Immigration headlines distract from what's really broken

Whether you add or subtract berths on RMS Titanic, that great ship still sinks.

I don’t want you to think this week’s Toronto Star column reflects a dismissive view of the state of Canada’s immigration policy. I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that we’ve had arsonists in charge of that corner of Ottawa for far too long. Elections have consequences, as they say.

Every entrepreneur who subscribes to this Substack knows that if you need to expand your sales team, you hire sales folks. If you want to improve the hiring process at your tech startup, you find someone with HRPA credentials and relevant industry experience. I wasted our collective time to type out those two sentences, but the pretense has been that Ottawa’s ever-expanding immigration policy was rooted in finding “skilled labour” to fill holes in our economy. I must report that it doesn’t take much primary research to pierce that largely-accepted narrative.

Just last week, one of my morning papers ran a piece that seemed oblivious to the facts on the ground:

For many years, the federal Liberal Party made strong immigration a central plank of its economic plan for Canada, inviting scores of skilled workers to the country to slow demographic aging.

If only that were true.

To most voters, the hundreds of hourly wage job postings for Circle Ks across Canada don’t qualify as proactive “invitations for skilled labour” if the hiring criteria involves no more than a heartbeat and a high school degree. To be fair to Matt Lundy and Mark Rendell, if the LMIA cashier role in question requires one year of similar experience you are, I suppose, both “skilled” and will be performing “labour” once you start ringing-in those Lotto Max tickets. (As someone who at age 14 yearned to one day be old enough to run the Sunoco gas pumps at the corner of Riverside and Bloor, I’m well aware there’s a level of legal responsibility involved.)

What’s more maddening might be that these lower immigration targets serve the purposes of those who see racism in everything. Syed Hussan, of the Migrant Rights Network, would have us believe that “if there is even a small reduction in permanent immigration levels, the Liberal government would be pandering to the xenophobic idea that migrants are responsible for the housing and affordability crisis.”

That’s like calling parents “selfish” for deciding not have a seventh child when their current family home has but one bathroom.

I recognize that advocates are born to advocate, with the expectation that negotiating in public is an effective mechanism to influence public policy outcomes. Even then, it’s hard not to look at such things critically, just as you would analyze any business plan. If Mr. Hussan ran through his firm’s “powerpoint” with me, I’d start by asking him how a self-described “anti-colonialist” supports uncontrolled migration to a foreign land like Canada. Oxymoron, no?

I focus on these two vignettes because they demonstrate just how far away Canada is from having a prudent, unbiased, data-driven, strategic conversation about our nation’s future, both culturally (see representative prior post “My Canada does not include the Hamas flag” Oct. 15- 23) and economically (see representative prior post “Where's the plan to fix Canada's ‘grim’ business climate?” July 2-23), and the role that immigration will necessarily play in that future.

I’ve posted the first half of this week’s column below. If you want to see how it ends, buy a print copy, use your Apple News, or subscribe to the Star online via my special discount code: www.thestar.com/informed:

Facing a tight housing market and with 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor, Ottawa’s latest faux solution is to “slash” the number of new permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025, while capping new international study permits at an eye-popping 874,000 over the next two years.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller acknowledges “the system needed an injection of discipline,” although Glenn Vollebregt, the president of St. Lawrence College (SLC) in Kingston, argues that such moderation translates to “Canada saying we’re closed for business.”

Ottawa authorized 111,865 new international students in 2013. The revised 24-month Liberal plan provides almost 900,000 student visas — a massive increase versus a decade ago. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s newly “slashed” permanent resident target is still 30 per cent higher than it was in 2016, which was a high watermark at the time.

I don’t know anything about SLC’s reputation for numeric literacy, but Canada has not withdrawn the welcome mat.

The adjusted immigration targets are still at near-record highs, but some critics nevertheless see racism at play. One migrant advocate recently claimed any reduction in permanent immigration was the government “pandering to the xenophobic idea that migrants are responsible for the housing and affordability crisis.”

That’s not xenophobia, it’s our lack of infrastructure.

Honesty is the first step in any recovery journey, and I commend Miller for being the only senior Liberal to admit that “we’ve got a lot of people coming in, and it’s putting strain on housing prices, on infrastructure.” Miller’s absence from the shadow Liberal leadership campaign likely explains why he has the guts to even tinker with Trudeau’s “hog wild” immigration strategy.

Nothing the Liberals have done on the immigration file will magically reverse the fact that Canadians continue to get poorer relative to our American cousins. As we say in the venture capital space, you can’t cut your way to growth.

To give you a sense of how badly we’ve been served, consider these two inexplicable, but representative, realities: one macro, one micro.

On the macro front, Canada’s labour force participation rate has stubbornly stayed around 65 per cent for the past 20 years.

Across nine years in office, the Liberal government has trumpeted a variety of policies that should have boosted that participation rate: $10 daycare, billions for improved transit, legislating against non-competes, $8 billion for “underserved” entrepreneurs. Throw in remote work, and it’s troubling that more people aren’t finding a productive place in our economy. 

Hit the link to see how it ends.

MRM

(note: this post is an Opinion Piece)