Immigration is good, but too much immigration is a problem

By Craig Westcott / July 7, 2023

As Canada Day celebrations unfolded last weekend, the country hit another milestone – we’ve reached the 40-million-mark people-wise.

It seems like just a couple of years ago our population was around 30 million.

But with successive Conservative and Liberals governments throwing the doors wide open to immigrants, Canada is the fastest growing country in the developed world, population wise.

Last year, more than a million immigrants came to Canada. One in every four Canadians is an immigrant, with that ratio expected to increase to one in every three within a decade. We’re letting people in at such a high clip that immigration is causing a severe housing crisis, and according to a recent survey of economists, countering measures by the Bank of Canada to curb inflation. With too many people chasing too few goods, especially housing, prices can only go one way, and that’s up.

Canada has done good from immigration. The newcomers have brought talent, energy and money that has fueled economic prosperity and enriched our culture. The two most impressive politicians in the country – Michael Chong of the Conservatives and Anita Anand of the Liberals – are children of immigrants. It’s a pity neither is the leader of their respective parties; Canada might be in a better place if they were. The most trustworthy journalist in the country, by my reckoning anyway, is Ian Hanomansing, also the child of immigrants. So, let’s face it: Canada is a better place because of immigration.

But too high a rate of immigration – the level we’re at now – is contributing to a widening disparity between the haves and have nots. The homelessness crisis was not caused by immigrants, but the high rate of immigration is exacerbating it and making things tougher for people on the bottom end, including working class Canadians who no longer have hope of ever owning their own home.

I attended a seminar in Clarenville recently on how to hire immigrants. We had just spent nearly a year looking for a qualified graphic designer before finding the excellent local person we have now. It turns out, the Government of Newfoundland, and the Atlantic Provinces as a whole, have cut special deals with Ottawa to open the immigration gates even wider than they are in the rest of Canada.

Gerry Byrne and the Liberals tout their immigration policy as a massive success story, because of the 10,000 or so immigrants a year flooding into Newfoundland. But it’s not much of an accomplishment to simply open a door. Literally hundreds of millions of people are desperate to come to Canada. It’s not like we have to coax them in. Not with the sweeteners the Province and Ottawa are offering.

The sweeteners are these: guaranteed Permanent Resident status in as little as five months, and the right to bring your spouse and family in too with those people also getting Permanent Resident status and open work permits.

I thought most of the newcomers behind the counters at Tim Horton’s or the processing lines in the fish plants were being imported temporarily to relieve a labour crunch and would have to return home. Not so. They are now Permanent Residents of Canada.

We have so many immigrants coming to Newfoundland, the population of the province has increased seven quarters in a row and is growing at a clip not seen since 1971 when the Pope was still telling Catholics to use bird control instead of birth control.

Permanent Resident status qualifies the newcomers to employment insurance benefits, welfare, free health care, free primary and secondary education, an old age pension, and all the other benefits and rights of being a Canadian citizen, except the right to vote or hold public office. They get those rights once they get Canadian citizenship. In the past year, some 364,000 people were granted citizenship.

There are basically no restrictions. A permanent resident who breaks the law gets dealt with in the Canadian courts and has no fear of ever being kicked out of the country.

It seems to me there should be more involved to becoming a Canadian than working at a fast-food joint for five months. There should be a couple of years of probation, at least.

Letting in so many immigrants at once lets governments at both levels hide their inability or unwillingness to deal with serious problems that need immediate attention, including the housing crisis, our low labour participation rate (that is the high percentage of working age people who are not in the work force contributing to the economy), the drug trade, welfare problems and the shortage of mental health services.

The federal and provincial governments boast they are solving the labour crunch through immigration. Yes, we need some immigration. But we also need to train and support more Canadian born citizens who are capable of work, but for various reasons are not employed.

Canada should stop using immigration to paper over other problems, and join the rest of the developed world, including the United States and Europe, in looking for ways to reduce immigration.

In Great Britain, which has a much lower immigration rate than Canada and where immigrants have been well integrated into society for decades, there’s a huge debate about how to bring down immigration. The people leading the charge are immigrants themselves, or the children of immigrants, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman. They know that while some immigration is necessary and good, too much causes other problems.

It’s especially important to tighten the flow of immigration now, because as climate change worsens, we’re going to face much more pressure to take in people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by droughts or floods, or fires or whatever else the planet is going to throw at us for speeding up climate change. To be good humanitarians and accommodate them, we need a stable democracy with room left to house them. 

Finally, a word to the wise. An important takeaway from that seminar I attended in Clarenville is that if you really need to import an immigrant to work in your business, and many people legitimately do, don’t hire a HR agency. All the services you need to find and hire talent overseas is available for free from the two levels of government. The staff in those departments are eager to shepherd you through the process, and help you find candidates. They also have the advantage of knowing the rules. There are tales of some agencies charging desperate immigrants as much as $40,000 a head to supposedly “enhance” their chances of getting a job in Canada. That’s on top of what they are charging the employers. Stay away from such outfits. You don’t need them. People are desperate to come here. All you have to do is open the door. But let’s not open it so wide that we create a whole new set of problems.