to lock them down.
Partly easing this fear of mobile free-agent immigrants is a 2019 Statcan study using earlier data that found the decline in citizenship uptake to be largely driven by immigrants with low education and low income. Further, almost the entire drop between 1996 and 2016 was attributable to migrants from one country in one region. “Most striking was the large decline in citizenship take-up among immigrants from East Asia – mainly China,” the Statcan report states. Naturalization rates for all East Asian immigrants fell from 83 percent to 45 percent over this time.
Communist China’s increasingly strident prohibition on dual citizenship may be to blame here, since it means footloose Chinese immigrants must now choose one passport or the other when they arrive in Canada. If they can’t have both, it appears most are deciding to remain Chinese citizens even after they settle permanently in this country. And if government policy in China is the principal factor behind the precipitous decline in citizenship uptake, then there’s little Canada can do to correct the situation
An international perspective is also useful. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) International Migration Outlook 2022 Canada remains near the top of the immigration leaderboard despite recent concerns. We stand third overall in terms of total immigrants accepted, trailing only the United States and Germany. (While the U.S. is often painted as unwelcoming, it has long been the world’s dominant recipient of permanent, legal immigrants. Under President Donald Trump, for example, it admitted more than 1 million immigrants annually until Covid-19 hit in 2020; last year it welcomed over 830,000.)
As well, the average annual rate at which foreign-born residents become citizens across all OECD countries is just 2.2 percent. In Canada, it’s 4 percent – nearly twice as high. While the OECD also notes Canada’s citizenship rate has fallen significantly in recent years, this global perspective does not reveal any grave threat to Canada’s way of life or its ability to attract immigrants. Among the top five immigrant-accepting countries (Spain and the United Kingdom complete the set), all have substantially larger populations than Canada; our status as a generous, welcoming and desirable country appears solid.
The Horror Stories We Tell Ourselves
The evident decline in Canada’s citizenship rates may say more about the attitudes and habits of existing Canadians than those of newly-arriving immigrants. The federal bureaucracy’s failure to meet its own published service standards is certainly a self-inflicted wound. As is the proposal to solve this problem by eliminating much-loved citizenship ceremonies. The effect of both situations is to debase the perceived status of Canadian citizenship by emphasizing the transactional over the transformational. Then there’s the Roxham Road debacle, which offers migrants the opportunity to illegally sneak into our country via a dead-end road rather than at a regular border crossing and still be recognized as refugee claimants, with all the official support and standing this entails. If Canadian citizenship is supposed to be so valuable, it seems foolish to further cheapen the reputation of the entire immigration system in this way.
Beneath these obvious failures of governance and policy, however, lurks an even deeper and more insidious problem. As Bernhard explains, becoming a citizen is akin to joining a team with all other Canadians. A “club,” so to speak, that is exclusive to those who wish to be identified as Canadian and who intend to participate in its promotion and maintenance by voting and performing other civic duties. If we accept such an analogy, then it clearly matters how we advertise and promote this club to new members. So what sort of stories do Canadians tell about their own country these days? And do they amount to an effective marketing strategy?
“The story of Canada that our major institutions tell has increasingly become one that focuses on only the most negative aspects of our country, such as oppression, racism, discrimination and dispossession,” observes Christopher Dummitt, an historian at Trent University’s School for the Study of Canada in Peterborough, Ontario. Common examples of this new tendency are factually-dubious claims, often from officially sanctioned sources, that Canada has committed and continues to commit genocide against the Indigenous population, is systemically racist towards black people, was once a slave country, and on and on. “It is a deliberate distortion of our actual history,” says Dummitt in an interview.
This sense of national self-loathing has become so encompassing that official multiculturalism, once billed as an unquestionable Canadian value, is now considered evidence of an “unjust society premised on white supremacy,” as two University of Calgary education professorsabsurdly argued last year. Even professed supporters of Canadian identity, such as ICC co-founder Ralston Saul, now casually declare that “Canada has failed on many fronts.” As for how such a perspective might work as a branding exercise, Dummitt says, “If the story about Canada is that it was an institutionally corrupt nation beset by the original sin of colonialism, then why would anyone want to become a citizen of that?”
Dummitt has been pushing back against the now-pervasive narrative that Canada is, at its core, morally bankrupt. In 2021 he organized a rebuttal signed by many eminent Canadian historians condemning the Canadian Historical Association’s (CHA) unilateral declaration that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples was “genocidal.” In making such a claim, Dummitt’s rebuttal stated, the CHA was “insulting the basic standards of good scholarly conduct.” He has also spoken out against the practice of tearing down statues honouring Canada’s founding fathers, and is currently fighting Toronto’s plans to scrub the name of 18th century British parliamentarian Henry Dundas from its streets and public squares on the (entirely bogus) assertion that he was an ally to the slave trade. “We need to call out these nonsensical claims,” Dummitt states determinedly. “And we need politicians who are willing to celebrate the Canadian nation in diverse ways.”
If there is a piquant irony to how Canadian history is currently being told by and to Canadians, it’s that new immigrants are actually more likely to receive a fair, balanced and generally uplifting vision of their new country than native-born residents. That’s because immigrants must still study for their citizenship test using a guidebook written by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper before our current historical miasma took effect.
“Discover Canada,” unveiled in 2011 by former Citizenship and Immigration minister Jason Kenney, was widely recognized for its nuanced treatment of Canada’s history, governance and culture. It explicitly acknowledges the low points in our past – including the Indian Residential School system and racist policies towards Chinese immigrants – but never claims such events represent the totality of the Canadian experience. The overall (and entirely honest) message is that Canada has always been a remarkably tolerant and welcoming country with a proud heritage of accommodation, democracy and the opportunity to achieve prosperity for all. As a result, Dummitt observes, immigrants who read the guidebook may actually have a better understanding of the true nature of Canada than Canadian students who’ve been force-fed a litany of horror stories about our past in high school and university classrooms.
Precisely because of the guidebook’s even-handedness and generally upbeat tone, however, many groups are demanding it be replaced with something grimmer and much less complimentary about Canada and its past. When the CBC tried to foment outrage over the continuing existence of the Harper-era citizenship guide in 2019, Janet Dench, then-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, called the situation “incomprehensible” and demanded a new version that “acknowledges the problems in Canadian and current reality, and how that affects Indigenous and racialized people.” In other words, Dench wanted Ottawa to tell newcomers a much more negative – and almost certainly much less accurate – story about the country they were coming to. With this sort of self-hatred being expressed by current citizens, is it any wonder immigrants are having second thoughts about joining Club Canada?
Discover Canada, the Canadian citizenship study guide introduced by the Harper government in 2011, is one of the few remaining official documents that offers an evenhanded and generally uplifting vision of Canada’s history by celebrating our legacy of democracy, accomodation and prosperity.
If we want to make Canadian citizenship more attractive to newcomers, the first order of business should be to project a more uplifting story about what Canada means. And to do that, says Dummitt, “we need to stop telling lies about our past.”
Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2C Journal. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
While I have little patience with the Ottawa protesters/occupiers, there is a range between the organizers, who are extremists, and others who are frustrated (as all of us are).
But given the nature of the organizers, the many symbols of hate and the aggressive and abusive behaviour of many of those protesting, those who tolerate r don’t call out that behaviour are complicit:
On TV, I watched the Canadian men’s soccer team pull off a gutsy, determined 2-0 victory over the United States — epitomizing the very best of the Canadian spirit and inching ever closer to qualifying for Canada’s first World Cup since 1986.
Two screens. Two Canadas. One closed to the world, fearful, and drenched in hate. The other, open to the world, confidently competing with the best in the world, made up of people from around the world who are proud Canadians by choice.
Canada’s new-found soccer success would not be possible without our ambitious immigration policy, which both Conservative and Liberal governments have supported over decades.
Just look at the makeup of the team. Canada’s star player, Alphonso Davies, was born in a Ghanaian refugee camp after his parents fled civil war in Liberia. Sunday’s goals were scored by Cyle Larin (Jamaican parents) and Sam Adekugbe (U.K.-born to Nigerian parents), with assists by Jonathan Osorio (Columbian parents) and Jonathan David (U.S.-born to Haitian parents). The Americans had a golden chance to tie the game late in the first half, but were denied by a highlight-reel save from Canada’s Yugoslavian-born goalkeeper, Milan Borjan, who celebrated emphatically before the sold-out crowd in his family’s chosen hometown of Hamilton, Ont.
But Canada’s immigration story is not the immaculate success we might think. This year marks the 75th anniversary of Canada having its own citizenship independent of Great Britain, yet the proportion of immigrants who become citizens dropped by 20 per cent between 1996 and 2016, the latest year for which data is available. It doesn’t help that, right now, more than 400,000 citizenship applications are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, awaiting processing by an outmatched bureaucracy that is only just getting around to allowing online applications. Citizenship applications now take more than two years to process — which doesn’t seem like evidence of a country eager to welcome new citizens.
Canadians continue to strongly support immigration, but too often it’s framed in purely economic terms. For example, in her last fall economic statement, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland devoted $85 million to reduce processing times. This is because “immigration is critical for Canada’s economic growth, especially when it comes to attracting top global talent, meeting the needs of employers and addressing labour shortages,” as the government’s Economic and Fiscal Update 2021 put it.
But immigrants aren’t just workers. They are future citizens, future voters and future owners of our society. If we believe that to be true, we need to behave accordingly.
The immigrant-rich Canadian team I watched on TV last Sunday proves that when people believe in Canada and feel an equal part of it, they will give their heart and soul to make it great, no matter where they were born. These wonderful athletes have inspired the nation with their toughness, togetherness and talent. They and their families have done so much more for Canada than simply “meeting the needs of employers and addressing labour shortages.”
The second screen, though, was no less true. The hateful bunch in Ottawa — and the MPs who still stand by them — show another side of Canada that we cannot simply wish away. And they demonstrate very clearly the attitudes newcomers often encounter, alongside racialized people born in Canada. Maybe that’s one reason why citizenship rates are falling.
Maybe immigrants see the rise in hate and xenophobia, and take it more seriously than some Canadian-born citizens, who have only known democracy and don’t understand its fragility. Maybe they see their paperwork languishing in bureaucratic limbo for years and conclude that Canada doesn’t care.
But the soccer stars show that we have reason to care, and that we ought to get serious about respecting newcomers as citizens-to-be from day one. Because when newcomers believe in Canada and seem themselves in our future, we can take on the best in the world, and win.
Multicultural Meanderings 