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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ICYMI: Douglas Todd: Why Vancouver housing prices became so out of whack

2024/02/07 Leave a comment

Not much new but neverthelesss telling:

Prices in Canada’s major cities have also been growing extremely fast compared to other countries.

The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which monitors global economic trends, reports that Canadian housing prices since 2015 have skyrocketed roughly twice as swiftly as prices in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Why? Even the stodgy Bank of Canada, which is hard to accuse of being racist, in January acknowledged that the country’s rapid population growth, 98 per cent of which comes from international migration, has led to higher costs for housing.

The National Bank of Canada’s chief economist, Stefane Marion, is also among the many voices lamenting how years of welcoming record-breaking numbers of new residents is strongly contributing to inflation, especially of shelter costs and rents.

Unfortunately, many politicians and the development industry obfuscate the issue by putting virtually all the blame for lofty prices on a lack of supply, plus mortgage rates and bureaucratic red tape.

But a host of housing analysts, such as Steve Saretsky, John Pasalis, Ron Butler, Stephen Punwasi, Ben Rabidoux, Patrick Condon, Mike Moffat and others, counter that Canadian developers, especially in Metro Vancouver, have been building new housing at a frantic rate — yet still cannot come close to keeping up with demand.

That demand has been exacerbated ever since 2015, when newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began to crank up targets for new permanent and non-permanent residents to rates far more intense than any other Western country. Last year, Canada’s population grew by a record 1.25 million people because of it.

Meanwhile, a huge cohort of people in Canada who seek a place to live at a reasonable price, including many newcomers, continue to suffer.

For Metro Vancouver, it all adds up to a double whammy: The gateway city has its own distinct house-price problems, and it’s located in a country that compounds them.

Source: Douglas Todd: Why Vancouver housing prices became so out of whack

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Douglas Todd: Remarkably popular book on baby boomers distorted by politicians

2023/09/02 Leave a comment

More on some of the false or at least misleading demographic arguments underlying current government immigration policies and organizations like the Century Initiative:

Daniel Stoffman was co-author of one of the most popular books written in Canada.

Boom, Bust and Echo: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Shift sold more than 300,000 copies after it was published in 1996, with a followup in 2000. Stoffman, who died this summer in Vancouver, shared the royalties equally with University of Toronto economist David Foot.

The theme of Boom, Bust and Echo was that “demographics explains two thirds of almost everything.”

Stoffman and Foot maintained the baby-boomer bulge of Canadians, born between 1947 and 1966, would have a huge impact on trends in real estate, the stock market, eating habits, health care, and leisure activities, including, for instance, the future of birdwatching.

But an odd thing happened largely because of this best-selling book. Its spotlight on Canada’s baby-boom cohort of almost 10 million people has often been misinterpreted, if not distorted, by corporate leaders and federal politicians. That did not please Stoffman, a journalist, author and secular Jew who described himself as a “radical centrist.”

Stoffman, who once worked as a reporter at The Vancouver Sun and edited the University of B.C. student newspaper, The Ubyssey, wrote 13 books before he died in Vancouver at age 78 on July 3. They included profiles of Canadian Tire, Barrick Gold, Boston Pizza and McCain Foods, plus The Money Machine, an unusually readable look at the mutual fund industry.

But the more risky book for Stoffman, in contrast to the crowd-pleasing Boom, Bust and Echo, was the one he wrote to challenge business leaders and politicians who maintain, to this day, that aging baby boomers are the No. 1 reason Canada needs one of the highest immigration rates in the world.

Most commentators, scholars and journalists have only recently been catching up with some of Stoffman’s analysis in his book Who Gets In: What’s Wrong with Canada’s Immigration Program — and How to Fix It, which was a finalist for the Donner Prize in public policy.

Stoffman was pro-immigration. But in the early 2000s he wanted Canadians to think seriously about the complex, almost taboo subject. That’s what he did after winning an Atkinson Fellowship from his liberal newspaper, The Toronto Star, to write a groundbreaking series on it.

Today, more mainstream voices are joining Stoffman in questioning the platitudes streaming out of Ottawa, particularly from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is currently justifying increasing Ottawa’s immigration target to a record 500,000 this year, double the 250,000 when the Liberals came to power.

Stoffman also anticipated the questions pundits are now raising about the federal Liberals’ related migration decisions to allow the number of foreign students and other non-permanent residents to reach almost two million, a figure CIBC’s Benjamin Tal cited this week. That compares to about half a million when Trudeau was first elected.

Former immigration minister Ahmed Hussen, echoing Trudeau’s talking points about the need to welcome immigrants, foreign students and guest workers to “grow our economy,” often justified his approach by referring to what he characterized as the baby boom problem.

“The question is: Why do we need immigration? Well, five million Canadians are set to retire by 2035. And we have fewer people working to support seniors and retirees,” he said, echoing similar remarks by other immigration ministers about the high costs of public health care for the elderly.

Stoffman’s book, Who Gets In, laid out some of the counter arguments economists are making today, which is that high in-migration can never replace an aging workforce.

The main reason is that immigrants also age. The baby boom generation is now aged 56 to 77, a cohort that includes millions of immigrants.

The second reason is many immigrants bring dependants. That is especially true under the Liberals, who quadrupled the number of parents and grandparents that could be sponsored.

The University of B.C.’s David Green and McMaster’s Byron Spencer, both economists, have their own unique way of responding to the supposed dilemma of aging baby boomers. Wryly, they say, the only conceivable way high immigration could offset Canada’s retiring workforce would be if every newcomer was a 15-year-old orphan. That’s because it would take 50 years for the teens to reach retirement age and, as orphans, they would not seek to bring in parents or grandparents.

Stoffman maintained there are two main reasons corporate leaders lobby Ottawa to keep immigration levels high, roughly triple per capita those in the U.S.

“I think the main purpose of Canada’s high immigration policy is to lower wages — and inflate real estate values,” he said in 2015.

The authors of Boom, Bust and Echo were aware, decades ago, of the two dangers. They recognized hiking immigration rates does indeed, as the politicians boast, increase the country’s overall GDP. But it also tends to lower GDP per capita, especially for low-skilled workers.

Stoffman said struggling immigrants best understood this downward pressure because they were the ones most likely to come to him after his speeches to express their worries.

In recent years, economists like Don Wright, former head of the B.C. government’s civil service, Mikal Skuterud of the University of Waterloo, and the B.C. Business Council’s David Williams have been strongly making the argument about lagging wages.

And a host of housing analysts, such as Steve Saretsky, John Pasalis and Ben Rabidoux, have also been warning about how high in-migration, including by foreign students and guest workers, puts intense pressure on rent and housing prices, which are at crisis levels in Vancouver and Toronto.

Stoffman was among the first to argue that Canada could deal with the societal costs of a large baby boom (which once made up 31 per cent of the population, but is now down to 23 per cent) by increasing productivity through innovation. Alas, in recent years productivity has fallen.

Another way is to offer incentives for Canadians to stay longer in the workforce, which the baby boom is doing. Canada could also encourage more people to have children, he said, particularly by providing better and cheaper daycare.

What would be an optimum number of permanent residents coming to Canada, leaving aside guest workers and foreign students? Eight years ago, Stoffman suggested a balanced number for Canada would be about 150,000 new immigrants annually.

Stoffman said he understood why right-wing people — “who think wage inflation is worse than income equality, and don’t want to see cab drivers and cleaning ladies earn more” — would promote “apocalyptic visions” about the need for higher in-migration targets.

“But it’s weird,” he wrote in Who Gets In, “that so many Canadians, who pride themselves on their social consciences and progressive politics, hurl nasty names at those who call for a more limited immigration program.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Remarkably popular book on baby boomers distorted by politicians

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