One Thing Conservatives And Progressives Agree On: The Case For Stability That Crosses Party Lines

Editor’s note: In a departure from regular programming, I am publishing a paper explicitly aimed at progressives. Drawing on examples from vampire bat colonies to immigration policy, the author warns that altruistic societies will collapse without built-in safeguards, and argues that the perpetuation of progressive values is predicated on a stable, resilient society. Why am I publishing this piece? Firstly, because Dominion Review is a free speech publication that seeks to deliver a wide variety of interesting perspectives to readers. Secondly, because it presents a strong case against the policy of endless immigration-driven population growth pursued by all Canadian governments since Brian Mulroney. If you would like to contact the author to ask questions or provide feedback, you can email him (dhakalp@gmail.com).

Ensuring a habitable planet for future generations is a crucial mission championed by the Green Party. This focus on sustainability is both understandable and admirable—after all, what good are our endeavors if the planet’s health is in jeopardy? However, without societal stability, sustainability efforts often have diminished and short-lived impacts. Despite this, stability has been largely overlooked by the mainstream political parties, including the Greens. Moreover, policies focused on perpetual economic growth remain prevalent, which undermine societal stability and conflict with sustainability goals.

Achieving sustainability requires us to plan far into the future. However, in societies plagued by continuous and unpredictable issues, sustainability efforts can easily be sidetracked. Therefore, true sustainability demands stability.

This paper explores the intrinsic link between sustainability and stability, examines why progressive values stand to lose from instability, and argues that the Green Party is uniquely positioned to prioritize stability, making its mission more complete. It aims to persuade the Green Party to incorporate stability into its agenda by highlighting its critical connection to sustainability. Additionally, it seeks to convince a broader audience of the importance of societal stability and offers new insights into the underlying causes of instability.

What is stability?

In this paper, a stable society is defined as one whose defining characteristics remain intact over time. While societies naturally evolve and not all characteristics need to be preserved, we focus on maintaining foundational values such as altruism, inclusiveness, and secularism.

Stability, more generally, refers to a system’s inherent ability to return to normalcy after disturbances. Small tweaks to a system can significantly impact its stability. This concept is familiar to systems engineers and civil engineers who strive to ensure that their creations remain standing for years, decades, or even centuries. Similarly, in nature, organisms and populations establish order in unpredictable environments to survive for millennia.

To illustrate the concept of systems and stability, consider the following examples:

• The Human Body: Built-in feedback mechanisms maintain homeostasis, keeping internal conditions stable despite external changes.
• A Pendulum: At rest, a pendulum is stable; an inverted pendulum is not. Small disturbances can easily topple the latter, and it will not naturally return to its original state.
• Earth’s Climate: A complex and delicate system with many feedback loops which affect its stability.

Human societies are living systems that require stability to maintain their core values and functions. History has shown that even the greatest civilizations have succumbed to instability, leading to their eventual disappearance. In this context, “unstable” doesn’t refer merely to the breakdown of law and order or institutions. Instead, it denotes the gradual alteration or erosion of a society’s defining characteristics, which can cause a complex society to become dysfunctional. While change is natural and can be positive, preserving foundational values ensures that societies can adapt without losing their essential identity.

In contrast, sustainability is about managing the resources and interactions within a system to ensure its long-term viability. If the system itself is inherently unstable, managing these resources and interactions becomes challenging. Instability can undermine resource management, planning, and the implementation of long-term strategies.

While there may be varying opinions on a society’s “defining characteristics,” it is reasonable to suggest that, for Canada, these include secularism, multiculturalism, inclusiveness, a social democratic political structure, personal freedom, and shared prosperity. Many refer to such a society as “progressive.” In this paper, we use “progressive” to represent these specific characteristics, emphasizing values that promote collective well-being and inclusivity. Conversely, we use “regressive” to denote forces or ideologies that oppose or undermine these progressive values.

The late AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, in his book The Society of Mind, identified stability as one of the great challenges for modern humans. He discussed how complex systems, like the human mind and societies, require stability to function effectively. Understanding how stability functions in living systems such as societies is crucial for addressing the challenges of maintaining a cohesive and enduring society.

To better understand the importance of stability in societies and how it can be achieved, let’s explore how nature addresses the challenge of stability within living systems.

Stability of vampire bat colonies

Genetic and cultural information that propagate within a population can significantly affect the stability of living systems. Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of a “meme” in The Selfish Gene, defining it as a unit of cultural transmission or imitation. Memes encompass ideas, behaviors, styles, and practices that spread within a culture—examples include religions, viral internet trends, and political ideologies like communism and capitalism. These memes can strengthen or weaken societal stability depending on how they influence collective behavior and values. Genes can be thought of as “biological memes” being the unit of transmission of genetic information.

To explore the dynamics of stability, let’s compare three vampire bat colonies in similar environments (see The Selfish Gene for details):

1. Colony-UA (Unconditionally Altruistic): Most bats are unconditionally altruistic; when they have surplus blood, they offer it to any hungry bat without expecting anything in return.
2. Colony-RA (Reciprocally Altruistic): Most bats practice reciprocal altruism; they share blood with those who have helped them in the past and withhold assistance from those who haven’t reciprocated.
3. Colony-NA (Non-Altruistic): Most bats are non-altruistic; they do not share blood with others, focusing solely on their own survival. These bats are sometimes referred to here as “selfish” for brevity.

Which bat colony would thrive? Certainly not Colony-NA. Being occasionally unlucky while foraging might be enough to weaken and kill the bat. The bat population would be relatively low in that colony due to a lack of cooperation.

In Colonies UA and RA, hungry bats would be rarer given an equal population size. Altruism benefits the bat colonies in the short term. Deciphering the longer-term prospects requires additional analysis.

Let’s have the bats move from one colony to another to see its impact on the recipient colony.

Migration to Colony-NA: An unconditionally altruistic bat entering the non-altruistic colony would share blood with others, but most would not reciprocate when it was in need. Consequently, it would have a significantly lower chance of surviving and thriving.

A reciprocally altruistic bat in selfish bat territory would cooperate with others, but it may be too late when it recognizes that most do not reciprocate.

We can conclude that a colony of selfish bats is a stable colony because this population cannot be displaced by bats with differing strategies. Something to note from this is that “stability” doesn’t necessarily mean good. It simply means that the colony can continue with its defining characteristics (not sharing) intact over generations. Note that these bats with differing strategies need not have migrated here; due to genetic diversity, they can emerge from within.

Migration to Colony-UA: A selfish bat entering an unconditionally altruistic colony would quickly gain an advantage, exploiting the generosity of others without reciprocating. Over time, the selfish strategy would overtake the population, leading to the eventual replacement of altruistic bats. Thus, Colony-UA is unstable, as individuals with differing strategies have an evolutionary advantage. And so unconditionally altruistic bat colonies do not exist in nature. Humans, take note!

Migration to Colony-RA: The reciprocally altruistic bat colony is interesting because it remains stable over time despite being altruistic. Neither unconditionally altruistic bats nor selfish bats thrive here. The unconditionally altruistic bats gain no advantage and can occasionally be disadvantaged, while selfish bats are shunned once their selfishness becomes apparent. This ensures that the colony remains reciprocally altruistic over time. In essence, it is an altruistic colony that remains stable over generations.

Success and stability are separate things. The selfish colony is not overly successful due to lack of cooperation, but it is stable due to fending off competing strategies. Initially, Colonies UA and RA (both altruistic) would be similarly successful. However, over time, their paths diverge predictably—reciprocal altruism endures while unconditional altruism does not. The colonies can remain stable in both selfish and altruistic forms, though the altruistic bats need to be strategic about their altruism.

Stability of human societies

Most human societies (including Canada) have characteristics of all three bat colonies. Whether they are stable or not can be approximated by gauging the durability of their defining characteristics. For example, in a secular society, if the support for secularism is decreasing over time, then we can reasonably say that the society is unstable. Societies may evolve and change, but by choosing to stabilize progressive features, we ensure that altruistic and inclusive values endure.

We can see parallels between human societies and bat colonies at a broad level.  A libertarian society, for instance, loosely mirrors Colony-NA, where individualism reigns and cooperation is limited. A “progressive” society, on the other hand, resembles Colony-UA, driven by altruistic values but vulnerable to exploitation by selfish actors. While it contains defenses like universal education, they are insufficient to prevent abuse by regressive and selfish forces, which inherently adds an “expiry date” to such a society. What’s striking is that we don’t yet have a progressive society with the built-in resilience of Colony-RA—a society that balances altruism with mechanisms for self-protection, thereby ensuring stability over time.

While human societies are indeed more complex than bat colonies, and the impact of culture is more significant in humans, the analogy remains generally appropriate. Memes affect the stability of culturally complex living systems, including human societies. Whether the bats’ blood sharing strategies are affected by genes or by imitation is not important in the context of stability of bat colonies.

Without prioritizing stability, progressive societies risk being overwhelmed by forces that exploit their openness and inclusivity. This is a glaring oversight in our efforts to build a harmonious and enduring society. Singapore may serve as a possible exception, where diverse groups coexist peacefully in a progressive environment, with stability maintained for decades.

Keep in mind the narrow definition of exploitation in this context. It is not talking about, for example, the exploitation of poor people by plutocrats. It specifically refers to the strategy of taking advantage of competing memes to grow in numbers, for example as selfish bats do in an altruistic bat colony.

Why is stability important?

Stability is crucial because it ensures that future generations inherit the valued defining characteristics of our society while still allowing society to evolve. For example, if we value secularism and multiculturalism, we must ensure these are durable traits of our society. Indeed, if these traits are worth fighting for, then why aren’t they worth preserving? It follows that we should ensure that valued features of our society do not erode over time.

But why should we decide for future generations what kind of society they should want? While societies naturally evolve and future generations will shape their own paths, many agree that certain progressive values—such as rights, freedoms, inclusiveness, and altruism—are foundational for a just society. By focusing on the stability of these values, we ensure that future generations inherit a framework that upholds these principles, allowing them to pursue their own aspirations. As we’ll see later, a society’s progressive values can naturally erode over time.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with the Green Party! Here’s why: People have long acknowledged that a system that manages important resources unsustainably cannot last (and is, by definition, unstable). Acting sustainably requires envisioning and planning for the distant future. However, in societies where challenges are constantly shifting and unpredictable, sustainability efforts often get derailed. New crises continually emerge, pushing long-term initiatives to the back burner. In contrast, stable societies provide an environment where planning for the distant future is more feasible, as crises are less frequent. Therefore, true sustainability demands stability. To be long-lasting and impactful, sustainability efforts must consider societal stability.

Consider the example of Japan, a relatively stable society where defining characteristics remain fairly consistent (or change slowly) over time. While some in the West find it perplexing that Japan is unwilling to address its demographic challenges through immigration, this stability allows Japan to predict and manage its future challenges more effectively. For instance, the aging population has been a major concern in Japan for decades and still significant today. We can reasonably predict that an aging population will continue to be Japan’s dominant issue in 20 years. In contrast, the dominant issues have not remained consistent in Canada, and we can reasonably predict this will continue. In a stable society, challenges are predictable and manageable; in an unstable one, they shift too unpredictably for meaningful action.

Given that Canada is in relatively good standing in the world today, it is surprising that stability is not even a matter of political discourse. When we are successful and content, we should proactively seek stability of characteristics that we value to preserve and build upon our achievements. Although success and stability are separate things, stability enables effective long-term planning and thereby fosters success.

The swiftness of instability

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” – Professor Albert Allen Bartlett

No system in nature is immune to instability, but it can often go unnoticed until it’s too late. Picture a petri dish with a few bacteria that double in number every hour, eventually filling the dish after 24 doublings.

For the first 20 hours, the bacteria will hardly be aware of the looming scarcity of food. However, after 22 hours, when ¼ of the dish is full, some will recognize the problem and start sounding alarms. After 23 hours, many more bacteria will see the issue, but some will still say, “Come on! Half of the dish is still empty!”

This scenario mirrors the nature of instability in larger systems. The “wrecking ball” often appears to come suddenly, though it is predictable much sooner. When the seeds of instability are small, they go unnoticed and ignored, but they can grow exponentially, leading to crises that catch us unprepared.

Meme strength and success

Memes try to gain an advantage over competing memes through replication. This is why the “emails from grandma” often ended with something like “Forward this to 10 other people or you’ll be met with bad karma.” Those emails had a strong built-in mechanism for growth, giving them an advantage over competing emails (memes) that relied on merit alone. Similarly, computer viruses have a built-in mechanism for growth in addition to being destructive. This built-in mechanism for reproduction is a common pattern of all successful memes.

The “progressive” meme is in a constant state of struggle because competing memes propagate more aggressively through a combination of horizontal influence and vertical reproduction. Horizontal growth refers to the spread of ideas in the same generation, typically through communication. Vertical growth refers to the passing of ideas across generations, typically to one’s offspring. Successful memes often have mechanisms for vertical and horizontal growth.

Why does the Middle East—the crossroads of European, Asian, and African cultures—essentially have one dominant language, culture, and religion (with some exceptions)? Given its location, it should have been the ideal place for multiculturalism and a place of maximum diversity. An important reason for this dynamic is the relative strength of memes, where the stronger ones have been able to displace the weaker ones that came before. The displaced cultures lacked mechanisms to resist “stronger” memes, meaning they were inherently unstable. Similar things happened all over the world, including in Western Europe where Christianity came to dominate.

In the long run, cultural diversity is shaped by the relative strength of competing memes. While we  may speak of a meme’s strength in absolute terms, it’s more useful to consider its strength relative to other memes and the environment in which they operate. For example, in the aforementioned bat colonies, the selfish meme is strongest in the non-altruistic colony and the reciprocally altruistic one is strongest in the respective colony. The unconditionally altruistic meme is the weakest in any setting. A society where the strongest meme prevails is stable in that respect.

Building a society where the altruistic meme is strong (as opposed to the selfish one) seems like a worthy endeavor! As the bat example suggested, the altruistic meme can only be strong in any setting if it doesn’t tolerate abuse.

Do we really need to worry about memes?

Many factors influence the stability of societies, and among these, memes play a significant yet often underappreciated role. In progressive societies, memes can affect stability by introducing regressive elements that challenge core values like inclusiveness, secularism, and social democracy.

However, we don’t need to worry about every regressive idea that emerges. What demands our attention are the regressive memes that are also expansionist, possessing strong built-in mechanisms for growth. If an expansionist meme doesn’t already exist, it inevitably will arise for the same reason that forest fires exist—a single spark somewhere is all that is needed for the forest to burn down.

We could save the forest by employing built-in mechanisms that prevent it from drying. This ensures the stability of the green forest. The defences should be built into the system, and not require the help of a kind-hearted person with sufficient time on their hands. That may include, for example, a process that assigns responsibility of safeguarding to someone who has a vested interest in fulfilling the responsibility.

Because regressive ideas cannot spread horizontally on merit alone, they tend to rely more on vertical growth for propagation. In human societies, this often involves the repression of women (a strategy that promotes population growth) and childhood indoctrination (which gives continuity to the repression). Most regressive ideas that don’t also suppress women or indoctrinate children have already died due to their unconvincing merit. On the other hand, features of a progressive society such as secularism and inclusivity can stand on merit alone.

Recorded human history is thousands of years old, yet we are still grappling with the issue of women’s rights. Why? Because progressive values are inherently unstable if left to their own devices. And so humans were grappling with women’s rights 1000 years ago, and will continue doing so 1000 years from now unless “progressives” understand and take to heart the idea of stability.

This is the paradox of the progressive meme: It wants to be inclusive, makes room for competing memes, and then gets displaced. It never conclusively wins.

Environment’s impact on meme

Understandably, the influence of a meme can impact the environment in which it operates. But the reverse is also true. As we saw with the bat example, the ability of a meme to propagate is not divorced from the environment and the competing memes that surround it. In fact, a meme may morph in order to better adapt to its surroundings.

People rarely give thought to why Islam may be less conservative in the US than in Europe [page 36]. One reason is that, compared to the more conservative political system of the USA, Europe’s progressive political system is more unstable, making it more exploitable. The non-secular, non-inclusive, and expansionist branches of any religion have a relative advantage in Europe. Notice how conservative America has liberal Islam, and traditionally liberal Europe has conservative Islam. It’s no fluke.

Doing nothing to safeguard society from exploitative memes is a terrible disservice to human progress and to those who want peaceful coexistence.

Education and women’s rights not the solution?

Many progressives advocate for education and women’s rights as the primary means to achieve societal progress. While they are necessary elements to building stable progressive societies, they  are not sufficient.

The term “education” is broad and can encompass a wide range of meanings. If a society’s progress is measured by its ability to separate church from state, then religious education may hinder rather than help that progress. Googling the phrase “education is the answer” yields millions of results, reflecting a common belief that education can solve our problems. However, this view is simplistic and overlooks the critical question: what kind of education are we advocating, and what problems are we really addressing?

Even with secular education, progress towards a progressive society isn’t guaranteed. While efforts to promote education and gender equality have yielded positive results, they have also led to complacency. We have overlooked the forces actively opposing women’s literacy, undermining secular education, fighting against women’s autonomy, and indoctrinating children. Progressives cannot afford to ignore these influences unless they are confident that the progressive ideas can sufficiently counterbalance them.

Consider the literacy rate in Pakistan, which has stagnated at 60%. One might assume that as older generations with low literacy rates (below 25%) are replaced by younger ones, literacy rates would naturally increase. However, the reality is more complex, with social and cultural factors at play that impede this progress.

This observation highlights that there are active forces resisting progress, and the belief that things will naturally improve on their own is dangerously naïve. Progress is not a given; it requires counteracting measures against forces that resist progress through the repression of women and childhood indoctrination. In a stable progressive society, these counteracting measures are an inherent part of the system.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.” – Alexander Pope

When our limited understanding leads to some success, it can create a false sense of security, blinding us to the full scope of the problem. Take, for example, the optimistic depictions of the 21st century as imagined by futurists and authors after the Second World War. This view that things would naturally progress was shared by many people. Their visions were filled with robots, flying cars, and pristine cities where hunger, extremism, and inequality no longer existed. The reality is anything but.

It’s clear that simply funding organizations dedicated to education and women’s rights, while important, is not enough. To truly build progressive societies, we must actively combat the deeply entrenched regressive ideas that continue to propagate and hold back meaningful change. Once achieved, the challenge will be stability. But if we can foster an environment where the progressive meme is “strong”, the society will naturally stabilize in that state. That is to say, the means of creating a progressive society and stabilizing it in such a state are essentially the same.

How to stabilize progressive societies

Building a stable, progressive society requires addressing a wide variety of challenges across many fields in order to give strength to the progressive meme. Progressives have long recognized the importance of universal education, tackling economic inequality, combating political corruption, and protecting the environment. However, factors such as population growth, the competition between progressive and opposing memes for relevance and dominance, and the understanding that memes influence societal stability are often missing from mainstream discourse. Suggestions that follow aim to address these overlooked aspects.

Broadly speaking, we need to ensure that progressive values, which can generally stand on merit alone, have a fair opportunity to thrive against the regressive ideas that have built-in mechanisms for propagation. By leveling the playing field, we allow merit to be the determining factor in which ideas prevail. We can achieve this by not giving advantages to regressive memes, and by actively promoting the progressive memes. Left to their own devices, the most expansionist memes always win. That’s just the nature of memes. An idea being expansionist doesn’t indicate whether it’s good, and vice versa.

With the understanding of memes and their impact on complex living systems, we are equipped to discuss policy. To build a stable, progressive society, certain measures could be implemented to strengthen the foundational values and reduce exploitation. While some of these ideas may be subject to debate, they are proposed to stimulate discussion on how best to achieve societal stability with minimal impact on individual freedoms. A set of policies geared specifically for Canada, which may be implementable will follow this more comprehensive but somewhat controversial list:

1. Secular Education: Public education should inform students about religions without indoctrination or promotion.
2. Cultural Coexistence: People should be incentivized to coexist and cooperate with others of different cultures. For example, in Singapore, the ethnic makeup of each apartment building must reflect the ethnic makeup of the country.
3. Responsible Parenthood: Economic incentives should exist for women to have 2 children and no more. Aside from being an ingredient of societal stability, this is also an ingredient of environmental sustainability.
4. Better Childcare Allocations: When faced with a shortage of spaces, the childcare system should prioritize giving access to as many different families as possible, instead of prioritizing families whose children are already at the childcare centre.
5. Sustainable Economic Model: An economic model that falls apart without an exponentially growing population or economy seems much like a Ponzi scheme! Each generation should invest sufficiently to take care of itself in its old age. That way, an ever-growing taxpayer base is not required.
6. Managed Immigration: Immigration policy should account for the fact that exponential growth in population is a problem whether it occurs naturally or through immigration. For societies that prioritize stability and embrace immigration, implementing integration programs is essential. Those who have a demonstrated ability to live in a multicultural setting should be preferred. Immigration should be in the hands of the country seeking stability, which means it should (largely) be through legal channels.
7. Birthright Citizenship: In a world where inequality is growing and where many developing countries have failed to make significant socioeconomic leaps, ending birthright citizenship when neither of the parents has status may be necessary to ensure that the nature of immigration is in the management of the recipient country that seeks stability. Australia and many European countries have already implemented this policy.
8. Marriage by Choice: Underage marriages should not be recognized, even if performed outside the country. To reduce the likelihood of coercion, the marriageable age is increased to 19, consistent with existing laws in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This minimum age should apply to both court marriages and cultural weddings, ensuring that the evolutionary advantage of coercion is diminished. Additionally, parents should not be allowed to consent to earlier marriages, and the law should be strictly enforced to prevent parents and religious leaders from circumventing the law.
9. Non-discriminatory Childhood: Children should not be encouraged to distinguish each other based on religion, culture, or race from an early age, which gives them the freedom to acquaint and make friends with a variety of people. To this end, secular schools are necessary, though additional measures are required to fully promote mutual respect.

The core tenet of these ideas is to check the unbridled growth of regressive memes with the understanding that these memes tend to grow vertically rather than horizontally. That is not to say we need to share more memes that agree with this paper (though it wouldn’t hurt!). What we need is a framework that gives progressive memes a fighting chance. By doing so, a progressive society can withstand any regressive memes currently existing or those that may emerge.

In the reciprocally altruistic bat colony, other bats had a lower ability to survive and thrive. This reciprocity ensured the stability of the altruistic colony. Similarly, a human society that wishes to be both altruistic and stable must counteract the transmission of regressive ideas. Without doing this, multiculturalism is necessarily an unstable ideal. And this may help explain the rise of societies that do not view altruism as a virtue.

Historic opportunity for the Green Party

The Green Party should be the party, not just of environmental sustainability, but of societal and economic stability as well. As noted above, true sustainability demands stability. A green party that does not promote policies to stabilize population on finite land is not a true green party.

The time is ripe to start advancing the stability agenda because of:

• Voter Awareness: Voters are increasingly aware of the destructive rise of religious fundamentalism.
• Societal Trends: Our society is still largely progressive. However, if religious fundamentalism, anarchism, or ethnocentric ideologies gain ground, it may be difficult to reverse course, as those societies would be relatively stable in those forms. This would mark the end of a harmonious multicultural society.
• Better Late Than Never: We should consider the stability of any system we build. However, the nature of stability in culturally complex living systems has been overlooked. Let’s stop doing that!

The time is ripe for the Green Party, specifically, to include stability in the platform because:

• Long-term Sustainability: Sustainability movement does not last without societal stability. For example, if the Iran of the 1970s was still around, the green movement there would be a much stronger force than it is today. Additionally, if we were not always fighting fires, we could give long-term planning more consideration.
• Policy Overlap: The policies needed for long-term sustainability overlap significantly with those needed for stability because, as we’ve seen, true sustainability demands stability.

The federal Green Party should seek to implement politically popular ideas that promote stability while balancing these efforts with the protection of individual liberty. While many of these suggestions are applicable to any progressive society, some are specifically tailored to address contemporary issues in Canada. Coordination with the provinces will be necessary for some. Such agendas may include:

• Secular Education: Work with provinces to promote secular education. Religious schools can continue operating, however, a minimum of 25% of staff in any religious institution should not belong to that religion including the science teachers. This ensures that values that are incompatible with a harmonious multicultural society cannot easily be imparted onto children.
• Responsible Parenthood: Limit child tax benefits and tax credits to four children, with the intention to further reduce it to three and consider further reduction to two. This policy does not restrict the number of children individuals can have; it simply limits the extent to which society financially supports these personal decisions. Considering that throughout much of human history and in many parts of the world today there is no societal support for these decisions, limiting such support is a reasonable position. The impact of this policy would be wide-ranging, extending beyond what’s obvious. Some consequences that are not immediately obvious would be the increase in labour force participation rates and availability of public daycare spaces for a higher percentage of families.
• Sustainable Population Growth: Commit to a maximum 0.5% growth in population per year, with a plan to build an economy that can sustain even without population growth. This includes limiting the number of people who are granted permanent residency at 200,000 per year, easing the housing shortage. While this may seem like a drastic cut, Canada would still maintain one of the higher growth rates among the G7. More effort should be put towards retaining bright Canadians here instead.
• Education System Reform: Require colleges and universities to have an international student body that is at most 10% and 20% of the total student body respectively. (Graduate programs may have a higher quota.) For-profit colleges should be prevented from accepting international students. Additionally, IELTS (International English Language Testing System) requirements should be raised to ensure that students are primed for success should they choose to stay after graduation. Measures should be taken to prevent reported ability of students to purchase certificates in other countries. In addition to a cap on students, there should be minimum criteria for admission, which may result in the cap not being hit in some years. If the cap is reached every year, then clearly the entry requirements could have been made stricter with little to no impact. Lastly, ensure that the qualifications of the international students are no less than the qualifications of the locals on average, ensuring that international students weren’t brought just for the money. Canada’s ability to attract bright students over the long term will depend on maintaining a good reputation.
• Support for Canadian Students: Provide additional funding to colleges and universities for each Canadian citizen and permanent resident who studies there. This would reduce our institutions’ hunger for foreign students. It may be necessary to lower the foreign student tuition in order to attract quality students and make the program sustainable in the long run, which would additionally reduce  the hunger for international students.
• Institutional Accountability: Colleges and universities whose students go on to claim asylum or social assistance within 5 years of enrollment should be fined sufficiently to encourage proper vetting of students.
• NGO Accountability: NGOs such as Rotary Club and Lions Club frequently organize conventions globally. When hosted in prosperous nations, many participants exploit these gatherings to seek asylum. Revoke licenses of NGOs whose past conventions have resulted in over 5% of attendees claiming asylum.
• Regulation of For-Profit Colleges: Shut down the worst-performing for-profit colleges in terms of employment in a related field within two years of graduation.
• Economic Realignment: Commit to reducing real estate’s share of the economy to less than 10%, in line with other developed countries over time. (Perhaps after the housing shortage is addressed.) Additionally, commit to preventing future real-estate bubbles, which sap investments away from more productive ventures.
• Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) Regulation: Require companies who hire TFWs to pay a $6,000 tax for each TFW hired per year to prove that an employee was not available within the country. This would greatly reduce system abuse. Although some industries will argue that the TFW program is absolutely necessary for their survival, the overreliance on TFWs is leading to stagnating productivity. For almost all of Canada’s history, it had no provision for temporary foreign employment, and it was doing just fine! Productive industries (like agriculture, and unlike coffee shops, which are “zero-sum businesses”) should be given tax incentives similar to SR&ED in the tech sector, and they may be exempt from the $6000 fine. In our largely free-market economy, labor shortages and surpluses should naturally self-correct over time. Therefore, unless an immediate correction is needed, there is no such thing as a labor shortage that requires foreign labor to resolve.
• Discourage Fraud: Increase enforcement and fines for LMIA (Labour Market Impact Assessment) fraud. Many businesses are abusing this program to sell foreigners an entry into the country.
• CPP Contributions: Increase CPP contributions by 10% to get closer to each generation taking care of itself at old age. This helps avoid the need for an exponentially growing population.
• Department of Stability and Sustainability: Establish a new Department of Stability and Sustainability that aims to evaluate the society’s standing in these respects and find new ideas and avenues to build a sustainable, inclusive, and stable society founded on individual liberty, where individual liberty is restricted only if it destabilizes an inclusive society. [This is a complex topic, which would require experts from various fields to come together to hash out the details.]

To keep talented Canadians in Canada and to better utilize available human capital, the Green Party could also consider:

• Tax Incentives: Federal income tax exemption for two of the first five tax filings following graduation from a Canadian university.
• Venture Capital Support: Require extremely profitable banks to invest 5% of their profits into new Canadian ventures.
• Medical Education Reform: Encourage medical schools to enroll students with two years of undergraduate education (instead of four years) and require them to work in Canada for a certain number of years after graduation. Additionally, medical students who choose to leave Canada should be required to pay back some or all of the public investment made towards their education.
• Pathway for Foreign-Trained Doctors: Establish a rigorous but easier pathway for foreign-trained doctors to become family practitioners in Canada, and provide an easier pathway into nursing for those who don’t qualify.
• Production-Focused Economy: Build an economy focused on investment rather than consumption, as suggested by David Dodge. For example, incentivizing the production of hybrids, PHEVs, and EVs rather than providing rebates for purchase of certain vehicles.

The policies needed for stability are compatible with the policies needed for environmental protection. In fact, there is significant overlap if you look at a long enough time horizon. An immigration policy that promotes a constantly growing population is not sustainable. Advocates for reduced immigration are often unfairly accused of racism and xenophobia. The time is ripe for The Green Party to champion the idea of managed population growth through the lens of stability and sustainability. This can pave the way for building a society that can sustain itself with a stable population.

These steps will help create an inclusive society that supports those who have been struck by bad luck while maintaining stability by warding off abuse and keeping the progressive meme strong. Remember, religious fundamentalist and anarchist societies are also stable, and it will be difficult to ever come back if we end up there. I would like to argue that the reciprocally altruistic bat colony is the ideal model we should aspire to emulate.

We should also adopt ideas from countries with thriving multicultural societies (like Singapore), keeping in mind that we need to look at a long enough time frame to truly know whether it is stable. But certainly, any step we take to reduce instability is a step in the right direction.

Sustainability and stability are intrinsically linked. The Green Party has a historic opportunity to set the agenda as there is general support for measures that would stabilize the society, and this opportunity may not come again if it does at all.

Other benefits

If all of the suggested ideas mentioned here can be implemented by the Green Party, in addition to building a stable society, there will be other, seemingly unrelated, benefits.

Better Education Outcomes: Canadian PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores for reading, math, and science literacy are dropping significantly. The suggested policies could slow down or halt this decline, giving us time to figure out the root causes.

Economic Stability: There are now multiple reports of Canadian GDP per capita falling. This decline results from prioritizing total GDP growth at all costs, with population growth being the lazy politician’s solution. Implementing these policies would halt the decline as businesses would be forced to prioritize innovation over cheap imported labor.

Controlled Inflation: Canadian Consumer Price Index (CPI) could fall back to around 2% without the need for high interest rates. Until recently, the inflation rate stubbornly refused to fall to 2% even though the Canadian economy is stalling and real per capita income is decreasing. Sustainable population growth would help achieve this target.

Reduced Property Value Inflation: Sustainable and predictable population growth would reduce property value inflation and decrease speculative investing in real estate, which is an unproductive use of society’s resources.

Better Social Cohesion: Halting the rise of libertarianism, anarchism, and religious fundamentalism would lead to better social cohesion, especially in a multicultural society. The supposedly “progressive” ideal of open borders would also lead to inherent instability.

Increased Home Ownership: By reducing housing costs, many young people can dream of owning homes and starting families again. More young people will dream of establishing themselves here instead of heading to the US.

Sustainable Green Movement: Ensuring that the green movement lives on is crucial. The green movement has a much easier time establishing itself in a social democratic setting than in a theocracy or a libertarian society. The sustainability of the green movement itself requires that we stabilize our societies in progressive forms.

No need to ban “isms”

The unconditionally altruistic bat colony does not need laws banning non-altruistic bats from entering their colonies. The system is inherently stable against free-loaders and continues to remain altruistic. Similarly, a stable progressive society doesn’t need to “call out” any particular group of people. This is not a proposal to ban a bunch of “isms”. It is to assert that a stable progressive society is possible with minimal impact on individual liberties. We need provisions to ensure progressive values have a fair chance to thrive against regressive and expansionist memes without suppressing freedom of thought.

Although a progressive society that is ultimately stable would manage the influx of incompatible ideologies, creating such a society without significantly trampling on individual liberties may be challenging. Given that we have the opportunity to be selective with immigration, it’s easier to maintain a multicultural and secular society in stable forms by choosing immigrants who share those values.

A progressive society that is concerned only with personal liberty without consideration for stability will have a very short life, indeed. In order to balance personal liberty with stability, our policies should be focused on economic incentives rather than coercion.

I urge progressives to stop being like the unconditionally altruistic bats and be more like the reciprocally altruistic bats. Let’s build a society where the progressive meme is strong. If progressives wish for their values to endure, they need to recognize how regressive memes exploit progressive societies. And by doing so, stability may be achieved without banning any “isms”.

Conclusion

The Green Party’s mission of ensuring a habitable planet for future generations is noble but incomplete without recognizing that sustainability and stability are fundamentally intertwined. As we’ve explored, true sustainability demands stability—a concept that applies to any system, including societies. Yet, progressives have not embraced stability, let alone acknowledge that memes affect societal stability and that merit alone does not determine a meme’s success.

Social democratic systems as implemented are inherently unstable—like the unconditionally altruistic bat colony, they are vulnerable to exploitation because altruism without safeguards is at risk. However, we have an opportunity to create a society that is both stable and altruistic, much like the reciprocally altruistic bat colony that balances generosity with mechanisms for self-protection. By achieving this balance, a progressive society can ensure its foundational values endure across generations; without it, such a society would have a short lifespan. Although achieving this balance may require implementing measures that some find controversial, failing to do so risks losing progressive societies entirely.

The challenge is to ensure that the systems we establish today are resilient and lasting, upon which we can truly build a better future. Stability is not opposed to progress; rather, it is the bedrock upon which sustainable progress can be achieved. This doesn’t mean resisting all change—it means recognizing that the core values worth fighting for are also worth preserving.

Now is the time for the Green Party to champion an agenda that includes stability. Policies supporting secular education, responsible parenthood, managed immigration, and sustainable economic models create conditions where progressive values can thrive without being undermined. And with any new policy proposal, we should consider its impact on stability.

By integrating stability into its platform, the Green Party can set itself apart as a political force committed to enduring progress. Public support for the ideas suggested in this paper has never been higher, presenting a historic opportunity for the Green Party to lead.

I urge the Green Party not to squander this opportunity.