New Report Reveals Mass Immigration Will Not Impact Canada’s Ageing Population

Over the past few years, the drawbacks of Canada’s mass immigration policy have become widely acknowledged by the public, mainstream media columnists, and even many politicians. The consequences of sky-high, immigration-driven population growth have become impossible to ignore: a housing crisis, crowded schools, congested roads, strained social services, an overloaded job market, food banks running on empty, and fragmenting social cohesion.

The federal government is hitting the brakes, capping the international student and foreign worker streams and cutting permanent resident admissions. But we are still told that Canada needs some level of mass immigration to address our “ageing society”. As the Century Initiative, a lobby that advocates for growing Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100, put it in their October 2024 report: “To opt out of population growth driven by immigration is to opt for an older and poorer country cut off from the world”.

Notwithstanding the strong case that has been made against the value of fighting ageing demographics – some of these arguments have been made on this publication – a new report explains that large-scale immigration is not even accomplishing the government’s stated goal of addressing Canada’s ageing demographic profile.

The report, titled Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Demography: A Canadian Case Study was written by Daniel Hiebert and released by the Migration Policy Institute. Before we go further, I should clarify that this is not an immigration restrictionist outfit like Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) or Foundation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). According to Influence Watch, a watchdog that monitors and explains the biases of various organizations that influence public policy, the Migration Policy Institute “receives funding from a variety of left-of-center ideological funders, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations”.

Given the Migration Policy Institute’s progressive funding sources, we can expect that they would not be opposed on principle to mass immigration, which makes the following admission on the first page of their report all the more startling (emphasis mine):

“Canada provides a useful case in exploring what role immigration policy should play in future population planning—and to what extent immigration can alleviate demographic decline. Different scenarios commissioned from Statistics Canada explore the consequences of different recent immigration rates on the Canadian population and old-age dependency ratio, ranging from near-zero net permanent immigration (with annual permanent immigration at 0.3 percent of the national population) to highly ambitious (1.8 percent). These scenarios would produce very different population sizes by 2046 and 2071, but even under the highest of these immigration rates, the old-age dependency ratio would still rise as larger immigrant cohorts age and eventually retire along with their native-born peers. The only way to mitigate this would be to commit to continuously increasing the scale of immigration on an indefinite basis.”

In case that wasn’t clear enough, the report goes on to spell it out even more directly in the next paragraph (emphasis mine):

“These scenarios point to an important lesson: immigration can grow the population and slow the effects of falling fertility, but it is less efficient at changing the age composition of the population. To tackle the rising old-age dependency ratio and the prospect of shrinking workforces, policymakers would need to also consider other interventions, such as raising the retirement age.”

This finding corresponds to similar findings in a 2006 study published by the C.D. Howe Institute titled No Elixir of Youth: Immigration Cannot Keep Canada Young. President of Population Institute Canada Madeline Weld summarized the findings of this study as follows (emphasis mine):

“It concluded that immigration could do little to alleviate the likely consequences of aging on Canada’s age structure and government finances. In order to maintain the current dependency ratio, Canada would have to vastly increase immigration and by 2050 would be taking in 7 million immigrants per year and our population would be 65 million.”

For the last twenty years, the findings from reports have been clear: mass immigration does not reverse ageing. The only way to offset the ageing and retirement of the immigrant cohort is to indefinitely increase the rate of immigration to statistically absurd levels like the 7 million per year mentioned in the 2006 C.D. Howe study. Of course, all of this analysis is predicated on the idea that an ageing society is a five-alarm-fire that must be somehow “solved” – in reality, ageing is a transitory demographic trend that carries both challenges and benefits. President of Canadians for a Sustainable Society John Meyer has listed some of the benefits of an ageing society:

• Higher wages for young people

• Higher employment levels for young people

• More affordable housing

• Lower consumption

• No need for additional infrastructure

• Emphasis shifts from “more” to “better”

• Less material consumption by older population

• Lower need for resources outside of one’s own borders

One by one, the arguments made for mass immigration are being exposed as lacking merit. “Immigration raises GDP” – yes, but it reduces our living standard by lowering GDP per capita. “Immigration is needed to fix labour shortages” – why don’t we just train Canadians? “We need immigration to fix Canada’s ageing society” – even if that were a good idea, large-scale immigration doesn’t impact the demographic profile.

What then is the true motivation? We can look to the funding of pro-immigration organizations. The Century Initiative, the lobby that seeks to raise Canada’s population to 100 million, has received funding from the Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, TD Bank, the Power Corporation of Canada, AGT Food and Ingredients, and the Business Council of Canada. Artificially expanding Canada’s population benefits this country’s business and financial sectors by growing the pool of consumers, flooding the job market with cheap labour, and increasing rent and mortgage values. Mass immigration is big business.