Todd: Liberals got a popularity bump by reducing immigration targets. But those numbers aren’t the full picture

2025/12/19 Leave a comment

Some reaction from various experts. Published at the same time that Canada’s population declined for the first time in many years, driven by reduced numbers of students. But government was being “too cute” in how it presented the numbers and somewhat foolish given the number of persons with detailed knowledge who would spot the “slight of hand:”

…Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who obtained the PCO surveys, said this would not be the first time Ottawa has massaged immigration numbers. It is, he said, common practice.

“And selling Canadians the idea that there has been a ‘reduction’ in new immigrants is not the same as an actual ‘reduction’ in the number of foreigners living in Canada,” said Kurland.

The most important measurement, Kurland said, is how many foreign nationals are living in the country at any one time. But the bigger numbers on temporary residents in Canada are even harder to nail down than those on permanent residents.

Statistics Canada recently reported there are now 3.03 million foreign nationals temporarily in the country as workers, students and asylum claimants.

Temporary residents made up about 7.1 per cent of the entire population for at least the past year. That compares to 2.3 per cent in 2015, when the Liberals were first elected.

Carney has promised to get the proportion down to five per cent by 2027, since it’s hurting the job prospects of both immigrants and those born in the country.

But Anne Michèle Meggs, a former director of Quebec’s Immigration Ministry and now a prominent migration analyst, says, “It’s going to take ages to bring down the numbers.”

Nevertheless, Meggs said Ottawa is “working hard at issuing fewer temporary permits. To demonstrate how they’re succeeding, they’ve started just this year to issue data on arrivals.”

To that end, on Wednesday the federal Immigration Department went on X to say: “Between January and September 2025, Canada saw approximately 53 per cent (308,880) fewer arrivals of new students and temporary workers compared to the same period last year.” Immigration officials say that means 150,220 fewer new students arrived, as well as 158,660 fewer new temporary workers.

Meggs, however, cautions: “There are some serious gaps in the data. It really is a numbers game.”

For instance, she said StatCan numbers show the number of people living in the country on work visas actually grew in the 12 months leading to September of this year — from 1.44 million to 1.51 million.

The only overall drop, said Meggs, has been in international students. The number of study-permit holders declined to 551,000 in September, from 669,000 a year earlier, she said, citing StatCan.

Meggs joins Henry Lotin, an economist who advises major banks, in pointing out that StatCan’s data has long been unreliable on how many guest workers and foreign students are in the country.

That’s because StatCan naively assumes, they say, temporary residents leave the country within 120 days of their visas expiring. Canada Border Services also does not publicly track who leaves the country. CIBC economist Benjamin Tal has estimated the number of uncounted “overstays” at roughly one million….

Source: Liberals got a popularity bump by reducing immigration targets. But those numbers aren’t the full picture

And the StatsCan report:

…Canada’s population fell by roughly 76,000 over the third quarter, the largest decline this country has seen in records dating to the 1940s, and a result of major policy changes by Ottawa to curb immigration.

Outside of a slight drop during the height of the pandemic, this is the first time that Canada’s population has declined in at least the past eight decades, based on historical data from 1946. 

The decline was driven by a drop in the number of international students, more than a year after the federal government started imposing caps on study permits. 

Source: Canada reports biggest population decline on record

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Todd: The summer job is threatened by Canada’s misguided migration strategy

2025/08/11 Leave a comment

Good op-ed, featuring comments by David Williams of Business Council of British Columbia, David Green of UBC, Pierre Fortin, Anne Michèle Meggs and food service data compiled by me.

The search for a summer job is a rite of passage.

Filled with anxiety and reward, the quest in Canada offers young people an introduction to the marketplace, where they will spend a large portion of their lives, hopefully leading to independence and self-confidence.

But this summer in Canada, opportunities for people between the ages of 15 and 24 are abysmal. Their hunt is full of dead ends and discouragement. Talk about making hope-filled young people feel unwanted.

What can we make of the contradictory economic signals? Young Canadians are increasingly facing an employment brick wall. But at the same time many corporations say they’re struggling with “labour shortages.”

For clarity, we should listen to the economists, business analysts and migration specialists who say a big part of the problem for young job seekers is Canadian industries are increasingly addicted to low-wage foreign workers, especially of the temporary kind.

There are now 2.96 million non-permanent residents in the country, most of whom work. And that doesn’t count more than half a million who are undocumented or have remained in the country after their visas expired.

In a typical summer of the recent past, young people would look for jobs in the restaurant, hospitality, tourism, retail, landscaping and food and beverage industries.

But Postmedia reporters Alec Lazenby and Glenda Luymes are among those who have noted that unemployment among people between 15 and 24 is at a record 20 per cent across the country. That’s nine percentage points higher than three years ago.

And the real numbers could be worse. In B.C. in the month of June, for instance, more than 21,000 young people simply dropped out of the job market from discouragement.

The Liberal government has been doing young people a terrible disservice through its stratospheric guest worker levels, says David Williams, head of policy for the Business Council of B.C.

“If the government intends to expand the labour supply explicitly to fill low-skill, low-experience, low-paying job vacancies,” like those sought by young people, Williams said, “it is helping to keep Canada on the dismal path” to the lowest income growth among the 38 countries of the OECD.

Rather than trusting in the labour market to resolve wage and price imbalances on its own, Williams said the federal government’s high-migration strategy “is like believing Christmas dinner will be made easier if you invite more people because they can help with the washing up.”

Ottawa’s approach to migration is setting young people up not only for early job disappointment, he said, but long-term stagnant wages.

UBC economics professor David Green, who specializes in labour, is among many who say Canada’s immigration program is moving away from raising all Canadians’ standard of living.

“The research shows that immigration tends to lower wages for people who compete directly with the new immigrants, who often consist of previously arrived immigrants and low-skilled workers” — such as young people, Green says.

As the UBC professor makes clear, high migration rates “can be an inequality-increasing policy.” They hurt inexperienced workers and “improve incomes for the higher-skilled, and business owners who get labour at lower wages.”

To illustrate, it’s worth looking at migration numbers related to the food industry, where many young people in Canada used to find summer jobs.

Figures obtained by a former director in the Immigration Department, Andrew Griffith, reveal a rise in temporary foreign workers in Canada’s food industries since 2015, when the Liberals were first elected.

There has been a 666 per cent jump in a decade in the number of temporary foreign cooks, as well as a 970-per-cent hike in “food service supervisors.” There has also been 419 per cent increase in “food counter attendants” and “kitchen helpers.”

Ottawa approved a 419% jump in foreign “food counter attendants” and “kitchen helpers” in a decade. Those are decent starting positions for inexperienced job seekers. (Source: IRCC / Andrew Griffith)

The problem extends beyond summer jobs, says Pierre Fortin, past president of the Canadian Economics Association. Too many Canadian bosses who don’t find it easy to hire staff, he said, now think it’s their “right” to hire non-permanent migrants.

“But immigration is a public good, not a private toy,” Fortin said. “The employer gets all the benefits and the rest of society is burdened with all the time and costs for the successful integration of the newcomers, in the form of housing, services and social and cultural integration.”

B.C. and Ontario have the highest proportion of temporary residents in Canada. The rate is 9.3 per cent in B.C.; 8.6 per cent in Ontario. The national average is 7.1 per cent. And that level is far above what it was before 2020, when it was just three per cent. 

Canada’s temporary foreign worker, and international experience, programs were initially supposed to provide employers with short-term relief during a specific labour shortage, says Anne Michèle Meggs, a former senior director in Quebec’s immigration ministry who writes on migration issues.

But too many employers now rely on the programs as a long-term strategy, including to keep wages low. Meggs is surprised, for instance, the food-services industry relies so heavily on migrants.

“I admit I was shocked that Tim Hortons would be hiring through the temporary foreign workers program.”

Meggs is also taken aback that so many food chains even find it profitable to hire foreign workers over local ones. “It costs a lot, and there’s considerable bureaucracy,” she said. That includes spending more than $5,000 on each visa worker’s labour market impact assessment, to convince Ottawa a local worker isn’t available for the position.

To make matters worse, guest workers themselves often get exploited by employers, said Meggs. “Many are still expecting to be able to settle in Canada, obtain permanent residency and bring their families. But for those with limited education and language skills, that is very unlikely.” She points to how last year a U.N. report said Canada’s temporary guest worker programs are a “breeding ground” for contemporary slavery.

It’s hard to say if Prime Minister Mark Carney is ready to revise the Liberal party’s long-standing strategy of handing industries what they want: large volumes of low-skilled foreign labour.

Since its peak at the end of last year, the proportion of temporary residents in Canada this June has gone down only slightly, by less than three per cent.

Unless Carney orchestrates a bigger drop, it suggests he is ready to maintain his party’s record migration rates. That will mean young Canadians unable to find summer work will continue to suffer.

And, since migration policies have ripple effects on wages throughout the economy, they won’t be the only ones.

Source: The summer job is threatened by Canada’s misguided migration strategy

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Todd: Canada’s giant immigration industry will have to get used to ‘intense’ public debate

2025/06/16 Leave a comment

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.

Source: Canada’s giant immigration industry will have to get used to ‘intense’ public debate

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Todd: In Canada, ‘housing nationalism’ shouldn’t be an epithet

2025/04/04 Leave a comment

Important reminder and lesson:

…The story of this type of Canadian nationalism, which aims to make it possible for young, working Canadians to have a chance at affordable housing, is spelled out in a new study by B.C. housing experts Joshua Gordon, David Ley and Andy Yan. 

Gordon is with the digital society lab at McMaster University, Ley is author of Housing Booms in Gateway Cities and Yan is director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program.

They rebut big players in the Canadian development industry and their allies, whom they dub the “growth machine.”

These powerful forces are often guilty of “playing the race card” as an “ideological tactic” to stop the public from realizing how offshore capital and wealthy immigrants have contributed to astronomical house prices in Canada, say the authors.

The trio’s paper, Crafting the Narrative: Wealth migration, growth machines and the politics of housing affordability in Vancouver, is published in The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. It is a direct response to a 2023 article by two prominent B.C. researchers that was published in the same journal.

In their article, University of B.C. professor Nathanael Lauster and Vancouver statistician Jens von Bergmann defended investment of offshore capital in Canadian housing, arguing that opposition to the phenomenon is a baseless “moral panic” in the guise of “housing nationalism,” a movement they deem to be a “hammer in search of nails.”

Lauster and von Bergmann argued in their 2023 paper, which echoed the views of many in the development industry, that such economic nationalism “blames and penalizes the foreign” and, specifically, is “anti-Chinese.”

In addition to their high profiles as commentators in the media, Lauster and von Bergmann were key players in the legal attempt to force the repeal of B.C.’s foreign-buyers tax, which failed. B.C. Appeal Court judges concluded in 2019 the tax didn’t promote racism or reinforce “racial stereotypes” about people from Asia.

The new paper by Gordon, Ley and Yan compiles data showing foreign capital has indeed been a dramatic factor in raising B.C. housing values, a fact they say is often “celebrated behind closed doors by the real estate industry.”

Their paper frequently quotes business speeches by Vancouver condo marketer Bob Rennie, including when he told an audience of developers that buyers from Mainland China were at one point responsible for 90 per cent of the homes sold for more than $2 million on the west side of Vancouver.

The tremendous volume of high-end housing purchases by non-Canadians was confirmed in a 2015 study by Yan. This new paper provides further context. It notes how what was happening to Metro Vancouver was also occurring at the same time in the U.S., which, unlike Canada, keeps track of foreign investment in property.

The U.S., between 2015 and 2018, experienced a six-times surge in the volume of housing purchases made by buyers from China. The multi-billions of dollars were much more geographically spread around than in Canada, however, where the money was concentrated in Vancouver and Toronto.

While acknowledging that some people can indeed be xenophobic, Gordon, Ley and Yan say there is no evidence of that in regard to opposition to excessive foreign capital in Canadian housing. Polls, they say, show popular resistance to these global flows of capital came from across ethnic groups, including people of Chinese ancestry.

The scholars also provide evidence that B.C. residents’ grassroots opposition to “foreign ownership” — a term in which they include “satellite families” who earn most of their money outside of the country, where it’s not subject to Canadian taxation — has come largely from centrist and left-wing people.

They explain how B.C.’s foreign-buyers tax, and the speculation and vacancy tax, have been moderately successful in curbing house-price inflation.

Before the two taxes were introduced in 2016 and 2018 the west side of Vancouver had seen detached house prices jump by 67 per cent between 2014 and 2016. Prices in the same two-year period spiked by a “remarkable” 84 per cent in Richmond.

After the two taxes came into effect, the price of houses in the same parts of the city, which had drawn the most interest from foreign buyers and rich investor immigrants, fell by about one-fifth.

Reflecting on political philosophy, the authors take exception to Lauster and von Bergmann’s claim that opposition to such price jumps came from “reactionaries,” a term normally used to describe right-wing people who oppose progress or reform.

Their article says protective policies like the foreign buyers and speculation taxes have instead had “egalitarian effects, generating tax revenue from landowners, property developers and wealthy buyers that helped support government spending on lower-income individuals, including affordable housing.”

The authors, including Ley, a UBC geography professor emeritus who this week publicly endorsed the candidacy of TEAM’s Colleen Hardwick in Vancouver’s April 5 byelection, recommend a novel idea for governments to go further in limiting foreign wealth in B.C. housing.

“More aggressive action is possible,” they say, “such as property surtaxes that can be offset by income tax paid, with exemptions for seniors, which would more comprehensively tax foreign-capital-based home ownership.”

The authors readily acknowledge the “growth machine” opposes such policy ideas: It would rather continue to “instrumentalize charges of racism to support neo-liberal agendas” and maximize profits.

The trouble, suggest the authors, is that such name-calling taints legitimate debate about housing and the nature of healthy nationalism.

Source: In Canada, ‘housing nationalism’ shouldn’t be an epithet

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Todd: This should be the first Canadian election that focuses on migration

2025/03/28 Leave a comment

I suspect, however, that it will not given that immigration, like so many other issues, is drowned out by the existential crisis of the Trump administration. But yes, appointments by PM Carney provide a hook to raise the issue and cite the excessive influence of the Century Initiative in past government policy before former immigration minister reversed course. As I have argued before, his changes provide space for immigration policy discussions without being labelled as xenophobic or racist.

Skuterud’s comments on rotating immigration ministers is valid and unfortunately former minister Miller was shuffled out by PM Carney:

A controversial appointment put migration in the headlines on the same weekend that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a snap election.

The investment fund manager and former head of the Bank of Canada, who won the Liberal leadership contest two weeks ago, became the subject of news stories focusing on how he has chosen Mark Wiseman, an advocate for open borders, as a key adviser.

Wiseman is co-founder of the Century Initiative, a lobby group that aggressively advocates for Canada’s population to catapult to 100 million by 2100. Wiseman maintains Canada’s traditional method of “screening” people before allowing them into the country is “frankly, just a waste of time.” The immigration department’s checks, he says, are “just a bureaucracy.”

Wiseman believes migration policy should be left in the hands of business.

The appointment of Wiseman is an indication that Carney, a long-time champion of free trade in capital and labour, is gathering people around him who value exceptional migration levels and more foreign investment, including in housing.

Carney denied a charge by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre that bringing in Wiseman “shows that Mark Carney supports the Liberal Century Initiative to nearly triple our population to 100 million people. … That is the radical Liberal agenda on immigration.”

Carney tried this week to distance himself from the Century Initiative, telling reporters Wiseman will not be advising him on migration.

For years, migration issues have been taboo in Canada, says SFU political scientist Sanjay Jeram.

But the Canadian “‘immigration consensus’ that more is always better” is weakening, Jeram says. Most people believe “public opinion toward immigration has soured due to concerns that rapid population growth contributed to the housing and inflation crises.” But Jeram also thinks Canadian attitudes reflect expanding global skepticism.

Whatever the motivations, Poilievre says he would reduce immigration by roughly half, to 250,000 new citizens each year, the level before the Liberals were elected in 2015. The Conservative leader maintains the record volume of newcomers during Trudeau’s 10 years in power has fuelled the country’s housing and rental crisis.

Carney has said he would scale back the volume of immigration and temporary residents to pre-pandemic levels, which would leave them still much higher than when the Conservatives were in office.

What are the actual trends? After the Liberal came to power, immigration levels doubled and guest workers and foreign students increased by five times. Almost three million non-permanent residents now make up 7.3 per cent of the population, up from 1.4 per cent in 2015.

Meanwhile, a Leger poll this month confirmed resistance is rising. Now 58 per cent of Canadians believe migration levels are “too high.” And even half of those who have been in the country for less than a decade feel the same way.

Vancouver real-estate analyst Steve Saretsky says Carney’s embracing of a key player in the Century Initiative is a startling signal, given that migration numbers have been instrumental in pricing young people out of housing.

Saretsky worries the tariff wars started by U.S. President Donald Trump are an emotional “distraction,” making Canadian voters temporarily forget the centrality of housing. He says he is concerned Canadians may get “fooled again” by Liberal promises to slow migration, however moderately.

Bank of Canada economists James Cabral and Walter Steingress recently showed that a one per cent increase in population raises median housing prices by an average of 2.2 per cent — and in some cases by as much as six to eight per cent.

In addition to Carney’s appointment of Wiseman, what are the other signs he leans to lofty migration levels?

One is Carney’s choice of chief of staff: former immigration minister Marco Mendicino, who often boasted of how he was “making it easier” for newcomers to come to the country. Many labour economists said Mendicino’s policies, which brought in more low-skilled workers, did not make sense.

By 2023, the Liberals had a new immigration minister in Marc Miller, who began talking about reducing migration. But Carney dumped Miller out of his cabinet entirely, replacing him with backbench Montreal MP Rachel Bendayan. Prominent Waterloo University labour economist Mikal Skuterud finds it discouraging that Bendayan will be the sixth Liberal immigration minister in a decade.

New ministers, Skuterud said, are vulnerable to special interests, particularly from business.

“It’s a complicated portfolio,” Skuterud said this week. “You get captured by the private interests when you don’t really understand the system or the objectives. You’re just trying to play whack-a-mole, just trying to meet everybody’s needs.”

Skuterud is among the many economists who regret how record high levels of temporary workers have contributed to Canada being saddled with the weakest growth in GDP per capita among advanced economies.

Last week, high-profile Vancouver condo marketer Bob Rennie told an audience that he pitched Carney on a proposal to stimulate rental housing by offering a preferred rate from the Canada Mortgage Housing Corp to offshore investors.

We also learned this week that Carney invited former Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson to run as a Liberal candidate. Robertson was mayor during the time that offshore capital, mostly from China, flooded into Vancouver’s housing market. When SFU researcher Andy Yan brought evidence of it to the public’s attention, Robertson said his study had “racist tones.” Two years later, however, Robertson admitted foreign capital had hit “like a ton of bricks.”

It’s notable that Carney, as head of the Bank of England until 2020, was one of the highest-profile campaigners against Brexit, the movement to leave the European Union.

Regardless of its long-lasting implications, Brexit was significantly fuelled by Britons who wanted to protect housing prices by better controlling migration levels, which were being elevated by the EU’s Schengen system, which allows the free movement of people within 29 participating countries.

For perhaps the first time, migration will be a bubbling issue this Canadian election.

While the link to housing prices gets much of the notice, SFU’s Jeram also believes “the negative framing of immigration in the U.S. and Europe likely activated latent concerns among Canadians. It made parties aware that immigration politics may no longer be received by the public as taboo.”

Source: This should be the first Canadian election that focuses on migration

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Todd: 10 reasons fewer newcomers are becoming Canadian citizens

2025/03/21 Leave a comment

Good overview:

The pandemic mattered, somewhat
COVID might account for 40 per cent of the decline in naturalization rates in the five years before the 2021 census, estimate Fou and Picot. But Fou emphasizes that, even after removing the pandemic effect, “the citizenship rate declined at a faster pace from 2016 to 2021 than during any other five-year period since 1996.”

Canada has lost comparative advantage
With Canada performing poorly in the past decade in regard to GDP per capita, the country isn’t offering the solid wages it once did. Meanwhile, many other countries are doing better than they did in the past.

It’s revealing that the immigrants most likely to apply for citizenship are from countries with grim economies and severe civil strife, including such as Iran and Pakistan. Citizenship take-up is lower among newcomers from countries such as Britain and India.

Andrew Griffith, a former immigration department director now with the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), adds that many migrants with high-tech skills are using Canada as a stopover, where they can build up their credentials to eventually access the U.S. marketplace, which is harder to get into but has much higher-paying jobs.

Housing crisis
“Unaffordable housing is the top reason not to naturalize,” said Daniel Bernhard, CEO of the ICC. “This suggests that it’s a question of optimism about the future. If Canadians aren’t optimistic about our future overall, we shouldn’t be surprised that non-citizen residents of Canada feel the same way.”

Canadian citizenship has been devalued
Separate from debates over whether too many Canadian politicians have been overstressing the problematic aspects of the nation’s identity and history, migration specialists point to specific signs of devaluation.

Griffith believes Ottawa’s move to shift most citizenship ceremonies online has been discouraging for some.

He also thinks Canadian citizenship was diminished when the country moved to “unlimited voting rights for expatriates.” It used to be that non-resident citizens couldn’t vote after being out of the country for five years, but now it’s possible for millions to vote in federal elections regardless of how long they’ve been outside the country.

Ottawa has also “removed preferential hiring of citizens in the public service,” said Griffith. One now need only be a permanent resident to apply.

China is making things tougher
China has been among the top three sources of newcomers to Canada, where immigrants make up one out of four residents. But retired immigration lawyer Samuel Hyman notes China has been lately forcing its citizens to choose “whether they want to continue to have access to their wealth and assets in China” or be prepared to become Canadian citizens and struggle with far fewer rights in the homeland.

Lack of dual citizenship can discourage
Relatedly, the appeal of Canadian citizenship could be decreasing for people from nations like China and India in part because they don’t allow dual citizenship. As Hyman said by way of example, a migrant from India who becomes a Canadian citizen loses the right to inherit or buy property in India.

Citizenship uptake
Popular internet discussion forums, such as on Reddit, are devoted to foreign nationals in Canada discussing the financial and social-services consequences of obtaining citizenship in Canada while losing it in one’s homeland.

International tax scrutiny has expanded
The government of Stephen Harper stepped up tax scrutiny of offshore wealth, said Hyman. That put pressure on people with luxury lifestyles to report to the Canada Revenue Agency on how and where they made their money. It may have contributed, Hyman said, to Canada losing its appeal to some high-net-worth individuals.

Overemphasis on self-interest
While many commentators now highlight the value of Canadian pride and loyalty, some immigration advisers stress mere transactional self-interest. They advise clients that if they become citizens they can spend more time outside the country, and that a Canadian passport will allow them to travel to more countries. It can make the country less appealing.

Citizenship fees increased
On a bureaucratic note, some suggest it’s significant that the government has for a decade steadily hiked the fees that permanent residents must pay to obtain citizenship. [Note: Fees were increased by the Harper government in 2014-15 and have been frozen ever since. Liberal electoral platforms promised to eliminate fees in 2019 and 2021 but this was never implemented.]

Lack of encouragement
Canada used to put more effort into encouraging would-be immigrants to learn Canadian history, laws and values, Griffith said, culminating in an often-emotional in person ceremony. He recommends the immigration department begin to devote two per cent of its [Note: settlement services] budget to “citizenship preparation courses.”

Source: 10 reasons fewer newcomers are becoming Canadian citizens

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Todd: Should birthright citizenship, banned in most countries but not Canada, be a human right?

2025/02/18 Leave a comment

More on birth tourism, based on some of my analysis:

“Birth tourism” is on the rise again in Canada.

In the past year, 5,219 babies were born in Canada to travelling foreign nationals.

In B.C., 102 non-resident births were at Richmond General Hospital; 99 were at Surrey Memorial; 97 were at Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital; and another 85 were at Children’s Hospital, according to Andrew Griffith, a former senior director in Canada’s immigration department who is now an immigration analyst.

At the same time that Griffith was releasing data showing non-resident births are returning to 2019 levels in an article published in Policy Options last month, entrepreneurs in Richmond said there has been an uptick in inquiries from women in China and other parts of East Asia who want to have their babies in Canada now that President Donald Trump aims to end birthright citizenship in the U.S.

The ethical debate over birthright citizenship, also known as jus soli (right of the soil), is coming to a head as Democratic U.S. states challenge Trump’s initiative and non-resident births rise again in Canada with the easing of COVID-19 restrictions.

Data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows the percentage of non-resident births in Canada fell from 1.6 per cent of total births in 2019-20 to 0.7 per cent in 2020-22. It rebounded to 1.5 per cent in 2023-24.

A majority of countries forbid birthright citizenship, including virtually every country in Europe, Asia and Africa. It’s permitted in only about 33 nations.

Even though 160 years ago the U.S. enshrined the 14th Amendment to protect the constitutional rights of those born on its soil, particularly former slaves, Griffith said Canada’s laws on birthright citizenship could be more easily changed than in the U.S.

While most countries mandate that a child’s citizenship depends on the passport held by the parents, Canadian academics argue that birthright citizenship should be a “global human right.”

Today, one of the most common rebuttals to such a stand is that babies who receive citizenship only because they were born on Canadian territory are jumping the country’s immigration queue, which others must go through to qualify to become permanent residents and access universal education, health care and social services.

Two Canadian scholars who have obtained federal government grants to research birth tourism insist it must be protected in the name of “reproductive autonomy.” They say those who oppose it are “demonizing” and “criminalizing” non-resident pregnant people.

University of Carleton law professor Megan Gaucher believes critics of birthright citizenship are engaging in “settler-colonial” thinking that reflects “long-standing racist ideas.”

Ottawa’s Gaucher co-wrote an article on the subject with Lindsay Larios, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Manitoba who has obtained a federal grant to do collaborative research on birthright citizenship with B.C.’s Migrant Workers Centre.

Gaucher and Larios maintain attempts to portray birth tourists “as queue jumpers and citizenship fraudsters ignores the real-life obstacles they encounter within the health-care system and the Canadian immigration system.”

Larios argues that opponents who say offspring shouldn’t get citizenship because of their birth parent’s “precarious” immigration status are ignoring what she calls “reproductive justice.”

Opposition to the position set out by Gaucher and Larios has come from politicians, and medical and immigration professionals.

Rather than being disadvantaged, Griffith said, most women who engage in birth tourism come to North America with enough wealth to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for travel, accommodation (including in so-called “birth hotels”), and hospital deliveries.

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada has said birth tourism needs further investigation. And Dr. Jon Barrett, head of obstetrics at McMaster University in Hamilton, has written that Canadian hospitals should have “absolutely zero tolerance” for it.

Doctors “should unite in a firm stand against birth tourism,” Barrett said, arguing it stresses Canada’s health-care system and puts pregnant foreign nationals at risk of being “fleeced by unethical individuals.”

An Angus Reid Institute poll found that in 2019, when Richmond Hospital was the epicentre of Canada’s birth tourism industry, that two-of-three Canadians believed “a child born to parents who are in this country on tourist visas should not be granted Canadian citizenship.”

Births to non-residents now make up 6.9 per cent of all deliveries at Richmond Hospital, which is down from 24 per cent before the pandemic. Despite this year’s jump in inquiries from people seeking to have babies in Canada because of Trump’s threat, Griffith believes the overall decline over the last few years at Richmond Hospital is owed largely to China restricting its citizens’ travel.

There is no data on whether international students in B.C. have given birth in hospitals here. International students in this province can join the Medical Services Plan by paying $75 a month. In Ontario, said Griffith, some non-resident mothers who have paid for hospital deliveries could be foreign students as that province doesn’t allow them to receive subsidized health care.

In light of a lack of government oversight of birth tourism, Griffith said there is need for more research, including like one study from Calgary. Four-of-five non-resident mothers who delivered babies in that city said their primary motivation was to give their newborn Canadian citizenship. The largest group, one-of-four, was from Nigeria.

Given the ethical issues at stake, Griffith suggests Canada, whose citizenship rules aren’t bound by a Constitution like in the U.S., take a responsible middle way in regard to birthright citizenship.

To reduce the chances of exploitation, he recommends Canada follow the lead of Australia, which allows a baby born on its soil to receive citizenship only if at least one of the child’s parents already has that status.

Source: Should birthright citizenship, banned in most countries but not Canada, be a human right?

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Todd: Can Ottawa solve the problem of millions of expiring Canadian visas?

2025/01/08 Leave a comment

More commentary on immigration policy and program failures:

…How did we get to this muddled state, where the government admits the numbers are out of control — and that it can’t even track, let alone control, the movement of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the country’s guest workers and foreign students?

In 2019 I wrote an optimistic column about how the Canada Border Services Agency was going to bring in “exit controls” to help fix our infamously leaky borders.

The upshot was that proper exit controls would increase the likelihood officials catch homegrown terrorists, individuals who illicitly take advantage of taxpayer-funded health care and, particularly, people who overstay their visas.

The plan was to better track when people leave the country by land, sea or air — using techniques long in place in Australia, the U.S. and the European Union. But even though upgraded exit controls were instituted in 2019, they have not made an obvious difference in compelling people to follow the rules regarding how long they can stay in the country.

To add to the disorder, 2024 had a drastic rise in the volume of temporary residents — 130,000 — trying to overstay their work and study visas by applying for refugee status. That’s up from 10,000 less than a decade ago. The asylum claims process can take several years.

In response to questions from Postmedia, the CBSA said it does what it can to monitor and penalize people who overstay. Specifically, officials said that for various reasons it issued more than 3,700 “removal orders” in 2024, compared to 1,517 in 2020.

Sam Hyman, a retired Vancouver immigration lawyer, said Canada, unlike many countries, doesn’t have exit immigration controls that require all travellers who leave to be examined and their departure confirmed. But, he said, there is a certain degree of border-crossing monitoring.

Vancouver lawyer Richard Kurland, publisher of a monthly migration newsletter called Lexbase, says more rigorous entry and exit controls, while useful, won’t solve Canada’s border crisis alone.

He’s more concerned the government is trying a number of strategies to avoid taking blame for the migration turmoil, first by “denying” it, then by “distracting” from it and now by “repackaging” it, while making new promises.

After Trudeau spent years accusing critics of his high migration policies of being xenophobic or racist, Kurland said he and Miller last year “did a 180 (degree turn) and offered a mea culpa,” admitting to overshooting.

However, they then compounded their blundering, Kurland said, by promising temporary residents who overstay their visas a general amnesty.

“But when you have immigration amnesties, why obey rules, when all you have to do is to hide and wait for the next amnesty?” Kurland said. After the public rose up in criticism, Kurland said the Liberals had to pull back their scheme.

“We are left with the chicken in the python,” Kurland said, “which will be a ticking immigration time bomb for whoever replaces the Trudeau government.”

Source: Can Ottawa solve the problem of millions of expiring Canadian visas?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

Todd: Little-known program dominates Canada’s massive guest-worker scheme

2024/09/16 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, Olsen didn’t check the data (Temporary Residents: Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and International Mobility Program (IMP) Work Permit Holders – Monthly IRCC Updates – Canada – International Mobility Program work permit holders by province/territory, intended occupation (4-digit NOC 2011) and year in which permit(s) became effective). Had some time to look at the construction sector, highlighting that there has been an increase at the supervisory level (B):
Union leader Mark Olsen is frustrated Canadians know almost nothing about Ottawa’s international mobility program. And he’s afraid company bosses want it that way.

The program is the vast federal guest worker program that now brings by far the most newcomers into Canada — with more than one million in the country now.

It’s also the program that Olsen believes makes it most easy for employers to exploit guest workers, which in turn harms Canadian workers.

As the western manager of the Laborers International Union of North America, Olsen said that the international mobility program is drawing more than four times as many guest workers as the more discussed temporary foreign workers program.

Two weeks ago Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to modestly trim the temporary foreign workers program by up to 80,000 workers after protests that it was responsible for a high number of low-wage workers at a time of high unemployment among Canadian young people.

An Angus Reid Institute poll released Tuesday shows that 56 per cent of Canadians believe the Liberals are bringing in too many temporary workers, which they think is making it harder to access housing and obtain decent wages.

Olsen believes Trudeau’s gesture with the temporary foreign workers program is window-dressing. If the past is a guide, he said, the federal government and corporations will just use the decline of that program to funnel more foreign workers into the expanding international mobility program.

The government’s strategy, Olsen said, will continue to “institutionalize foreign worker exploitation, discrimination and abuse, distort the labour market, suppress Canadians’ wages and lead to a loss of training opportunities and jobs for Canadian workers, including Indigenous people and women.”

There is a need, Olsen said, for qualified people to come from other countries to work in Canada. That’s especially the case in Canada’s gigantic construction industry, which employs most members of the Laborers International Union of North America. But guest workers, Olsen said, must be invited to the country in a way that’s fair both to them and to Canadian workers.

The major defect in the international mobility program, Olsen said, is that, unlike the temporary foreign workers program, it doesn’t require Canadian employers to provide evidence to the government that they’re unable to find a Canadian to do the job.

“This has made the IMP (international mobility program) ripe for abuse of both the system and the temporary worker, and has fuelled explosive growth under the program,” said Olsen.

A second problem with the international mobility program is that employers are allowed to pay the foreign workers significantly less than they pay Canadians in the same job, whether they’re in the field of high tech, health care, retail or construction. That’s because bosses only have to commit to paying foreign workers a wage that is higher, even only slightly higher, than the median Canadian salary, which Olsen said is in the $23-an-hour range.

That leads to international mobility program workers often doing the same tasks as Canadian workers at far lower wages.

Obviously, Olsen said, the big wage disparity hands bosses an incentive to hire cheap labour through that program, rather than seek Canadian applicants.

“It results in employers paying substandard wages and often no benefits to foreign workers,” Olsen said in a joint memo with Eric Olsen, his brother, who is the political director for the western arm of Laborers International Union, which has about 400,000 members in the U.S. and 150,000 in Canada. “It also allows employers to pay Canadian workers less than the market would ordinarily require, distorting the market.”

The B.C. Building Trades this year put together a report on migration, with case studies showing how B.C. employers paid foreign workers much less than Canadians during construction of the Golden Ears Bridge, the Murray River mine project and the Canada Line.

Since 2015, the Liberal government has dramatically increased the number of temporary residents in Canada, to about 2.8 million. Immigration Minister Marc Miller said this year that nine per cent are in the temporary foreign workers program stream, 44 per cent are employed in Canada through the international mobility program category and another 43 per cent are foreign students, most of whom are allowed to work.

However, Mark Olsen is on to something when he worries ordinary Canadians have no idea about the country’s many guest worker programs — and the often crucial differences between them.

Canada’s migration system is complex and confusing. Even politicians, pundits and pollsters often make comments that suggest they mistakenly think the temporary foreign workers program is the only Canadian stream for “temporary” workers. It doesn’t help that the term, international mobility program, is itself fuzzy.

In the face of the public’s ignorance, which Mark Olsen believes companies capitalize on, the leaders of the Laborers International Union want to reform Canada’s guest-worker programs.

One top recommendation is that bosses using the international mobility program must prove there is a need for each guest worker. Such declarations exist with the temporary foreign workers program, when employers fill out a document called a labour market impact assessment.

And since news reports frequently arise about abuse and deception in regard to the rules of the guest worker system, the union says “there must be proper enforcement and significant penalties.”

In addition, union wants all foreign workers in Canada to “have the same rights as Canadian workers” and “be paid the same as Canadian workers in wages and benefits.”

It also recommends providing foreign workers “a pathway to Canadian citizenship.” As the union’s policy paper says: “If these workers are good enough to be invited here to build our country, they are good enough to stay and build their families and communities.”

In regard to these last two reforms, Mark Olsen acknowledged that there is sometimes resistance from members of his union.

Given changing public sentiment in Canada, that’s not surprising. One key finding in this week’s Angus Reid poll is that only 24 per cent of Canadians believe guest workers should be offered a route to citizenship.

Nevertheless, Mark Olsen said after he talks to members about the union recommendations on guest workers, they invariably end up embracing the union’s viewpoint, which he describes as “respect for all.”

Source: Little-known program dominates Canada’s massive guest-worker scheme

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Todd: Do women, people of colour get fewer votes in Canada? New studies say no

2024/08/12 Leave a comment

Interesting US study, broadly applicable to Canada:

Given the Olympics are up and running, it’s fitting to reflect on how the image that cartoonists most often use to show that women and ethnic minorities have a disadvantage is one of the hurdles.

The illustrations recur: Of women and people of colour literally having to jump over more and higher hurdles than white people or men to reach victory in their fields, particularly politics.

Now that U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, whose mother was born in India and father in Jamaica, is the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, media outlets are especially filled with talk about gender and racial barriers.

But the clichéd metaphor of an unfair hurdles race is in need of an update in light of studies showing that in almost all cases and places women and people of colour compete evenly.

Last month, researchers at the University of Oxford unveiled the findings of the most extensive analysis yet performed on how people vote in view of candidates’ ethnicity and gender.

Lead by Sanne van Oosten, the team looked for the patterns in 43 different sociological experiments in the U.S., Europe and Canada of voter preference over the 10-year period ending in 2022.

The experiments typically involved presenting respondents with profiles of fictional political candidates, while randomly varying the candidates’ race or ethnicity. There were in total more than 310,000 observations of respondents’ preferences.

“Our meta-analysis concludes that, on average, voters do not discriminate against minoritized politicians,” van Oosten said. “In fact, women and Asians have a significant advantage compared to male and white candidates.”

Van Oosten, who had earlier been appalled by gender-based criticism of Hillary Clinton and the race-based undermining of Barack Obama, considers the results good news — for Harris and other candidates who are female and/or of colour.

The researcher has been surprised by the dearth of media interest, however, given that her earlier study of how the public can stereotype Muslim candidates as homophobic received international coverage.

“One journalist at a very highly esteemed newspaper even literally said to me: ‘People aren’t interested in good news’,” van Oosten said on social media.

The study by van Oosten, Liza Mügge and Daphne van der Pas doesn’t deny that there is a small minority of voters who have racist or sexist attitudes. But it does find most voters aren’t negatively impacted by a candidate being female or a person of colour. Indeed, it’s often perceived as a positive.

Here how the authors put it in their meta-analysis:

• “Voters do not assess racial/ethnic minority candidates differently than their majority (white) counterparts.”

• In regard to Asian candidates in the U.S.: “Voters assess them slightly more positively than majority (white) candidates.”

• “A meta-analysis on gender demonstrates that voters assess women candidates more positively than men candidates.”

• When voters from minority ethnic groups share the same ethnicity as the candidate, they positively “assess them 7.9 percentage points higher” than white candidates.

• Even in “patriarchal” societies, such as in Jordan, men will vote for a female candidate over a male if she shares the voter’s ethnicity.

The comprehensive Oxford study also cites the work of Anthony Kevins, of Utrecht University, who found across the U.S., Britain and Canada there is no sign that voters will refrain from marking an X on a ballot for a candidate because of their gender or ethnic background.

In Canada, Kevins found only one distinct bias: That members of the Canadian political left have, all other things being equal, “a higher likelihood of voting for the East Asian candidate.”

The University of Toronto’s Randy Besco, author of Identities And Interests: Race, Ethnicity and Affinity Voting, said in an interview that on average racial minority candidates don’t get fewer votes in Canada.

However, in one specific category, “racial minorities running for the Conservative Party do get less votes.”

The broader finding in the work of Besco and others is about significant so-called “affinity voting,” in which people elect members of their same identity group.

“Chinese and South Asians showed preference for their own ethnic group compared to a white candidate,” Besco said. And they also preferred to vote for members of other minority groups over white candidates. “But this preference was weaker than same-ethnic preference.”

Asked whether Canadians who are white also engage in affinity politics, by tending to mark their ballots for Canadians who are white, van Oosten said in an interview there is no indication white majorities in Britain and Canada make a point of voting for their ethnic in-group. But in the U.S., she said there is an inclination for some white people to do that.

In regard to Canadian voting trends around gender, Besco pointed to the work of his colleague, Semra Sevi of L’Université de Montréal, whose team wrote a paper titled, Do Women Get Less Votes? No.

Sevi et al studied the gender breakdown of over 21,000 candidates in all Canadian federal elections since 1921, when women first ran for seats in Parliament.

The researchers determined, in the 1920s, women were at a 2.5 percentage point disadvantage to men.

But in recent decades, Canadian voters have shown no anti-female bias.

What then explains the disparities on gender and ethnicity among MPs in the House of Commons?

In 2023, about 31 per cent of MPs were female, even though women make up half the Canadian population. Jerome Black and Andrew Griffith also wrote in Public Policy that MPs of colour comprised about 16 per cent of House of Commons members in 2021, while visible minorities made up about 20 per cent of all citizens.

Virtually all the researchers cited in this article maintain that such variance, in Canada and around the world, is not the result of voters being prejudiced against women or members of ethnic minorities.

It’s more about who decides to test the political waters.

The researchers strongly suggest the widespread incorrect belief that voters are prejudiced contributes to fewer minority and female candidates putting their names forward, or being supported, at the nomination stage.

As van Oosten puts it, “the demand” is definitely there for women and people of colour in office. But “the supply” often isn’t, she says, in large part because of misplaced fears about racist and sexist attitudes among the electorate.

In other words, as a society we need to stop discouraging women and people of colour from running for politics — and we can start by throwing away outdated images meant to show they have to jump over extra hurdles.

Source: Do women, people of colour get fewer votes in Canada? New studies say no

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

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