Mass Immigration Is Changing Canada

This article was originally published on the Population Institute Canada website (populationinstitutecanada.ca) on December 15th, 2025. It is republished here, in slightly edited and abridged form, with permission of the author.

It is the supreme duty of all citizens and the Canadian leadership to seek to protect Canada from preventable evils of tribalization emanating from misguided laws on citizenship and immigration which have been enacted based on ideologies. Those who repeat the cliché that “Canada is a nation of immigrants,” do not seem to realize that more than 150 years have passed since the time when Canada was sparsely populated and in need of waves of immigrants, generally from Europe, whose contribution was essential to the development of the economy of Canada’s West.

In May 1947, in a major speech on the federal Liberal government’s postwar immigration policy, the then Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King made it clear that “Canada would continue to be selective regarding which immigrants it permitted into the country…It is not a ‘fundamental human right’ of any alien to enter Canada. It is a privilege.”

Mr. King’s observation of the time is even more valid today in a world burdened by a human population many times the capacity of the Earth to support and when many economically advanced countries are in danger of being overrun by uncontrolled waves of economic migrants and climate refugees, and at a time when “birth tourism” and “chain immigration” have become the common practice. A land with open borders is not a country or nation; it is an unorganized territory wide open to the masses of humanity who choose to roam through or settle, just as the Eurasian plains were invaded and settled by the tribes of the Caucasus and Central Asia who had exceeded the capacity of their homelands to sustain their living due to overpopulation.

Currently the world population increases by more than 70 million annually. This increase is driven by persistently high fertility rates in some of the poorest countries, as well as the demographic momentum, even in countries where fertility rates have fallen, resulting from a high proportion of young people. Environmental degradation, dwindling small farm holdings, rampant crime, high unemployment, lack of opportunity, corrupt governments, and climate uncertainties drive both internal (within a country) and external migration. It is also worth pointing out, as Garrett Hardin did more than five decades ago, that some climate events have a catastrophic impact only because overpopulation has driven people to build their homes on floodplains.

The former Liberal government’s proposal to significantly increase immigration intake was profoundly misguided and would ensure degradation of life and the natural environment in Canada. And this planned increase happened at a time when there were more than 80,000 homeless people in Ontario alone, according to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario report. The total of homelessness across Canada may well exceed half a million.

The population pyramid cannot be constantly enlarged at the bottom, based on the ill-conceived assumption that there always has to be a larger ratio of young working people to support the older population at the higher strata of the population pyramid. To design immigration and citizenship policy based on such an assumption would be to lock Canada into the destructive logic of rapidly increasing population with the consequent results of crowded cities, resource depletion, and, ultimately, social and cultural disintegration.

Sixty years ago the late Canadian philosopher George Grant warned us that, “For twenty years, the Liberal Party of Canada had been pursuing policies that led inexorably to the disappearance of Canada” (Lament for a Nation, 1965). The Liberal policy of that era was “continental integration.” This integration of the North American continent would inevitably mean the erosion of Canada’s sovereignty and distinctiveness. The current generation of Liberals is promoting the policy of cultural disintegration through mass immigration.

A sound immigration policy would require the admission of no more than 0.003% of Canada’s current population from among qualified immigration applicants annually, to a maximum of 120,000 selected strictly on the basis of their ability to meaningfully contribute to Canadian society socially and economically.

The number of economic immigrants who came to Canada in 2015, before Justin Trudeau reset targets after coming to power in October of that year, was about 170,000. The addition of family members of these immigrants and those accepted for humanitarian reasons brought the number of new permanent residents in 2015 to about 260,000.

However, after the Liberals assumed power the target for permanent residents was increased to almost 500,000 by 2024. Before the backlash for the housing crisis generated by this policy (whose alleged purpose, ironically, was to benefit the economy) became too intense to ignore, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government planned to “stabilize” the annual intake of permanent resident at 500,000 in 2025 and beyond. This increase in permanent residents, along with proportionally greater increases in the number of temporary workers, foreign students, and asylum seekers who entered the country, drove population growth to over one million in each of 2022 and 2023, such that Canada’s population exceeded 41 million by April 2, 2024, an increase of more than two million from 2021.

None of this should surprise us from the government of an ideologue who tweeted to the entire world:

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada”   – Justin Trudeau on Jan. 28, 2017

In 2022, according to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada,  Asia continued to be the top source of immigration to Canada. Ranked by population of permanent residents, the following 10 countries sent the most immigrants:

These ten countries add up to 63% of the more than 437,000 permanent residents who came to Canada in 2022.

Under the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program, more than 960,000 Ukrainians were also approved to come to Canada and nearly 300,000 had arrived in Canada by February 24, 2025.

The Ukrainian arrivals are not included as permanent residents in federal immigration data since they are considered “temporary” residents.

The famed contemporary French economist, Thomas Piketty, in his internationally acclaimed book – Capital in the Twenty-First Century  – has shown that the economic growth due to increased population leads to lower per capita earnings for individuals, not prosperity. There will be a larger gross domestic product, but lower standard of living for each person.

We should add that the depletion of resources will further aggravate living conditions as we can see with the crises of housing, traffic congestion, pollution, and violent crimes (due to overcrowding and competition for survival) in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and the Greater Toronto Area, where they have received large numbers of immigrants.

The most ominous of all for the future of Canada, however, has been the disappearance of Canada’s best farmlands where the cities of Richmond, Surrey, Langley, Delta and other municipalities in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia now stand. Similarly, much of Canada’s best farmland has been lost to sprawling urbanization in southern Ontario along the northwest shore of Lake Ontario and continuing western and southwest toward Hamilton, St. Catharines, and Niagara Falls.

Many of the jobs making use of cheap immigrant labour are there to enhance employer profits. These jobs should be upgraded and improved, both in conditions of work and in earnings so unemployed Canadians would be willing to do them. To continue bringing more and more immigrants to do these jobs will only lead to the degradation of life and ultimate social disintegration.

As for the skilled-job vacancies, we should train Canadians rather than expecting instant skilled workers and bringing even more immigrants while the unemployed Canadians remain on social assistance.

For many decades self-serving governments in Ottawa have ignored the disastrous flaws in Canada’s immigration and citizenship laws which have been in plain sight for everyone to see. When Ahmed Hussen, the then Liberal Immigration Minister, was told about hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pregnant women from Hong Kong coming to Canada every year (generally to Richmond, British Columbia ) to give birth and have their children automatically gain Canadian citizenship, the minister’s answer was that “we cannot prevent pregnant women from entering Canada.”

A simple revision to Clause (3) (1) of the Canadian Citizenship Act would solve the issue for good – adding a requirement that a child born in Canada receives citizenship provided that the child’s birth mother was a Canadian citizen or permanent resident at the time of the birth.

In July 2020, the CBC reported that there are 300,000 Canadian citizens in Hong Kong who could migrate to Canada following the imposition of China’s Security Law on Hong Kong. Are these the same people whose mothers gave them birth in Richmond, BC? The “birth citizens” are generally called “anchor babies,” who are used by their parents and grandparents to get access to Canadian residency and citizenship later on in life.

Had a foreign power deliberately planned to colonize Canada, it could not have devised a more effective process of achieving its aim.

Furthermore, the Liberals claim that the Canadian population is getting older and we need young immigrants to work and support Canadians in their old age. Then they turn around and allow these “young” immigrants to bring their elderly parents and grandparents to Canada in the name of family reunification, thus negating the argument about aging Canadians:

Mass immigration will lead to the tribalization of society by creating self-sufficient masses of humanity who can satisfy all their needs within their own ethnic community, including intermarriage, and who will have no interest in integrating into Canadian society, thus precluding the emergence of a national consciousness which requires cultural integration.

Canada has lost the best of its farming and orchard lands due to population increase through mass immigration. Gone are the beautiful Okanagan orchards that supplied Canadians with fruits. The country has also lost the best Lower Mainland farms that were the country’s “bread baskets” for vegetables.  The fruit orchards of southern Ontario are suffering a similar fate. Canadians now have to buy much of our fruits and vegetables from Mexico, and South America, thus bleeding funds out of the country.

In addition, many of these low-wage immigrants from poor countries regularly send a substantial portion of their earnings in Canada to their families in their home countries, thus draining billions annually out of Canada. For example, Mexican immigrants in the U.S. sent US$55.9 billion to Mexico in 2022 according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, hence the Mexican government’s vigorous advocacy for more open U.S. borders.

Data from Statistics Canada has shown the number of jobs created by $1 billion expenditure, with the implication that a similar number of jobs would be lost in Canada for every billion dollars leaving Canada in the form of remittance by immigrants to their countries of origin.

A Statistics Canada report shows that in 2017 $5.2 billion left Canada in the form of remittance by immigrants to their countries of origin. That amounts to the loss of between 114,400 to 280,800 jobs per year, depending on whether the funds would have been spent on education (280,800) or the military (114,400) had the funds remained in Canada.

I am not opposed to immigration in principle, being a first-generation immigrant myself who was granted permanent residency and citizenship strictly based on the merit system in effect at the time and never invited any family member or relative to join me in Canada.

My point is that each immigrant should be chosen individually and based on the point system in effect in law. Self-serving Liberal politicians have opened wide the floodgates of the nation and are admitting vast numbers of immigrants with limited education and technical skills and no understanding of Canadian culture and values.

Low-wage workers and their families are obviously entitled to education and healthcare, housing and police protection – all of which must be provided and subsidized by the Canadian public since the meager earnings of these low-wage workers hardly require them to pay sufficient taxes to defray the costs of the public amenities they need to use. Patrick Grady and Herbert Grubel calculated that the net fiscal transfer by the federal government to recent immigrants amounted to $27 to $35 billion in 2014.