HOW MANY IS ENOUGH?
Liberal Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains wants Canada’s business community and members of his party to talk up the economic benefits of immigration. “We need to change that conversation to say it’s not a social policy, it’s economic policy,” he said in a speech at the Public Policy Forum’s Growth Summit this week. "It’s important to our economic agenda, our innovation agenda. If we bring the right people, the motivated people, they will create more jobs and more opportunities for Canadians.”
Bains said he’s getting pushback, and that’s not surprising. The liberal (and Liberal) immigration narrative tends to focus on Canadians’ generosity of humanitarian spirit, and on the ensuing, ostensibly unique combination of diversity and tolerance that envelops us all like a duvet. Even in 2015 and 2016, the number of economic immigrants we accept will dwarf the number of refugees, but there’s no warm fuzzy feeling to be had thinking of newcomers’ skills, degrees and future productivity statistics. ( Ironically, we heard all about Syrian refugees’ good education, middle-class upbringings and university degrees only after public opinion began to sour.)
Still, for whatever reason, the Liberals seem intent on boosting immigration targets — and Bains’ approach is a much better way to sell it than the one Immigration Minister John McCallum has been test-driving: basically, he just says Canadians demand it. “I have been hearing a lot of input, and all the hundreds of people I’ve spoken to across the country, most of them, almost all of them, have advocated ( for) more immigrants,” he said last month.
Clearly he was talking to certain kinds of people and not to others. In August, Nanos research found just 16 per cent of Canadians wanted more immigrants, while 39 per cent wanted fewer.
Of course, even if most Canadians were clamouring for more immigrants, that wouldn’t be an especially good reason all on its own to do it. But if the Liberals, like Bains, were inclined finally to accept naked self- interest as a good- enough reason to make new Canadians, a new Conference Board of Canada report would give them some evidentiary cover and a sales pitch.
The report considers five immigration scenarios — the status quo, more or less, plus four more aggressive ones — and how they would affect Canada’s rapidly aging population and its knock- on effects. If we began admitting about 400,000 immigrants a year and achieved a population of 100 million by 2100, we would see “a sharp increase in Canada’s potential output over the long term,” it concludes.
“Canada’s labour force expands at a much faster pace than it does in … other scenarios. Housing starts reach 432,000 by 2100, compared with 268,000 in ( the second-most-aggressive scenario), which leads to much faster growth in spending on durable goods over the forecast period.
“Investment spending also in- creases at a faster pace than it does in the other scenarios, supporting a quickly expanding economy.”
When the report landed, headlines were upbeat. “Increased immigration urged to support economic growth amid aging population.” “Immigration critical to Canada’s future prosperity.” “How a bigger Canada benefits us all.” The conference board’s press release, however, was rather more cautionary: “Immigration will help alleviate Canada’s aging population challenges, but not solve them.”
Indeed, the overall effect is quite daunting. Even in the “100 million scenario,” the share of the population over 65 soars by 36 per cent. That’s only better compared to the status- quo scenario — about 80 per cent. In other words, tripling the population of Canada in 80 years — a highly unlikely prospect, surely — would only make the productivity, health care, social services and other challenges posed by Canada’s changing demography somewhat less daunting than staying the course.
Addressing those problems is a policy- making challenge of the first order — one that lowering the retirement age, bringing in more immigrant parents and grandparents, and other feel- good Liberal ideas certainly won’t help. One scenario in the report considers going after younger immigrants, to get more working and child- bearing years out of new arrivals. Another considers efforts to boost the birthrate among extant Canadians, though such efforts tend to yield little fruit.
At a minimum, as my colleague Andrew Coyne recently argued, the feds should continue forcing the provincial health-care systems to figure out how to do more with less. Soon enough, they will have no choice. At the moment, the only person floating immigration numbers as big as the conference board is ( intriguingly) potential Conservative leadership candidate Chris Alexander. If the Liberals are thinking smaller, the challenges will be all the bigger as the baby boomers enter their dotage.
THE LIBERAL (AND LIBERAL PARTY) IMMIGRATION NARRATIVE TENDS TO FOCUS ON CANADIANS’ GENEROSITY OF HUMANITARIAN SPIRIT.