It’s unlikely Mark Carney was aiming to relaunch a national immigration debate when he popped into the New York Times last month and mentioned in passing that Canada will “resume some controlled increase in the population” once the system is under control.
But that, unsurprisingly, has been the result — with opposition MPs warning about Ottawa again letting in “too many people too fast,” accompanied by alarmist op-eds in conservative media outlets, packaged into online ragebait.
Confusing matters is that, right around the time Carney gave the interview, Statistics Canada released revised numbers showing that the country’s population increased slightly last year, rather than decreasing as it had previously reported.
None of that adds up to evidence that the prime minister should back away from a discussion about when and how to ramp up immigration again, like Homer Simpson in the retreating-into-the-bushes meme.
On the contrary, it’s an indication that he needs to take hold of it much more purposefully and authoritatively than the manner in which he kicked things off.
His reluctance otherwise to broach the subject, at home and unprompted, is understandable. His Liberals were spooked by public backlash to the massive post-pandemic immigration increases that happened during Justin Trudeau’s final years in office, which imperiled both their party’s hold on office and a long-standing national consensus on welcoming newcomers.
Having cooled the temperature over the past couple of years by dramatically curtailing the numbers, they don’t want to crank it back up before Canadians are ready — and polls, including ones the government is citing in briefing notes, suggest they aren’t yet.
But Ottawa doesn’t have the luxury of waiting too long.
Not if Canada is to counteract the impact of an aging population and related workforce gaps with potentially brutal consequences, such as in health care. Or avoid shortages of skilled workers to build all the major projects Ottawa is trying to fast-track. Or generally capitalize on our draw (potentially stronger than ever given what’s happened to the U.S.) to the world’s best and brightest, including through universities suffering from a foreign-student crackdown that was mostly a response to dodgy private colleges serving as diploma mills.
Few would recommend reopening the doors to the extent Trudeau did, probably including Trudeau himself. But before long, if economic considerations are the main consideration, we’ll return to immigration that gets annual population growth back to the usual pre-pandemic levels above one per cent annually, as opposed to the roughly 0.5 per cent (the lowest rate in nearly a century), which the latest numbers suggest we’re currently at.
The cool-off period now is when Ottawa should be laying groundwork to ensure things go more smoothly next time around.
That might include upgrading the government’s collection and publication of immigration data to cut down on constant confusion around even basic measurements of net migration. And detailed analysis, also ideally shared with the public, about the extent to which our housing and other infrastructure is ready to accept higher inflows.
It should involve allocating enough resources, human and technological, to avoid massive approval and enforcement backlogs that have undermined faith in the system previously.
This is also the time to comprehensively review the points system used to weigh applications by economic migrants, to ensure it’s in line with current needs. And to be conducting a cool-headed survey of various industries, along with besieged colleges and universities, to identify where increased flows of people would best complement our current skill sets, rather than being held hostage to lobbying in the heat of the moment.
Then there’s the matter of consulting with the provinces about where people are most needed and in what sectors — a task made more unpleasant and more necessary by the election of an immigration-sceptical separatist government in Quebec, as well as an Alberta referendum in which voters are likely to endorse giving that province more control over immigration decisions.
All this requires a strong immigration minister in place, which is a description that nobody in Ottawa seems to think applies to the current one, Lena Diab. If that’s the case, Carney shouldn’t wait until things have really heated up to replace her with someone he can empower to get the ducks in a row.
But we’re also approaching a point where Carney himself needs to properly explain why we can’t remain as chilled to newcomers as we are now.
Nobody expects him to deliver Trudeau-esque paeans to welcoming the world. But he’s highly capable of leveraging his economic credibility, and the immense benefit of the doubt Canadians are currently giving him, to set up the case for why we need that controlled population increase he mentioned.
And if it’s a tough sell even for him, that’s all the more reason to make it directly to Canadians, rather than just inviting further suspicion by dropping hints when he’s on foreign soil.
