Immigration And The Canadian Vampire Economy

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on the author’s excellent Substack.

In 2011, the Fraser Institute calculated that legal immigrants imposed a net cost on taxpayers of twenty-three and a half billion dollars per year (equivalent, in 2005, to six thousand dollars annually per Canadian). These were people entitled to work, drawn from cohorts admitted before the human-wave policies of the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 eras (between 1987 and 2004).

There must have been a truly structural reason to increase inflows by several hundred thousand at the height of a worldwide pandemic, and an even better justification for allowing tens of thousands to be employed on scam visas and to overstay their welcome, so that, as never before, there are now well over half a million illegal immigrants across the country.

One must wonder how staggering the costs would be if calculated for 2025 or 2026. On average, immigrants earned only about two-thirds of (reported) median income in 2000. Today, something in the ballpark of 60 per cent of immigrants earn less than the median income. Bear in mind that median earners aren’t net taxpayers. Bear also in mind that several major immigration grifts, including the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, are substantially predicated on cooking the payroll books to meet eligibility criteria and otherwise lying to the government to gain an advantage.

The average (reported) nominal wage gap between non-permanent residents and Canadian-born workers widened from –9.5 per cent in 2015 to –22.6 per cent in 2023–24. That represents more than a doubling in less than ten years. Few honest people would recognize that immigrants today are more skilled or better suited than those of previous times. With the construction of the Liberal Welfare Plantation and the introduction of a new Canadian underclass composed of displaced native-born workers and foreigners, Canada is simply not a respectable country anymore. It is no longer the sort of place that the highest-quality immigrants would ever choose to live in, given the opportunity to move elsewhere.

Even a cursory glance reveals that the Canadian economy of 2026 is predicated almost entirely on moving money. This includes the parasitizing of productive sectors and the reallocation of capital through subsidies and debt spending, unproductive asset speculation, and immigrant injections intended to boost paper GDP and ensure a steady supply of hands and mouths in the service sector. Housing, pensions, everything: it’s all been reduced to a colossal and cancerous pyramid scheme.

When I meet a personable and intelligent newcomer, I am, in keeping with the character of my people, sometimes compelled to apologize. ‘Yes’, I say. ‘This was a great country. I am very sorry that the news came too late. Many of us do not even remember the good days except through pictures and stories’.

We really do just seem to shamble on. One might imagine that this is how it would have felt to carry on in the final days of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I find in my travels, for whatever reason, that members of the Ukrainian diaspora are especially well equipped to understand the national condition and the Canadian Vampire Economy as it has developed. Over half of us are either working for the state, working in an organization funded directly or indirectly by the state, or collecting money on the dole or as part of some imaginary chunk of a state-backed employment sector. And the less fortunate, of course, scrape by without any mobility or security, at the malevolent mercy of a distant and pitiless governing class—a class that saturates the labour market and constructs conditions that keep them poor, disorganized, socially weak and, again, dependent on the state and government networks of patronage. These are networks of patronage, mind you, that gain power as the opportunities to manage services, bureaucracies and value-extractive institutions increase.

Obviously, immigration is not the only cause of our most pressing issues. It is merely representative of the corruption of the prevailing governing philosophy. It is a symptom of decline and socio-economic change, and one of several tools employed in the betrayal of the Canadian people and in the sacrifice of our collective inheritance.

The redistribution of treasure and status that comes with immigration serves to concentrate wealth in the hands of mediocre, unproductive managerial wreckers and money barons either in bed with the state or organized for the purpose of advancing the national violation. Every lobbyist I have ever met has decried labour shortages—one did so, incredibly, while a youth waved a CV towards our table. This same lobbyist later accepted $4,000 as a placement subsidy from the provincial government to hire a barely literate temporary worker (who had applied for permanent residence) as a hotel room attendant. He had worked as an Uber driver and had held no other job during his time in the country up to that point. Under most provincial programmes of this kind, the organization represented by the lobbyist actually gets more money if it chooses a foreigner (more often than not, this amounts to ‘double points’ because employers also get a larger subsidy for choosing minority applicants). This is true for dozens of provincial and federal programmes, as is overt discrimination in government job postings. The transient gentleman so described accessed innumerable programmes on the road to that wage subsidy. I know for certain that he received at least $1,000 in funding before his $4,000 placement subsidy. These funds were used to bling him out and provided no clear advantage to the Canadian people, especially those looking for work.

At every stage, he double-, triple- and quadruple-dipped, being entitled to more than any struggling Canadian and being coached on how to access new services by a conga line of eager case managers. In any of several dozen Canadian cities allowed to operate with ‘access without fear’ policies, this man could well, for all it matters, have been in the country illegally and on welfare. And in any case, the general philosophy across our social services is that assessing entitlement ‘isn’t their job’, even when abuse and deception are suspected. But no, it is almost cheating to talk about criminals or refugees or illegal aliens. We know some people scam their way here to receive benefits and force taxpayers to foot medical bills (while Canadians die in hallways). We know that it costs a golden bullet train every year to house and pamper refugees. We know that we are making ‘small’ sacrifices to assist others for humanitarian reasons. Yes, that is a different article.

We cannot allow room for deflection. The point is simple. Legal immigrants brought for economic reasons cost money, punish everyday people, and make life more expensive and desperate for the working class. This happens because it benefits the upper strata and the asset barons.

The immense costs shouldered by the Canadian people make no difference at all to lobbyists and employers, who are responsible for wages but not for any of the accompanying services beyond those funded by ordinary taxes.

Whatever the social and economic objectives of the diverse interests participating in the national plunder, the zero-sum calculus is apparent. What is the practical effect of refusing to deport an illegal immigrant or a criminal, or of admitting a foreign worker who represents a net cost to taxpayers? That worker is destined not only to take a job, a doctor, and a home but also to bring with him his dependent spouse and children, and his elderly grandparents and cousins through chain migration. Even if he were a doctor (and statistics say he isn’t), he has taken probably half his patient load with him to Canada.

In 1990, Canada’s population was roughly 26 million. Today, it is nearly 42 million.

Does it feel to you that we are 16 million Canadians richer? Does it feel as though there is continuity between what we had and where we are going now? Or does it feel as though the old Canada is being torn down, papered over, and replaced by something rotten, inferior, and morally bankrupt? Does it feel as though we are denied not only material goods but also our heroes, our sense of self, and the national soul—and that all of this is happening not as an unfortunate ramification but as an intentional, almost structural requirement?

In a recent public statement, Danielle Smith said that temporary residents cover only about a quarter of the costs of their education and health care alone in Alberta. Across the country, similar patterns emerge. There are many programmes where it is fairly straightforward and routine to track costs and divide them by group and status. There are many more, however, where it is nearly impossible.

Growth in the low-skilled population strains housing, utilities, transit, the justice system, law enforcement, bureaucracies, and most local services and institutions, lowering the quality of daily life for the public and saddling them with debt.

Few realize just how staggering and incalculable the costs of Canada’s migration regime really are. Beyond the scope of this article are the many opportunity costs that come with using immigration as a means to prop up an unproductive economy (as opposed to making capital, social, and research investments), and the increased costs of goods and services imposed on consumers through supply-and-demand pressures (as exacerbated by immigration-driven wage suppression). It is also beyond our scope to consider the many costs incurred by the state and the various social costs borne by ordinary people as a result of the necessary changes in governance and service provision that come with a loss of trust and a decline in community-cultural intersubjectivity, a sense of collective self, and general agreement on community goods and shared evils.

For now, our task is only to cast away comfortable lies and to acknowledge how difficult it would be to make an accurate and comprehensive accounting. It is beyond my abilities to lay it all down line by line. And it is certainly beyond the abilities of the best and brightest at McKinsey and Company, even bringing to bear every AI subscription at their disposal.

What matters is that we recognize that the costs are enormous.

Our immigration policies have made Canada weaker, not stronger, and that was true even under Harper.

One or two or three generations of immigrants need not comprise a high-cost, high-friction underclass. Nor is it the case that we need several hundred thousand every year. That is ridiculous. And I am tired of paying for it. I am tired of being saddled with debt for the privilege of funding a discrete form of group and corporate welfare.

A growing number of us will not support any party that enables Canada to be a fractured, foreign, exploitative, and unproductive pyramid scheme. An expanding bloc will vote only for a party we believe will go another way and lead Canada in a new direction.

Unfortunately, Mark Carney has signalled, after a break that amounted to not much of a break at all, that immigration is poised to soar again—’…in the nature of Canada’, as he put it. Whether or not it is ‘controlled’, as he claims, the structural purpose is clear. Present and future generations will be exploited to maintain parasitism, baby-boomer standards of living, and corporate welfare. The market will be free when it is good for the market. Limitations on the market will be to the disadvantage of the productive economy and the working class.

There will be no bonds of duty between the strata.

Worse still, Pierre Poilievre, with his ‘Direct Flights to Amritsar’ rhetoric, has taken the better part of ten years even to meaningfully imply that immigration should be lower. He was calling for increases at the height of the immigration crisis.

Poilievre’s recent attacks on Liberal plans to spike intakes once again are not a sure promise of substantive policy. He lacks credibility on this issue. He has demonstrated no strong commitment to saving the country. What about Canada does he intend to conserve? Thus far, he has demonstrated little more than a desire to provide better management of a globalist Canada constructed by the Liberal Party machine.

For now, both the Conservative and Liberal leaders still seem like two wings of the same bird.

But I am encouraged that this new crop of voters doesn’t seem to care about boutique tax cuts. Nor do they seem entranced by Carney’s economic magic tricks. Collectively, we seem to demand an answer to the same question:

Will you save the country with decisive action? Or will you, like so many before, fritter away time carving the national turkey on a sinking ship?

The abuse perpetrated by our leaders—hook-mouthed to the immigration faucet like so many ruddy alcoholics.

We cannot abide by it any longer. It will not be the sort of thing that can be defused by lower prices and slightly more affordable homes.

Our leaders must come off the immigration binge and be true patriarchs and matriarchs—men and women with a real attachment to the children they are charged, by divine, moral, and pragmatic law, to serve.

Otherwise, we will never vote. We will not buy in. No promise will be worthy of trust.

To be a conservative is to be the sword and the shield of your people.

Show us fidelity, and show us honour.