According to a new CIBC report titled “Counting heads in Canada – a conundrum” there are a million more people in Canada than recorded by official statistics. The federal government is dramatically undercounting the number of “non-permanent residents” (work or study visa holders). Many do not fill out the census, and there is no system to track visa overstayers.
Counting heads in Canada should not be a conundrum. The concept of a census dates back to the Babylonians in 4000 BC, who used clay tiles. In the year 2 AD, the Han Dynasty recorded 57.67 million Chinese. The Romans conducted a census every five years, calling on every man to return to his place of birth with his family to be counted. With our vastly more advanced technology, we should be doing at least as well as the ancient world.
The central revelation of this bombshell report, however, is the extent to which our immigration system is out of control. Take the example of visa overstayers – who are by definition illegal immigrants.
Statistics Canada generously assumes that all visa holders quit the country 30 days after their visas expire. In reality, the majority stay. The report estimates that at least 750,000 people did so from 2017-2022. Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has no method to withdraw employment or tax slips from overstayers. With no legal repercussions, this population of illegal immigrants continues to grow.
The Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation (CMHC), a crown corporation focused on affordable housing, uses census data to create its household formation forecast – which is used by planners nationwide. The discovery of a million people uncounted in the census means that the housing crisis is worse than we thought.
This is in addition to Prime Minister Trudeau’s annual immigration target of 500,000 permanent residents. And that is in addition to Canada’s stock of international students, numbering 900,000, and temporary foreign workers, numbering 777,000 as of 2021.
In a recent Toronto Star piece titled “Is Canada’s housing crisis about to take a very dark turn?”, Susan Delacourt argued that “reopening a conversation” on immigration numbers would be intolerant. Unfounded accusations of xenophobia do not negate the reality of supply and demand. A month before Delacourt’s piece, monthly rent for a single-bedroom apartment in Vancouver reached $3000. This is an untenable situation, which hits immigrants and native-born Canadians alike.
High immigration is also fracturing social cohesion. Last Saturday night in northeast Calgary, rival Eritrean groups numbering between 150 and 200 clashed, wielding two-by-fours and pipes. A month ago, Toronto cancelled an Eritrean festival after an outbreak of violence hospitalized nine. These conflicts stem from differing opinions on the dictatorship in Eritrea.
Immigration is a non-partisan issue. Every opposition party should reject large-scale immigration: the NDP (foreign labour lowers wages), the Greens (population growth means urban sprawl) and the Conservatives (to conserve Canada’s identity and social cohesion). Canadians should stop confining our opposition to private conversations for fear of the noisy but small woke mob, and start registering our opposition with MPs.
Editor’s note: My bi-monthly Counter Current column is originally published in the Islands Marketplace magazine (islandsmarketplace.com/issue.pdf).
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