If the world needs more Canada, Canada needs more of the world.
With 41 million people, Canada remains a country of modest population occupying the world’s second-largest land mass.
We still answer to the description former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King gave Canada: a country with too much land and too few people.
More people would better enable Canada to build more homes, hospitals and public transit systems, and to expand our ports, rail and power corridors.
More people would accelerate our recruitment for an understaffed Canadian Armed Forces.
According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, while immigrants make up about 26 per cent of the workforce, they account for 35 per cent of computer programmers, 43 per cent of engineers and 57 per cent of chemists.
We need more new Canadians to launch startup enterprises in manufacturing; medical, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing technologies; and exportable agri-tech products.
In the past few years, Canada has been bullied as perhaps never before by great powers — the U.S., China and India.
As a G7 country, Canada plays a major role in the global economic ecosystem, indeed, an essential one in supplying the world with food, energy and critical minerals.
But because we matter but don’t yet have the population heft to stand up for ourselves, we are the G7 country most vulnerable to tariff injury and internal meddling by the great powers.
“Having more people would give us a lot more clout in a world where it’s easy for the large to push around the small,” Steve Lafleur, a research director at Montreal’s Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP), wrote in a recent Maclean’s essay.
Social media is currently swamped with assertions that an influx of immigrants is squeezing native-born Canadians out of jobs, notably low-pay jobs.
“A lot of Canadians don’t want to do the jobs that are so-called low-skill, or low-pay, which are things like processing your chicken, slaughtering your beef, or gutting fish,” says economist Armine Yalnizyan.
The national average rate of unemployment, at 7.1 per cent in August, is at a nine-year high excluding the pandemic.
Yet Ontario is short 230,000 skilled workers, Premier Doug Ford told the Toronto Region Board of Trade earlier this month.
Someone of prominence, say, Prime Minister Mark Carney, needs to explain that we cannot solve our shortages of family doctors, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and mining, farming and construction workers without a constant inflow of new Canadians.
Everyone grants that Ottawa was wrong to take a shortcut in addressing the acute post-pandemic labour shortage by opening the doors wider to immigrants without first ensuring that Canada had the capacity to welcome so many people so quickly.
But Ottawa has since sharply reduced immigration levels. And the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program has been scaled back. Carney said this month that it will be further reformed.
Canada has long relied on temporary workers, whose essential services in agriculture, construction and other realms predate the creation of the TFW program. But the program needs to be reformed to protect foreign workers from all-too-common employer abuse including inadequate pay, shoddy housing and unsafe working conditions.
One remedy is to no longer tie a foreign worker to just one employer, which gives the employer more ability to commit abuse. The program must also be refined to eliminate fraud, in which prospective TFW applicants are told by unscrupulous agents in their homelands that TFW status is a gateway to permanent Canadian residency, which of course it is not.
Having regained control of the entry system we mustn’t make a second mistake in depriving ourselves of workers from abroad.
“Canada is in a global competition for talent,” Creso Sá, a vice-dean at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), wrote recently in The Conversation.
“This is especially true in key areas where specialized skills and expertise are indispensable to Canada’s economy. A growing number of countries are also seeking to attract these immigrants to bolster their economies. Canada cannot afford to let slip its attractiveness to highly skilled immigrants.”
Demographic experts say Canada will grow to a population of 100 million by the end of the century, despite our low fertility rates and because Canada is among the most favoured countries for newcomers. Most Western countries and China will shrink in population.
And they warn that without robust immigration we risk a growing imbalance between working-age people and retirees.
We need to do a better job of aligning population intake with, among other needs, our planned doubling of housing construction to 500,000 new units per year over the next decade.
And we should put more effort into planning where new immigrants choose to live, in small and mid-sized cities like London, Kingston and Sudbury.
With a bigger tax base and greater economies of scale from population growth, smaller communities can grow as Winnipeg has done in the past two decades into dynamic communities.
“Two-thirds of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border,” Lafleur notes. “Canadians should view future immigration as an opportunity to upgrade some of our mid-sized cities, the anchors of regional economies, to allow them to become more competitive and support higher levels of services and amenities.”
That would also take some of the pressure off our biggest cities, which have absorbed most of the newest Canadians, while making smaller communities — and by extension the country — more economically resilient.
Filling up Canada’s empty spaces with newcomers has been a priority since John A. Macdonald was prime minister. We must stay on that proven path to even greater prosperity.
