Canada officially has an immigration problem. No, it’s not the one we’ve been hearing about for months now, which the federal government has belatedly addressed through policies that cap both the number of foreign students coming to this country and temporary foreign workers being used by our business community. With rents in major urban centres already dropping, the impact of the post-COVID surge in temporary migrants on shelter costs and demand for services like healthcare and education is already on the wane. 

But this is just the beginning of Canada’s immigration challenge. Recent polling data confirms the pro-immigration consensus that we once enjoyed — one that was unique among developed countries — is rapidly deteriorating. According to new data from Environics Institute’s Focus Canada research, nearly six in ten (58 per cent) Canadians now think the country accepts too many immigrants. That’s a 14 per cent increase over 2023, which was itself a 17 per cent increase on 2022’s data. In other words, the number of Canadians who think we accept too many immigrants has more than doubled in the last two years. 

It’s a reminder of how fragile that consensus actually was — and how much the federal government might have overestimated its durability. There’s no question that its policy choices, from opening up the temporary foreign worker program to allowing far more foreign students to study here, have exacerbated existing pressures on housing affordability and access to key services. They own these mistakes and that should be particularly painful for a political party that has long defined itself by its embrace of multiculturalism as official government policy. 

But if Liberal bumbling helped sow this bumper crop of anti-immigration sentiment, Conservative politicians and pundits are more than ready to harvest it. As the Environics survey shows, 80 per cent of Conservative supporters — 80 per cent! — now think Canada has too many immigrants, up from 43 per cent in 2022. Based on the recent behaviour of some of the Conservative movement’s leading lights, they seem determined to push that figure even higher. 

In her recent public address that announced new funding for schools in Alberta, for example, premier Danielle Smith effectively blamed immigration for the overcrowding that has defined classrooms in her province for years now. “The Trudeau government’s unrestrained open border policies, permitting well over a million newcomers each year, are causing significant challenges,” she said. Never mind, for the moment, that her government literally funded a multi-million dollar ad campaign called “Alberta is Calling” that encouraged people to move from BC, Ontario, and the rest of the country. For Smith, it’s much easier to just blame the immigrants.

Her predecessor, former federal immigration minister Jason Kenney, has been nearly as reckless on this issue. In an interview with The Hub co-founder Sean Speer, he suggested that federal immigration policy is really about “creating a new permanent Liberal voting bloc, and inversely, a political trap for Conservatives.” This is a more sophisticated version of Elon Musk’s now-familiar refrain about how Democrats are supposedly trying to “rig” the election by allowing migrants into the country to vote (even though they can’t). As Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne noted, “this is an utterly irresponsible and inflammatory accusation: Trumpian, in fact.”

It gets even Trumpier as you move further towards the margins of the Canadian Conservative ecosystem. Over at True North, an increasingly popular safe space for Conservative politicians, show host Harrison Faulkner has been repeatedly testing the limits of just how far he can go. “Why do we need to have foreign-born politicians at the cabinet table?” he said in a video that listed off people like Justice Minister Arif Virani, Minister of Small Business Rechie Valdez and a host of others. “ What is the benefit that it brings to Canada?”

The benefit, of course, is that they bring a broader range of experiecnes and backgrounds to the decision-making table than a cabinet comprised entirely of Canadian-born people could. It also completely misses the point here, which is that where they come from — and whether their family has been here for ten years or ten generations — has no bearing on things like merit or competence. 

But these are rational answers to an irrational impulse, one that seems to be spreading rapidly among Conservatives both here in Canada and around the world. Remember Donald Trump’s demonstrably false nonsense about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating dogs and cats? Well, in the least surprising development possible, Canada’s own Rebel Media headed there to engage in what Politico’s Adam Wren described as a “conspiracy scavenger hunt.” As it happens, Danielle Smith was featured at a Rebel Media event in Calgary earlier this month. One might wonder if the issue of migrants eating pets came up. 

None of this is going to end well if Canada continues down this path. Our long-term prosperity depends on our ability to effectively integrate immigrants, who will account for all of our country’s population growth by 2030. That population growth is crucial to mitigating the economic and fiscal effects of a rapidly aging population, and immigration will play a key role in addressing labour shortages in areas such as caregiving, healthcare and the skilled trades. If we’re ever going to harness the numerous benefits associated with a larger population — say, 100 million — we need to get a handle on this issue right now. 

Conservatives need to get a handle on it too. They may think they can harness this energy to their own purposes, which is the exact same mistake establishment Republicans thought about Donald Trump and his own nativist obsessions. But the more their party is defined by anti-immigration sentiment, the more they’ll feel compelled to cater to its self-destructive impulses. As we’re seeing in America, that can and will lead to some very dark and dangerous places.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s latest stunt is really a tell 

As a glorified astroturf organization that’s an unofficial wing of the Conservative Party of Canada, I don’t pay much heed to what the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has to say. Their capacity for hypocrisy is almost impressively expansive, given how willing they are to look past dollars being wasted by governments like Doug Ford’s in Ontario and Danielle Smith’s in Alberta to highlight the pennies being spent by Ottawa. 

But their latest nonsense — sorry, “campaign” — deserves a bit of scrutiny. In a recent social media video, CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano went after the recent changes in the federal budget that will allow for automatic tax filing. “Don’t give the CRA more power over taxpayers,” he said. “The agency's job is to collect taxes. If it also files more Canadians' taxes for them, that puts it in a classic conflict of interest.”

Let’s take a step back and understand what’s really at stake here. And don’t take it from me, your friendly local social democrat. Here’s Kim Moody, the former chair of the Canadian Tax Foundation and a guy who I’ve sparred with frequently on social media, writing in that far-left outlet called the Financial Post: “Given that many of our country’s tax credits and entitlements are income sensitive and require a tax filing to substantiate income, it is usually important for all Canadians to file tax returns. However, for many, it is not easy and, more often, simply intimidating. Not good.”

This is why countries like the United Kingdom and Australia already have automatic filing and why lower-income Canadians will disproportionately benefit from its wider introduction here. The Canada Revenue Agency has opened its pilot project here to more than 1.5 million Canadians who have “a lower income or a fixed income and who are in a simple tax situation that remains unchanged from year to year.”

As Moody says, “it would be preferable for people in such straight-forward situations to not pay much, if anything, to annually prepare their returns.” According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer (yes, yes, I know), if automatic filing was rolled out to everyone, Canadian taxpayers would get an additional $1.6 billion back in benefits this year. That figure rises to $1.9 billion by the end of the decade. 

So why is the CTF getting so agitated about this?  Because it’s not actually interested in advocating for taxpayers, least of all those who would benefit from this change. It’s simply a proxy for the Conservative Party of Canada and their long standing desire to shrink the size of government at every available opportunity — and help the wealthiest Canadians get even wealthier. 

In his clip, Terrazzano notes that the CRA “has about 60,000 bureaucrats. In the US, the IRS has around 80,000 bureaucrats. So in Canada, there’s one tax bureaucrat for every 700 citizens. In the US, there’s one for every 4,000 citizens. And they’re not even doing their job good!” 

Let’s set aside that grammatical pratfall, as tempting as it is, and get into his numbers here. Let’s also set aside any discussion of why the CRA might have increased its head count recently, given the obvious backlog created by COVID-19 benefit programs for individuals and businesses and the need to properly assess and evaluate eligibility for them. And let’s even set aside the fact that, unlike the IRS, the CRA has to process both federal and provincial returns and do it in two official languages. All of that is background noise to the real issue here, which is the very act of comparing the CRA’s size to the IRS.

That’s because the IRS is notorious for being tragically underfunded by the US government. According to a White House fact sheet, the IRS had seen its funding cut between 2010 and 2021 by 18 per cent, all while its responsibilities — especially during the pandemic — continued to increase. As the Brookings Institute noted, this was a gift to wealthy Americans like Donald Trump. “For the wealthiest and most sophisticated tax filers, a cash-strapped IRS has meant a tax evasion free-for-all. Currently, the tax gap, which is the amount in taxes that are owed but not paid, comes to nearly $7 trillion over a decade. Three fifths of the tax gap is due to underreporting of income by the top 10% of taxpayers, and more than a quarter comes from the top 1%.”

That is slowly starting to change. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS received a temporary $80 billion boost in government funding. And guess what? It’s already starting to deliver returns. A new program, staffed by “dozens” of employees and aimed at 1,600 delinquent taxpayers with incomes over $1 million a year, has already brought in more than $1 billion in new tax revenue. The tax bill wasn’t even in dispute — the taxes were clearly owed by these people, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told the Washington Post, “but we didn’t have the people or the resources.”

In his little rant, Terrazzano said that “your accountant works for you. These broke government bureaucrats who want to squeeze every penny for you don’t.” Here, at least, he’s right for once. Our tax collectors aren’t working for individual Canadians. They’re working for all of us. It’s why wealthy people and the lobby groups they fund always want to see funding cut for tax collection agencies:  because they know they’re the ones who would benefit the most. 

The global south won’t save fossil fuel demand

Another year, another International Energy Agency forecast showing the imminent peak for global oil and gas demand. This continues to be an inconvenient truth for Canada’s oil and gas industry and the politicians serving as its head waiter, who still insist — growing body of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding — that demand growth can’t stop, won’t stop. Why? Because, they say, the developing world’s voracious appetite for energy will swamp whatever lifestyle-driven changes are happening here in North America and Europe. 

They’re wrong, of course. RMI, the former Rocky Mountain Institute, is out with a new report showing why the global south is heavily incentivized to embrace renewables and phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Those incentives range from the lack of access to fossil fuels (and widespread availability of high-quality wind and solar assets) to declining capital costs for renewable energy and the growing importance of energy security. “

As report authors Kingsmill Bond and Vikram Singh lay out in chart after chart, renewables will actually underwrite and support more vigorous economic growth. “The rapid growth of renewables provides the foundation for higher levels of electricity supply, which in turn will drive growth. By 2040, total electricity supply could be up to 40% higher than business as usual.”

As Singh told the Financial Times’s Lee Harris, “Even with the lack of commitment from the global north, in terms of their funding for the global south, this technology is very much in the money. It’s boom time in the global south.” 

As to the global south’s impact on fossil fuel demand? “Fossil fuel demand for electricity will peak by 2030 in the Global South, and the remaining areas of demand growth are limited as a result of ongoing electrification and efficiency. The Global South will not serve to prop up declining fossil fuel demand elsewhere.” Well, then. 

Instead, they say, the global south will become a major market for China’s low-cost renewable technology and electric vehicles — one Chinese companies will be more than happy to supply. Far from serving as the saviour for global fossil fuel demand, China is now actively eroding it both domestically and abroad. 

Case in point: the solar revolution that’s underway in Pakistan right now. Power demand actually declined nine per cent last year because so many businesses and households have installed solar on their rooftops, a trend that’s turned the country into the third largest global importer of solar energy. And while the national grid has expressed concerns about the impact this is having on stability, provincial governments there are leaning in. ”Despite the federal government’s concern about its power network, the provincial government of Punjab, home to more than half of Pakistan’s 240 million population, announced in July that it would give away free or heavily subsidized solar panels for millions of citizens struggling with rising electricity bills,” the Financial Times’ Humza Jilani wrote. “The party that rules Sindh province, with more than 50 million citizens, said last month it would follow suit with a similar policy for its poorest residents.”

In time, and not that much of it, the Canadian oil companies and their political proxies who are fretting about an emissions cap are going to look awfully silly — and naive. The only question now is how long it takes them to realize that. 

Recommended Reading

On his Substack, political science professor Emmett Macfarlane has a take on the legal implications of the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision in Mathur v. Ontario, a youth-led Charter challenge against Ontario’s policy governing the target for climate emissions. “In brief, the claimants assert that the weak or insufficient targets the Ford government have pursued under the law violate their section 7 right to life, liberty and security of the person and their section 15 equality rights. They seek an order on Charter grounds requiring Ontario to pursue a ‘science-based’ emissions target.”

This is interesting and important stuff, and it may well set a precedent for future legal challenges of governments that decide to backtrack on or completely abandon climate commitments. Then again, as Macfarlane suggests in his analysis, it might not. Worth reading either way, I’d say. 

***

On their blog, Generation Squeeze takes note of the unusual alliance between younger Canadians and the Canadian Association of Retired Persons around the question of how to better support low-income seniors. In a recent interview, CARP president Rudy Buttignol opened the door to a re-evaluation — long overdue, in my view — of the thresholds at which Old Age Security gets clawed back. “There is an issue about income thresholds, and I think that’s where the debate should be on,” he said on CBC’s The Current. “You know, when is a senior’s income considered sufficient?” 

Yes!

Rather than asking young Canadians to foot even more of the bill associated with supporting seniors, he’s suggesting we should treat it as an intra-generational transfer — from those with plenty to those without. As Generation Squeeze’s Paul Kershaw writes, “By slowing the pace at which tax dollars fund retirees who have six-figure incomes, the CARP president’s proposal would redirect those taxes so low-income seniors gain thousands of dollars. We could eradicate poverty for retirees.”

It’s a wonderful idea — one that would help both low-income seniors today and young Canadians tomorrow. “If we land on a clawback threshold for OAS that better approximates that of the CCB,” Kershaw concludes, “there would also be plenty of funds to reduce the deficit we are leaving for future generations.”

I’m all-in on this idea. I hope you are too. 

***

I know Stan Persky would be. Persky, who was a longtime social critic and teacher (and my dad’s closest friend and writing partner), died in Berlin last week. I can’t pretend that I had much of a relationship with him other than occasionally mediating his attempts to get in touch with my notoriously aloof father, and he was always more of a mythical figure to me than a real human being. But his death is an unwelcome reminder of how much closer I am to my own — as well as the importance of making and keeping friendships that matter. 

To Tom Sandborn, who was a contemporary of Stan’s, that’s what stood out most about him. As he wrote in a piece for The Tyee, “friendship may be the supreme democratic relationship, the even-handed, unselfish affection that is felt and exercised without the spur of erotic or romantic desire. Stan and I both came of age in a time of utopian hope for a transformed social order and have lived to see that hope nuanced and diminished by the rough workings of 20th-century history. And yet, even in the face of such disappointments, it is possible to hope for genuine friendship in the private sphere and a more amiable, respectful, even friendly tone in public life. Persky has done his part to promote both, and his city, his nation and his friends have all been enriched by his efforts.”

If you don’t know much about Persky, well, go buy this book. I had the pleasure of watching him interact with my dad and some of his peers over the years, and his intellect was formidable — only surpassed, as Sandborn says, by his sense of (and for) community. We could all stand to learn from that in our ever-more polarized time. 

Here’s just a snippet showing how his brain worked and why it was so compelling to so many people.

“Looking back at the events symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, the record is mixed,” he told Sandborn back in 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of communism. “Some of the countries that emerged from Soviet communism have become ‘normal’⁣ democratic capitalist nations, with all the freedoms and problems of democratic capitalism. Others, like Hungary, have slithered back toward a fascist, irredentist past. Others, like Poland, are still engaged in a struggle between democracy and the authoritarianism of the Catholic church. As one of the characters in my non-fiction stories says, ‘⁣I am glad to have seen the end of Communism.’⁣ But I’m also troubled in many cases by what has succeeded Soviet communism.

What I miss is the dream of communism, one of the great dreams of the 20th century, one that never came into existence, except as a cruel parody. It’s clear that global capitalism, while it has produced a relatively rich material life for many Canadians, is not the solution to our search for a meaningful life.

Naomi Klein’s recent book, This Changes Everything, details capitalism’s role in destroying the environment. Even beyond that, it has produced a culture that reproduces ignorance and drugs people with distractions, trivia and ‘entertainment.’ There ought to be another, better world possible, with a fairer economic system, one that doesn’t dominate all our values. While wrestling with iPhone 6, Windows 10, and www 3, I’m still waiting for someone to come up with communism 2.0.