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A CNN report that hasn’t been published yet. Interview with Alex Epstein of Energy Talking Points

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A CNN reporter interviews me about my political work

A behind-the-scenes look at my work with candidates and elected officials

In mid-February, a CNN reporter who had been following Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign, and had heard the campaign refer positively to my work, reached out to me to learn more about the behind-the-scenes work I do with candidates and elected officials.

I thought readers of this newsletter would enjoy learning more about this work—which, as you will see, is non-partisan, non-exclusive, and principled: my team and I will advise any major politician or candidate who asks, and will only deliver messaging and policy ideas we believe are pro-freedom and pro-human.

(I am keeping the identity of the reporter anonymous, and I am further protecting the person by paraphrasing their questions in my own words so that no specific phrases are attributable to them. Note also that CNN has not yet published my comments.)


CNN Reporter

What kinds of opportunities do you think exist for a Republican president in terms of energy and environmental policy?

Alex Epstein

I do a lot of advising of people in politics, and it actually has no partisan affiliation. So I’ll advise anyone from any party and I never support any candidate. I’ve advised multiple of the presidential candidates and I would advise Biden if he asked me (he hasn’t asked me for any advice yet).

My interest is in pushing what I call energy freedom policies—which we could get into the details of—which I think would be very good for the country.

CNN Reporter

What are energy freedom policies, and how do you go about advising policymakers to put them into practice?

Alex Epstein

The basic idea of energy freedom is that the key to both energy abundance and everything that comes with it, including prosperity here and around the world—but also coming up with long term alternatives to fossil fuels—is ultimately to be free to produce and use every form of energy.

I believe there’s a near term imperative to have as much energy as possible. I don’t think we should be restricting fossil fuel use. But I also think there’s a lot of things we can do to get out of the way of alternative forms of energy. So I’m personally agnostic in terms of what form of energy wins; I just want the most cost-effective thing to win.

For example, in the realm of alternatives, what we really need are alternatives that can be globally cost-competitive, such that China, India, etc., will voluntarily adopt them, versus the current state of affairs where China has 300-plus new coal plants in the pipeline designed to last 40-plus years because that’s the cheapest thing.

So that’s the broad idea. I can send you some links on this, but I’ve broken it down into five key policy areas. And then there are a lot of detailed policies within that. But the broad frame—and again, I can send you documents—but “Liberate responsible domestic development” is one of them. And so, that basically means: allow America to build things quickly. Right now, China can build a subway station in nine hours. We can’t build a yoga studio in nine months. So basically, getting all of the anti-development stuff out of the way. And again, this is energy agnostic. It’s not just for fossil fuels, but a lot of the changes apply to fossil fuels.

Number two is: “End preferences for unreliable electricity.” I think there are a lot of bad policies that favor unreliable electricity, so solar and wind without really accompanying battery storage or other backup. And so I advocate a suite of policies that I think would allow all forms of energy to compete to provide reliable electricity.

The third one is: “Reforming environmental quality standards to incorporate cost-benefit analysis.” Most people don’t know this, but right now, EPA is literally not allowed to consider the cost of its policies. And I think that just violates basic rules, and it guarantees that we do things that are bad for our economy and for health, because wealth is health. And if you can’t consider the cost of your policies, and you can only consider the benefits, then you’re always going to tend toward more anti-industry stuff. So there’s a suite of reforms there.

Number four is: “Address CO2 emissions long term by liberating innovation not punishing America.” So I sort of indicated this before, but I don’t believe in short term restrictions on fossil fuels. I think basically anything we do to restrict ourselves just harms America, and doesn’t do anything to make low carbon alternatives cost-competitive. So I think all the action should be in things like liberating nuclear, liberating deep geothermal, and a lot of this is in the “Liberating responsible domestic development.” If you make that a lot easier, you make it easier to do these other things, these alternatives.

And then the fifth one is kind of a specification on the fourth, but it’s “Decriminalize nuclear,” because I think nuclear energy is the most persecuted form of energy. It has a really tragic history where it used to be cost-effective and now it’s not, because of irrational regulations that have made it 10 times more expensive and yet have added zero safety benefit. They’ve in fact harmed our safety in many ways by depriving us of clean, safe nuclear energy. And so I think there’s a whole suite of reforms necessary for that.

So those are the broad areas and then in each area, you know, my team and I are hard at work detailing, “Hey, what are the key reforms?” And one thing just to note is that I don’t hold any political office, I never will, I don’t lobby for anyone, I don’t endorse anyone, I set up everything so I’m quite independent.

So what I try to do is just say what I think is right, and then persuade people as much as possible. And fortunately a lot of people listen to me, but I have no power over anything officially—but that also allows me to just say what I think is right. So, I’m not under the illusion that everyone is going to do exactly what I think, but they do listen.

And then to your question about what’s happened: I’ve only been working with politicians since really 2020, and we’ve done it through a vehicle called Energy Talking Points—which, everyone can see the messaging at EnergyTalkingPoints.com—and we have only recently in the last 6 to 12 months started getting into policy advice.

We have some policy stuff in the works with a few different offices, and certainly we’ve advised multiple Presidential candidates on policy ideas, but I don’t think we’ve yet seen these energy freedom policies pursued, really put forward, to the extent we’ll see it in the next year or two. Whereas we have seen, I think, quite a bit of my messaging being used.

CNN Reporter

Why has the nuclear energy space become so toxic in recent years?

Alex Epstein

If you look at where nuclear was at its peak, it’s arguably in the late 60’s when you’re really getting cost-competitive with coal. But, you know, safer and cleaner than coal—and I’m a big advocate of coal. I mean, I’m a big advocate of anything that can produce additional cost-effective energy. But I think nuclear was in the realm of out-competing coal back then.

And it has a lot of inherent advantages. It’s very dense. The fuel supply is abundant, the fuel is cheap, safer to mine obviously, doesn’t emit anything harmful in the air. But it was demonized as a unique safety threat, whereas I think in reality—and I talked about this in my book Fossil Future and on EnergyTalkingPoints.com—I think it’s actually uniquely safe.

And we’re doing a lot of work on this in terms of our nuclear policies that we’re working on. But I think the green movement, which is very tied to the anti-fossil-fuel movement, really demonized it to the point where people equated nuclear power with nuclear bombs, thought of it as uniquely dangerous and then set up a whole regulatory infrastructure including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where the whole focus was on making nuclear infinitely safe beyond any fearmonger’s imagination, versus making it available.

And so they thought, in practice, the best way to make it safe was to make it non-existent. And that’s why since the NRC came into existence in 1975, we didn’t have one new nuclear plant go from conception to completion until last year. And those plants were many times over budget in Georgia.

So I think it’s a 50 year plus problem and when I talk to any politician, what I just tell them is, “You have to be willing to consider fundamental reforms of the NRC and perhaps replacing it with something else, because the status quo is so bad.” Often politicians just like saying that they like things, or kind of tinkering at the margins, saying, “Hey, we’ll give it some funding,” or you know, “We’ll invest in this research,” and I think you have to fundamentally stop treating nuclear as a uniquely dangerous form of energy.

There’s a whole bunch of things that need to be done, but I’m glad people are talking about it more positively. But the policy, we’re in a policy catastrophe with it. I don’t believe any significant progress will be made until we radically change the policy.

CNN Reporter

Have you spoken to DeSantis personally?

Alex Epstein

So, without going into much detail, since most of this stuff is confidential, I have spoken to him before, and I’ve spoken to his team before. And I would say that what you see publicly is reflected privately in the sense of: he and they are very detail-oriented, particularly in terms of implementation.

They’re very interested in: How do you actually get these things to work? And I think that’s something that is very good and it’s something that I try to become better at myself. I mean, there are plenty of things that I disagree with Ron DeSantis about, but I respect that detail-orientation, and I think it explains the ability to get things done in practice.

CNN Reporter

What candidates did you advise this cycle?

Alex Epstein

I won’t say specifically, but a lot of them I either talk to—I always tried to talk to the individual or the team, and that happened in many of the cases. I mean in general we, this project I call Energy Talking Points, we advise something like at this point over 200 major offices. Last year I probably advised 75-plus major politicians. So, I talk to a lot of people to various degrees, and again, I don’t do anything for them except offer them messaging and policy—but I think we do quite a good job with that and I think that’s why they listen. Or, sometimes they listen; definitely not always.

CNN Reporter

What have you learned since you’ve entered the space of politicians who shape policy?

Alex Epstein

From my perspective, as somebody who considers himself more pro-freedom than both major political parties, I’ve been surprised at how open people are to more radical ideas if those ideas are explained in detail and have accompanying persuasive arguments.

One thing I try to do when I advise people is give them solutions, not just vague advice. So if I’m giving policy, give very specific guidance, give guidance on how to talk about it. And this is also true about messaging.

For example, one thing you saw—this is not me revealing anything because it was public—both Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, I can send you an article I wrote about this, but they talked about, you know, the 98% decline in climate-related disaster deaths. So this was at least mentioned by DeSantis in his energy speech in Midland, and Vivek mentioned it many, many times, sometimes mentioning my name and my book, Fossil Future.

And I think this is a really important point for people to understand: that empirically, we’re safer than ever from climate disasters. And I think people should think about why that is and what the implications are for the future.

I was impressed that leading politicians are willing to talk about that. And my experience with people like that is they’ll ask for references. At least some of them. And I was happy to see that the media felt the need to respond.

So we saw—I’ll send you this article—but we saw Reuters responded to it, the New York Times responded to it, PolitiFact responded to it. And none of them could answer the basic fact—they tried to sort of explain their way around it—but none of them refuted the basic fact. And I just thought, okay, I like that people are willing to say and do more pro-freedom and more principled things if somebody really helps them with the details. That was my hope when I started getting into politics and I am seeing that bear out to a significant extent.

CNN Reporter

Have you changed your approach over the years as you’ve watched the public react to your talking points?

Alex Epstein

I’ve been working on these issues for 17 years, so a lot of this stuff, I test it out in different kinds of ways—which is not the same, I mean, I’m not running millions of dollars worth of polls and stuff. But I test it out in front of different audiences. I see how people respond on social media.

I think people are open to a lot, so my own interest is what’s right and do the best job you can of persuading people of it. And there’ll be plenty of people who try to compromise that and dampen it. I don’t need to be the one to do it. I just try to make sure for everything I say, I can make, I think, a case that would persuade a reasonable person who was inclined to disagree with me but wasn’t dead-set on disagreeing with me.

If I have trouble doing that and I think the thing is right, then I try to get better at arguing for it. I don’t just give up. And just as a personal policy, I don’t ever advocate anything I don’t agree with, and I will never help a politician with something I don’t agree with. So for example, as I said, I’m not partisan, but if Republicans want to pass an import carbon tax, I will definitely not help them with that and I’ll publicly argue against them.

CNN Reporter

I noticed Elon Musk receiving some pushback from surprised conservatives, when he posted that the best way to address climate change is with a carbon tax.

Alex Epstein

Well, that’s been his position for a long time. I don’t think it really makes any sense. But what’s interesting I think about him—and I don’t actually attribute this to him taking over Twitter—he has dramatically moderated his hostility toward fossil fuels and his belief in climate catastrophe.

So he has some hostility now, and to some extent, his very rosy claims about solar and batteries, although those have been moderated the least; maybe there are commercial reasons for that. But he’s kind of, you know, if you look at when the Powerwall came out, he’s just like—and this is almost a direct quote—“burning fossil fuels and putting stuff into the atmosphere is the worst idea ever” and “the planet is on fire.” That’s what it looks like.

And it’s just kind of—and then we have this Powerwall and a million things he said about the Powerwall that didn’t come remotely true and would obviously not come remotely true if one knew anything at the time. But now his position [on climate] is sort of, “Yeah, you know, it’s not going to be a problem for a while, but it may be a problem eventually.” And he loves to say, “If I could push a button and get rid of oil and gas, I wouldn’t push the button, and in fact, we need more oil and gas in the US, short-term.”

So he’s become more moderated.

But yeah, carbon tax, that’s a standard thing that a lot of people believe in, so anyone who’s surprised with that just hasn’t followed him at all. And he’s not actually—whatever one thinks of the change in his views—he’s not like a standard conservative. He never was a standard liberal or a standard conservative, I don’t think.

CNN Reporter

Thank you for your time.

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Business

A Rush to the Exits: It’s Not Just Immigration, Canada Has an Emigration Crisis

Published on

From the C2C Journal

By Scott Inniss
The Justin Trudeau government’s decade-long determination to drive immigration numbers ever-higher – a policy that public outcry now has it scrambling away from – has obscured a rather important and discouraging phenomenon: more and more people are choosing to leave Canada. Emigration is the flipside of the immigration issue – a side that has been largely ignored. With the best and brightest among us increasingly leaving for better opportunity elsewhere, this growing trend reveals Canada is no longer the promised land it once was. Using the most recently released data and analysis, Scott Inniss uncovers why so many are voting with their feet.

Elena Secara is planning a career change. And not a minor change. She’s planning on moving to a different country for the next stage of her working life.

Secara arrived with her husband and their two sons as immigrants from Romania in 2005. At that time, Canada was looking for good-quality newcomers to welcome and Romania was still struggling to pull itself out of the doldrums following its 1989 revolution. As an impressively educated couple – Elena was a bank economist while her husband Gabriel had trained as a mechanical engineer – who were both fluent in French, the Secaras’ prospects looked good. They landed in Montreal, eventually settling in the suburb of Vaudreuil in 2010.

“The quality of life is low here”: After 20 years of living and working in Canada, Romanian immigrants Elena Secara and her husband Gabriel are planning to move back to their home country, having grown disillusioned with Canada’s economic limitations. (Source of photo: Courtesy of Elena and Gabriel Secara)

But life in Canada never became quite what they had hoped. Elena could not find the kind of work she thought she would. She took a job as a business manager in a car dealership in 2006, where she has stayed on, while Gabriel hit the wall erected by many Canadian professional associations that often severely limits recognition of education and training in other countries. He took upgrading courses to have his professional degree recognized, but that still didn’t land him a job in his field. Gabriel eventually went to work in manufacturing, often pulling night shifts.

“We had to face the reality of economic life in Canada,” says Elena in an interview. “We have contributed and worked for 20 years in Canada. I have never been without a job. But with the income we can count on over the next few years, it does not allow us to live at a level we wish to live at. The quality of life is low here, and we cannot take it.” Elena became a Canadian citizen in 2009 but she’s planning to say goodbye to Canada in the next couple of years. One of her sons has already voted with his feet, and is now living in Romania.

The Secaras’ story is not unique. Every year tens of thousands of Canadians pull up stakes and start a new life elsewhere. They become emigrants, and their numbers have been rising. Recent debates over the Justin Trudeau government’s massive increase in immigration targets (which last month were scaled back a bit) have ignored the fact that about 100,000 people have been leaving Canada every year of late, undermining the very system the government is so keen to tout and costing the country some of its best and brightest. Many are like Elena – successful people who came to Canada, made it through the immigration system to become citizens, only to feel their ambitions were stymied and their dreams dashed, to grow disillusioned and, ultimately, to leave again.

For many, Canada is not the promised land, or even the type of country they thought it was.

The Outflow by the Numbers

While it is known that the flow of emigrants from Canada is increasing – and that the number-one destination is the United States – their exact number is elusive, so Canada estimates figures using data from international sources, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (Source of photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

The first thing that becomes obvious when looking at emigration is how imprecise the data is. Unlike more repressive regimes, or even the European Union, Canada has no exit controls. Emigrants can just leave – and Canadians can also take their money with them, as long as they pay their taxes – and so organizations like Statistics Canada can only make estimates. “Emigration is one of the most difficult flows [of people] to measure,” says Lorena Canon, an analyst at Statcan who studies migration, in an interview. She and other statisticians have to work with different sources of information, like tax records, lists of recipients of child welfare money, and foreign government agencies that keep records. “Because we know almost all [Canadian emigrants] go to the states, we use data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security [on new arrivals to the U.S.],” she points out by way of example.

In a 2022 study entitled The Canadian diaspora: Estimating the number of Canadians citizens who live abroad, Canon and her co-author Julien Bérard-Chagnon acknowledged the lack of precision. “The numerous challenges associated with accurately measuring emigration and the significant conceptual differences in international data mean that the few sources that are currently available…provide very different numbers,” they write, in the bureaucratese of number-crunchers. Their study sorts through and analyzes the available data to estimate the number of Canadians living abroad in 2016 at between 2.9 million and 5.5 million, with a “medium numbers scenario” putting it at 4,038,700.

These are big numbers, the “medium” scenario equating to about 12.6 percent of the Canadian population that year (the latest for which this kind of analysis exists). Even if one excluded what the authors call “Canadian citizens by descent” – those born abroad to parents holding Canadian citizenship, who might be thought less connected to Canada – the country has still lost about 2 million citizens who used to live here. (The other two emigrant sub-categories are Canadian-born citizens, who comprise an estimated 33 percent of the nation’s global diaspora, and naturalized citizens, the remaining 15 percent.)

A 2022 Statistics Canada study put the number of Canadian citizens living abroad in 2016 under its “medium numbers scenario” at roughly 4 million, or 12.5 percent of the national population. (Sources: (table) Statistics Canada, 2022; (chart data) Statistics Canada, 2024)

And given that Canon advises there’s a margin of error of “perhaps up to 5 or 10 percent” in estimating numbers, and the fact – untracked by Statcan – that there are likely Canadian expats working illegally abroad who may not want to be counted, these are likely to be conservative estimates.

The numbers have also been rising in recent years. In its work analyzing the components of population growth, Statcan estimates the number of “emigrants” and “net emigrants” (which subtracts returnees) going back to the 1970s. Both numbers gradually rose into the 1990s, then stabilized to some degree. Emigration jumped significantly in 2016-2017, coinciding with a change in how Statcan calculates its figures. Since 2021-2022 it has been rising steadily, and in 2023-2024 more than 104,000 people left Canada.

Numbers from other sources tell a similar story. This year’s American Community Survey (ACS), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, put the number of people moving from Canada to the U.S. at 126,340 in 2022, up by 70 percent from a decade ago. About one-third of those are Americans who were returning home, but the number of Canadian-born immigrants to the U.S. was 50 percent higher than in pre-Covid times.

The Flow of Money, the Flow of People

A realistic interpretation of emigration numbers would include an observation of some historical trends. Although it’s true that for centuries emigrants tended to be poor, landless people desperate for a better life, or were fleeing oppression or famine, it’s not always the case today and certainly does not describe most Canadians currently pulling up stakes. In developed nations, the more prosperous people are typically the more mobile, and with rising wealth come greater means to move to other places.

Follow the money: Alex Whalen, an economist at the Fraser Institute, believes that “the precipitous decline in earnings [in Canada], relative to the U.S.” is helping drive Canadian emigration.

The trend also very likely reflects the globalization of commerce; as more people find themselves working for transnational corporations, they increasingly see the benefits in moving abroad. This is complemented by our era’s instant access to detailed information about nearly any place, even the world’s remotest and most obscure corners. That includes real estate prices, quality of schools, leisure activities – and, among the most important categories, tax levels. More and more Canadians have gained awareness that many other countries offer not only a more pleasing climate than Canada but an equal or better quality of life and some combination of lower taxes and lower prices.

When historians are discussing major past events – like a lot of people moving around – the conversation usually includes discussion of economic circumstances. Put bluntly, find the flow of money and you can explain the flow of people. Alex Whalen, an economist and director of Atlantic Canada Prosperity for the Fraser Institute, points to the earnings gap between Canada and the U.S. as a factor driving current emigration. Its recent report, Our Incomes Are Falling Behind: Earnings in the Canadian Provinces and US States, 2010-2022compared median per capita earnings in all 50 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces – and painted a depressing picture. Results in 2010 were worrisome enough: Alberta was the only Canadian province in the top 20. By 2022, all 10 Canadian provinces finished at the bottom of the ranking. Every province had become poorer, by that measure, than the lowest-earning American state.

“The precipitous decline in earnings, relative to the U.S. is deeply concerning, but not entirely surprising,” says Whalen in an interview. Canadian incomes have been lower than those in the U.S. for some time, he says, but it’s the dramatic nature of their recent relative decline that’s raising eyebrows. And it is not just relative to the U.S. Whalen points to growth rates in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) – how much a country produces per person – as evidence of Canada’s waning economic power. In another recent study, the Fraser Institute noted that Canada ranked third-lowest among 30 OECD countries by that measure between 2014 and 2022, losing ground to key allies and trading partners like the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

Comparing median per capita earnings in 50 U.S. states and the 10 Canadian provinces in 2010 versus 2022 reveals Canada’s dismal economic performance. (Source of charts: Fraser Institute, 2024)

Worse, perhaps, the OECD has projected Canada will rank dead-last among member countries in per capita GDP growth going out to 2060. GDP per capita is closely linked to productivity, which has been in a troubling decline in Canada, and to business investment, which has been moribund. Countries with rising per-capita GDP provide higher average wages and salaries because the capital investments that drive the higher productivity enable employers to pay more – and create greater competition for qualified labour.

“From a competitive perspective it is not surprising to see that people are on the move [out of Canada],” says Whalen, who notes that he is not an expert on emigration. Canada’s relatively high taxation rates, he says, exacerbate the problem: “High-income people, in particular, tend to be mobile, and sensitive to taxation and over-taxation.”

The high cost of living, particularly for housing, is also an increasingly large factor. A recent survey by Angus Reid reported that 28 percent of respondents were giving serious consideration to leaving their province of residence due to the increasing unaffordability of housing. Among those, 42 percent said they would move outside Canada. The overall cost of living, finding a better quality of life and improved access to health care also made the list of reasons to leave.

Canada’s poor productivity growth, partly due to sagging business investment, means sluggish growth in GDP per capita and lagging wages; add in heavy taxation, declining health care and the grim climate, and the decision to leave Canada becomes even easier. (Sources: (charts) TD Economics, 2024; (photos) Pexels)

And those most likely to leave are the people Canada should most want to keep. As the abovementioned 2022 Statcan study put it, emigrants “are younger, earn higher incomes, are more educated and often work in fields that require a high level of skill. The departure of people with these characteristics raises concerns about the loss of significant economic potential and the retention of a highly skilled workforce.”

Canada Becoming a Big Hotel

The notion that Canada is not so much a country as a large, open-air hotel has gained ground in recent years. Emigration can be seen as part of that phenomenon. Some of the people leaving Canada are people who recently arrived. A report from the Conference Board of Canada in partnership with the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), an advocacy group focused on integrating and celebrating new Canadians, sounds the alarm bells on the immigrant-turned-emigrant trend. Entitled The Leaky Bucket, the report notes that “onward” migration had been steadily increasing since the 1980s – but positively surged in 2017 and 2019 to levels 31 percent higher than the historical average. High levels of onward migration, the report notes, “Could undermine Canada’s strategy to use immigration to drive population and economic growth.”

An updated version of the report, shows that the numbers grew again in 2020, although the document speculates that the Covid-19 pandemic could have been a factor (even though the accompanying lockdowns and travel restrictions would seem to complicate the process of moving to another country). The report forecasts that 25,500 of the 395,000 planned permanent resident admissions in 2025 will have moved on by 2030.

“These are not desperate people fleeing destitution for the comfort of Canada’s generosity,” writes Daniel Bernhard, CEO of the ICC. “Rather, they are a globally coveted talent pool with global options. When we fail to retain newcomers, we are essentially helping them to contribute to another country’s success.” And these are the very people, Bernhard lamented in a recent column in the Globe and Mail, who are “by far most eager to hit the road.”

Another study from the ICC conducted with the polling firm IPSOS was equally alarmist. The Newcomer Perspective  surveyed more than 15,000 immigrants and found that 26 percent said they are likely to leave Canada within two years, with the proportion rising to more than 30 percent among federally selected economic immigrants – those with the highest scores in the points system. Clearly, many more people are planning to check out of Hotel Canada.

“Burgeoning disillusionment”: A 2023 report warns that even recent arrivals in Canada are turning around and leaving; “After giving Canada a try, growing numbers of immigrants are saying ‘no thanks,’ and moving on,” says Daniel Bernhard (right), CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. (Sources of photos: (left) The Canadian Press/Chris Young; (right) TVO today)

The top three reasons driving onward migration are all economic, led by the cost of housing, low salaries and general economic conditions. More than half of those surveyed said Canada falls short of their expectations as a place to get ahead financially. “While the fairy tale of Canada as a land of opportunity still holds for many newcomers,” Bernhard wrote in The Leaky Bucket, there is undeniably a “burgeoning disillusionment. After giving Canada a try, growing numbers of immigrants are saying ‘no thanks,’ and moving on.” It’s a particularly stark phenomenon considering that most immigrants have come from much poorer, less developed and often autocratic or unsafe nations; that these people find Canada – for decades considered the ultimate destination among those seeking a better life – to be such a disappointment that the best response is to leave is a damning indictment.

The same detachment from Canada can be seen in the number of immigrants who don’t even take the trouble to get their citizenship. Statcan highlighted the new trend in its February 2024 report, The decline in the citizenship rate among recent immigrants to Canada. In the mid-1990s, 65-70 percent of recent arrivals completed the process of becoming citizens (in 1996 it was even higher, 75.4 percent). By 2021 the proportion had fallen to 46 percent. Even accounting for the possible effects of the pandemic, which slowed the processing of citizenship applications, the citizenship rate declined at a faster rate from 2016 to 2021 than during any other five-year period since 1996.

The rising number of immigrants who don’t take the trouble to get their citizenship suggests an increasing detachment from Canada, quite possibly because the perceived value of becoming Canadian is not what it used to be. (Source of graph: Statistics Canada, 2024)

The drop was most dramatic among immigrants from non-Western nations, including East Asia (mostly China) and Southeast Asia. “This may be related to the increasing economic and international status of these regions,” the report speculates, “which may reduce the economic motivation of recent immigrants from these regions to acquire Canadian citizenship.” The value of becoming Canadian, it seems, is not what it used to be.

Canada Losing its Best and Brightest – Mostly to the U.S.

Canada, as every schoolchild learns, has thousands of kilometres of undefended border. There are places where people cross officially, at roads and airports. Some people think of these border crossings as gates. But they are not gates. They are revolving doors. A lot of people go through them, in both directions, every year.

“Revolving doors”: Canada’s border crossings with the U.S. have become gateways for those with marketable skills and high earning-power to leave the country. (Sources of photos: (left) ValeStock/Shutterstock; (right) oksana.perkins/Shutterstock)

When digesting the economic data, it becomes obvious that the flow of people out of the country is following the flow of money. People want better incomes, better prospects. It seems like stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious must be stated. The ones leaving Canada for the U.S. are the ones in a position to do so: the ones with globally marketable skills, independent incomes or inherited wealth, who can easily start anew elsewhere. And the ones who have decent incomes are usually the ones who have the brains as well. Canada is losing its best and brightest. Instead of easing, Canada’s brain drain is almost certain to intensify. Whoever holds office in Ottawa over the next decade will be hearing about it; let’s hope they do something about it.

Political leaders often tout Canada as a land of immigrants. In 2021, more than 8.3 million people, or 23 percent of the population, were immigrants, the highest proportion since Confederation. Never mentioned is that there could be as many as 5 million Canadians living abroad – one-eighth of the Canadian population. The inflated but often-insincere rhetoric about immigration, emanating from Liberal and NDP politicians in Ottawa and from much of mainstream media, has simply ignored the whole question of outflow from Canada, of how we have lost so many of our best and brightest – and, without major economic, fiscal and governance reforms, will keep right on doing so.

On to Romania

Regardless of who wins the next federal election, any policy reforms are unlikely to come soon enough to change Elena Secara’s mind. She is firm in her decision to leave Canada and add herself and her family to the 4-million-plus Canadian emigrés. “I return to Romania every two years,” she says. “And I see improvements each time. In Canada it is the opposite. Canada is getting worse and worse. Canada is declining…In Romania there are much more opportunities for professionals, the medical system is better, the food is better.” And, she adds with a laugh, “Even the roads are better.”

On the rebound: Once poor, corrupt and decrepit, Romania today is a growing regional economic power and competitor for immigrants – including emigrants from Canada like the Secara family. (Source of photos: Unsplash)

All of which stands as another indictment of Canada. Romania spent years after the Cold War as one of the poorest, most corrupt and decrepit nations in Europe, seemingly in terminal decline, the kind of place people left if they could – and hundreds of thousands did. Romania has managed to launch a remarkable comeback, however. Its per capita GDP  still lags Canada’s considerably but it has grown impressively over the last decade. It’s one of Europe’s leading destinations for foreign investment, and on Harvard University’s Economic Complexity Index – a measure of an economy’s productive capacity – it jumped from 39th in the world in 2000 to 19th, just behind France. Canada is facing ever-greater competition from nations on the rebound just as it enters the second decade of what may be its longest and most serious economic deterioration since Confederation.

Secara doesn’t bother overanalyzing the data. For her, “quality of life” sums up her thinking. “I love Canada,” she says. “And I thank Canada for all the experiences I have. But Canada is not what it was.”

Scott Inniss is a Montreal writer.

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Alberta

REPORT: Alberta municipalities hit with $37 million carbon tax tab in 2023

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Grande Prairie. Getty Images photo

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Laura Mitchell

Federal cash grab driving costs for local governments, driving up property taxes

New data shows the painful economic impact of the federal carbon tax on municipalities.

Municipalities in Alberta paid out more than $37 million in federal carbon taxes in 2023, based on a recent survey commissioned by Alberta Municipal Affairs, with data provided to the Canadian Energy Centre.

About $760,000 of that came from the City of Grande Prairie. In a statement, Mayor Jackie Clayton said if the carbon tax were removed, City property taxes could be reduced by 0.6 per cent, providing direct financial relief to residents and businesses in Grande Prairie.”

Conducted in October, the survey asked municipal districts, towns and cities in Alberta to disclose the amount of carbon tax paid out for the heating and electrifying of municipal assets and fuel for fleet vehicles.

With these funds, Alberta municipalities could have hired 7,789 high school students at $15 per hour last year with the amount paid to Ottawa.

The cost on municipalities includes:

Lloydminster: $422,248

Calgary: $1,230,300 (estimate)

Medicine Hat: $876,237

Lethbridge: $1,398,000 (estimate)

Grande Prairie: $757,562

Crowsnest Pass: $71,100

Red Deer: $1,495,945

Bonnyville: $19,484

Hinton: $66,829

Several municipalities also noted substantial indirect costs from the carbon tax, including higher rates from vendors that serve the municipality – like gravel truck drivers and road repair providers – passing increased fuel prices onto local governments.

The rising price for materials and goods like traffic lights, steel, lumber and cement, due to higher transportation costs are also hitting the bottom line for local governments.

The City of Grande Prairie paid out $89 million in goods and services in 2023, and the indirect costs of the carbon tax have had an inflationary impact on those expenses” in addition to the direct costs of the tax.

In her press conference announcing Alberta’s challenge to the federal carbon tax on Oct. 29, 2024, Premier Danielle Smith addressed the pressures the carbon tax places on municipal bottom lines.

In 2023 alone, the City of Calgary could have hired an additional 112 police officers or firefighters for the amount they sent to Ottawa for the carbon tax,” she said.

In a statement issued on Oct. 7, 2024, Ontario Conservative MP Ryan Williams, shadow minister for international trade, said this issue is nationwide.

In Belleville, Ontario, the impact of the carbon tax is particularly notable. The city faces an extra $410,000 annually in costs – a burden that directly translates to an increase of 0.37 per cent on residents’ property tax bills.”

There is no rebate yet provided on retail carbon pricing for towns, cities and counties.

In October, the council in Belleville passed a motion asking the federal government to return in full all carbon taxes paid by municipalities in Canada.

The unaltered reproduction of this content is free of charge with attribution to the Canadian Energy Centre.

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