Canada looking to stabilize immigration levels at 500,000 per year in 2026

2023/11/03 Leave a comment

One of the general articles covering the plan with Phil Triadafilopoulos stating the obvious that housing pressures will continue with these high levels give the time it takes for housing to be built:

After increasing its immigration targets several times in recent years, the federal government announced Wednesday it’s aiming to maintain its target of welcoming 500,000 new permanent residents in 2026.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller said the target is meant to support the labour supply while easing pressures on housing and health care.

“What Canadians are telling us, what economists are telling us, is that we have to dive into the micro-economic impacts of immigration,” Miller told a press conference.

The government has steadily increased its immigration targets in recent years to boost the workforce and support an aging population.

Last year, the government released a plan to grant permanent residency to 465,000 people in 2023, a figure that’s set to rise to 500,000 by 2025. The immigration target for 2015 was under 300,000.

Miller said Wednesday the government is now levelling off its planned immigration intake to see what sorts of adjustments can be made to Canada’s immigration programs.

“Those numbers were needed but now we have to take a look at them, where we feel they’re reasonable and plateauing in a space where we think it makes sense,” he said.

“We have a lot of complex calculations that we need to make and measures we need to adjust. I think it’s sometimes politically convenient to come out with a hammer-type approach… It’s more on the level of finer surgery that we need to adjust.”

Canada’s population grew by a record 1 million people in 2022. The population also surpassed the 40 million mark earlier this year.

That population growth is coming at a time when the country is also facing a housing shortage. Almost 5.8 million new units will have to be built by the end of the decade in order to fix the housing supply, said a report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released in September.

Miller admitted the housing shortage was a factor in the decision to level off immigration targets. He said it was not the main factor.

“If that were the sole reason, it would totally be misunderstanding the challenges I think we’re facing as a country,” he said.

Many experts have said that the root causes of this housing shortage are not related to immigration. Red tape and anti-development sentiment at the municipal level, for example, can lead to major delays in housing projects.

The federal government is pushing municipalities to adjust their zoning bylaws through its housing accelerator program.

Miller maintained that Canada will need to maintain immigration levels in order to provide the workers who can build houses.

Earlier this year, the government announced changes to the express entry system that would prioritize tradespeople for permanent residency. Miller said those changes have attracted roughly 1,500 tradespeople from abroad.

But Phil Triadafilopoulos, a political science professor who specializes in immigration at the University of Toronto, said high levels of immigration will still put pressure on the housing market.

“I don’t know whether pausing at a historically high level of immigration is really going to do much to ease affordability issues around housing,” he told CBC News. “Those pressures are going to persist, I think.”

The government’s target for economic immigrants is holding steady at 60 per cent of total immigration, according to the new plan

Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, said the government should boost that portion to 65 per cent.

“Unfilled job openings for highly skilled and educated professionals remain stubbornly high. If not addressed with urgency and ambition, this shortage of leading talent will have a large and lasting impact on Canadian technological innovation, labour productivity and capital investment,” he said in a media statement.

Jenny Kwan, the NDP’s immigration critic, said the Liberals’ plan lacks transparency.

‘While the government’s immigration levels plan document talks about ensuring newcomers can successfully resettle in Canada, there are no plans attached to make that happen. Once again, it’s all talk and not action,” she said in a media statement.

Source: Canada looking to stabilize immigration levels at 500,000 per year in 2026

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

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Good overview of some of the issues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Canada got to 40 million

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canada’s infrastructure problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tradeoffs that come with population growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Canada cap international students and migrant workers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canada ‘cannot afford to allow for polarization’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hyder: Canada needs to get its stalled immigration system back on track

2020/09/09 Leave a comment

The Canadian big business perspective, arguing that Canada should go back to the previous immigration targets given a larger population means more consumers and hence business revenues.

However, it focusses on GDP, not per capita GDP, it ignores the fact that previous recessions have hit hardest on recently arrived immigrants and have long-term impact on their earnings.

Moreover, an almost cult-like fixation on previously announced target without any serious reexamination of whether they remain appropriate is  incredibly short-sighted. The only interesting point is the the reference to Anna Triandafyllidou’s innovation proposal for virtual immigration (for knowledge industries), the rest is simply repeating previous arguments:

The effects of COVID-19 on Canada’s economy can be measured in many ways. Some are obvious: millions unable to work, thousands of firms forced to close their doors, more than $250-billion in emergency government spending.

Less obvious, but of potentially greater significance to Canada’s long-term economic health, is the impact of the pandemic on immigration.

Canada’s ability to attract newcomers to its shores has long been one of this country’s greatest strengths and competitive advantages. Immigration enriches the social fabric of the nation while boosting the economy, helping to offset a low birth rate and an aging population.

Immigrants bring energy, skills, new ideas and entrepreneurial spirit. They start companies, fill skill shortages, buy houses and pay taxes.

It’s no exaggeration to say – as Marco Mendicino, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, declared in a speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto last Feb. 28 – that the future of Canada “hinges on immigration.”

The minister couldn’t have foreseen it at the time, but less than a month later Canada responded to the global pandemic by temporarily closing its borders to all non-essential foreign travellers.

Overnight, the country’s intake of immigrants – which had been expected to hit 341,000 this year – slowed to a trickle.

In April, Canada welcomed just 4,140 new permanent residents, 85 per cent fewer than in the same month in 2019. Since then, the pace of admissions has gradually picked up, reaching 11,000 in May and 19,200 in June.

Still, at the current rate we can expect to see 170,000 fewer permanent residents entering the country in 2020 than planned, according to a recent report by RBC Economics.

The collapse in immigration means Canada’s population is currently experiencing its slowest growth since 2015. That will have important implications across many sectors, including residential construction, industries with labour shortages, and Canada’s postsecondary education system.

Canada currently ranks third in the world as a destination for international students. In 2019, 642,000 foreign students injected more than $22-billion into the economy, supporting 170,000 jobs.

The good news is that, despite the new coronavirus, Canadian officials are continuing to process new applications for permanent and temporary residence, albeit at a reduced rate due to physical distancing and other pandemic-related restrictions.

In addition, Mr. Mendicino has removed at least some of the obstacles standing in the way of would-be immigrants. Recently he introduced a special “one-time” pathway to permanent residency for refugee claimants who are working in front-line health and long-term care jobs.

He also announced that visitors to Canada who have a valid job offer will be able to apply for a work permit without the normal requirement to leave the country. The temporary policy is aimed at helping employers who continue to face challenges recruiting and hiring international workers during the pandemic.

Such measures are welcome, even though they won’t make a big difference to Canada’s immigration numbers.

There’s no getting around the fact that the longer the COVID-19 pandemic persists, the more difficult it will be for the country to meet its goal of more than one million new permanent residents between 2020 and 2022.

What can be done to close the gap? Anna Triandafyllidou, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University, has proposed a workaround for highly skilled people who have a job offer in Canada but are unable to get here because of travel restrictions. Under the rules, they can’t obtain a work permit or a social insurance number until they enter the country, which means they can’t be paid.

The solution, Ms. Triandafyllidou says, is technology. Her idea is to issue digital work permits and temporary SINs that would allow these “virtual immigrants” to start working remotely for their Canadian employers while they wait for the health emergency to abate.

Beyond that, immigration must be a pillar of Canada’s postpandemic economic recovery plan. In November, the federal government is expected to table its next multiyear immigration plan. It should move to make up lost ground by raising the targets for 2022 and beyond. The incremental growth should emphasize economic-class newcomers – those admitted through Express Entry programs, the Provincial Nominee Program, Quebec’s programs, and other federal streams such as the Atlantic Immigration Pilot.

The demographic factors that drive Canada’s need for immigrants have not changed due to COVID-19. Neither, it seems, has public support for immigration. In a Leger poll this summer, respondents agreed by a three-to-one margin that newcomers will help rather than hurt Canada’s long-term economic recovery. The sooner Canada’s immigration system gets back on track, the better.

Goldy Hyder is the president & chief executive officer of Business Council of Canada.

Source: Canada needs to get its stalled immigration system back on track

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Don’t make election about immigration, corporate Canada tells political leaders

2019/04/29 Leave a comment

Not surprising. Focus on the economic case (and economic class of immigrants) is where support for immigration is strongest:

Big business leaders worried about Canada’s aging demographics have been urging political parties to avoid inflaming the immigration debate ahead of this fall’s federal election.

The head of the lobby group representing chief executives of Canada’s largest corporations said he’s already raised the issue with political leaders who are shifting into campaign mode for the October vote.

With signs of public concern about immigration, Business Council of Canada president and CEO Goldy Hyder said he’s promoted the economic case in favour of opening the country’s doors to more people.

“We are 10 years away from a true demographic pressure point,” Hyder said during a meeting with reporters Thursday in Ottawa. “What I’ve said to the leaders of the political parties on this issue is, ‘Please, please do all you can to resist making this election about immigration.’ That’s as bluntly as I can say it to them.”

The message from corporate Canada comes at a time when public and political debate has focused on immigration, refugees and border security, to the point it could emerge as a key election issue, tempting parties fighting hard for votes.

A poll released this month by Ekos Research Associates suggested that the share of people who think there are too many visible minorities in Canada is up “significantly,” even though overall opposition to immigration has been largely unchanged in recent years and remains lower than it was in the 1990s.

Canada has been ratcheting up its immigration numbers and it plans to welcome more. The Immigration Department set targets of bringing in nearly 331,000 newcomers this year, 341,000 in 2020 and 350,000 in 2021, according to its 2018 report to Parliament.

As the baby-boomer generation ages, experts say Canada — like other western countries — will need a steady influx of workers to fill jobs and to fund social programs, like public health care, through taxes.

Thanks to the stronger economy, Canadian companies have already been dealing with labour shortages. Healthy employment growth has tightened job markets, making it more difficult for firms to find workers.

“Every job that sits empty is a person not paying taxes … We have job shortages across the country and they’re just not at the high end,” said Hyder, who added his members are well aware that immigration has become a tricky political issue.

“We’re worried about that in the sense that the public can very easily go to a xenophobic place.”

Hyder also brought up Quebec Premier Francois Legault’s election promise last year to cut annual immigration levels in his province by 20 per cent. Legault won the election after making the vow, even though Quebec faces significant demographic challenges.

Earlier this week, the Bank of Canada noted the economic importance of immigration in its monetary policy report. Carolyn Wilkins, the central bank’s senior deputy governor, said without immigration, Canada’s labour force would cease adding workers within five years.

“The fact we’ve got people that are buying things, that are using services, that are going to stores, that need houses — well, that creates a little bit of a boost to the economy,” Wilkins told a news conference in Ottawa when asked about the subject. “Certainly, immigration is a big part of the story in terms of potential growth, which will feed itself into actual growth.”

Hyder said he’s personally part of a group called the Century Initiative, which would like to see Canada, a country of about 37 million, grow to 100 million people by 2100.

The group was co-founded by Hyder and several others, including two members of the Trudeau government’s influential economic advisory council — Dominic Barton, global managing director of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., and Mark Wiseman, a senior managing director for investment management giant BlackRock Inc. Hyder was a business consultant before joining the business council and was once a top aide to federal Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark.

The Century Initiative wants Canada to responsibly expand its population as a way to help drive its economic potential.

“Demographics are not going to be relying on just making babies, we’re going to need immigration,” Hyder said. “We have to be able to communicate that from an economic perspective, but cognizant of the social concerns that people have.”

Source: Don’t make election about immigration, corporate Canada tells political leaders

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HYDER: No crisis with newcomers arriving in Canada

2018/09/05 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Goldy Hyder of Hill+Knowlton Strategies and board member of the Century Initiative.

Perhaps more important is that this appeared in the Toronto Sun to provide a different perspective than their usual contributors (just as the Star and Globe could benefit from a broader range of views):

Over 25 years ago, I wrote my master’s thesis on how the crisis label applied to public policy is both an opportunity for governments and a problem for its citizens.

The example I used to make the point was the “refugee crisis” generated by the dramatic boat arrival of 174 Sikhs off the coast of Nova Scotia in August 1986. This was preceded in equally dramatic fashion by 155 Tamils also arriving on a boat a year earlier.

In the first case, the government of the day responded with openness, generosity and willingness to embrace those who claimed to be fleeing persecution.

The public response was less generous, particularly upon learning that the boat and its occupants were in fact arriving not from India (hardly a refugee producing country) but in fact a safe country (Germany) that could have and should have applied its own refugee laws to determine legitimacy of the claims.

An RCMP officer standing in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., advises migrants that they are about to illegally cross from Champlain, N.Y., and will be arrested, Monday, Aug. 7, 2017.

When fate afforded the government a do-over upon the next boat arrival, the response by the same government — clearly feeling both duped by the circuitous manner in which the first boat arrived, and with the full knowledge of public sentiments on such arrivals — was to label the issue as a “refugee crisis.”

This dominated headlines, debate in Parliament and the public’s attention. It allowed a government under pressure on other issues to leverage the advantages that a “crisis” label affords any government: Namely the public’s demand and expectation that the government will — as a matter of priority — focus on and put an end to the “crisis.”

In 2018, history is repeating itself.

It was no more a crisis in the aforementioned incidents than there is one today from a purely statistical perspective. But that didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now.

There are many reasons we stand to be worse off if the debate heads in the direction it currently is driven by emotion, stoked by political agendas on both sides.

Canadians, I believe, are smarter than that. But, they must be heard.

We know our history. Unless Indigenous, we are all immigrants. What we cherish as a value is fairness and rule of law. We do not like our generosity and compassion to be abused.

While much attention goes to how the so called “alt-right” or those labelled racists, the fact is that masks what is taking place much more broadly in society albeit less overtly.

In the modern era, these debates cannot be suppressed, nor do they function uncomfortably underground. Rather, they play out in the open and that, frankly, is an opportunity.

Migration in all its forms has long been used as an issue to debate because it is deeply personal and goes to who we are as a people and as a nation. We need to be reminded from time to time about the role immigrants, refugees and migrants (not all the same thing) have played in making Canada what it is today.

We know study after study has proven time and again that immigrants put more into the system than they take out of it. Yet, people here in Canada, and in many other countries, are reaching a point of saying either “no more” or “not so many.” Whether there is a crisis or not (there isn’t), this is an opportunity to hear the voices of Canadians, left and right and those in between to understand what is driving their emotions.

If there is one thing I have learned about we Canadians, it is this: Given the right information, provided an opportunity to speak and be heard, there is a collective wisdom in the Canadian public consciousness that usually gets the answer right in the end.

Source: HYDER: No crisis with newcomers arriving in Canada

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

We can’t let Canada’s politicians divide us with populist labels: Goldy Hyder

2017/01/17 Leave a comment

While I agree with Hyder on the risk of playing to divisions, ignoring class and other differences also entails risk of denial and addressing issues.

Generally those who decry ‘class warfare’ do so from a position of privilege. What is needed, hard to do so in politics, is more nuanced debate about difference, barriers, and ways to overcome them:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to cancel his plans to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos so he can undertake a cross-country tour and engage directly with Canadians is a symptom of a much larger and more troubling trend where it has become increasingly fashionable for political leaders to frame public-policy decisions in terms of their potential impact on “ordinary,” “real” or “average” Canadians.

These terms, which are now at the heart of debates about everything from health-care funding to the benefits of globalization, have come to be used almost interchangeably with the equally popular “middle class.” To the extent that many Canadians consider themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be part of the middle class, these labels are intended to convey a sense of inclusiveness.

Yet the opposite is true. As we have seen in the United States and Britain, when these types of generic terms are used to describe large groups, they are generally defined on the basis of who they exclude: the so-called elites.

These terms are, in fact, inherently divisive. Just as few of us would self-identify as being “abnormal,” our characteristic Canadian modesty prevents us from thinking we are particularly exceptional. If we are not among those frequently maligned “elites,” we must therefore, be part of some “middle-class” majority. (Even the math holds up, as we’re told “elites” are only the top 1 per cent.)

The problem with vague terms like these is that they invite people to fill in the blanks with their own biases about who fits into each group – and we’ve seen the consequences that has had in other countries. Canadians should not be urged to divide themselves on the basis of income, education, ethnicity, religion or region. To do so would be to unravel our rich multicultural tapestry by pulling on loose threads.

We don’t want Canadians to be inherently distrustful of experts, to presume that a person is less ethical because they have a higher or lower net worth, or to believe that those with global outlooks aren’t patriotic. Any proliferation of populist labels risks creating an “us versus them” conflict within the country, something that can be exploited by those looking for an easy way to galvanize and mobilize a political base.

Some may suggest I am being alarmist, but I have spent the better part of my career in the field of communications, and in my professional experience our choice of language matters a great deal. It has also been my personal experience. As an immigrant and a Muslim, I have witnessed firsthand how quickly the word “different” becomes “foreign,” and how easily “foreign” can become “un-Canadian.”

At a certain point, assigning some meaning to arbitrary or artificial terms inevitably becomes a question of defining values. That is where things get complicated and where the real fissures can emerge. Canada’s 150-year story has many chapters in which divisions between people defined the politics of an era. Some of our worst mistakes have been made by governments in attempts to satisfy one group over another.

Without question, governments must consider the very different realities in which Canadians live when they develop policy res-ponses to pressing issues – but that is about technical implementation. What governments must avoid doing is using the levers of policy to divide Canadians on the basis of their different circumstances, as opposed to building a broad consensus based on shared values and interests.

Moreover, governments must avoid making decisions – such as whether to attend a global conference with the world’s most powerful economic stakeholders – based solely on the perceived optics of those decisions.

In these uncertain times, we cannot afford to make mistakes or miss opportunities. We need to seize every advantage we have, and that means ignoring those who call for us to marginalize or vilify others. Instead of targeting a particular class of Canadian – whether upper, lower or middle – let’s avoid entirely the temptation to engage in any type of class distinctions or, worse still, to inflame class warfare.

When the Fathers of Confederation created our country 150 years ago, they sought to unite us in common cause. Let us invoke that same spirit in this anniversary year by uniting Canadians, not dividing them.

Source: We can’t let Canada’s politicians divide us with populist labels – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,