David Clinton
What Drives Canada’s Immigration Policies?
News release from The Audit
Government decisions have consequences. But they also have reasons.
Dearest readers: I would love to hear what you think about this topic. So please take the very brief survey at the end of the post.
Popular opposition to indiscriminate immigration has been significant and growing in many Western countries. Few in Canada deny our need for more skilled workers, and I think most of us are happy we’re providing a sanctuary for refugees escaping verifiable violence and oppression. We’re also likely united in our support for decent, hard working economic immigrants looking for better lives. But a half million new Canadians a year is widely seen as irresponsible.
So why did Canada, along with so many other Western governments, choose to ignore their own electorates and instead double down on ever-increasing immigration rates? Whatever nasty insults we might be tempted to hurl at elected officials and the civil servants who (sometimes) do their bidding, I try to remember that many of them are smart people honestly struggling to be effective. Governing isn’t easy. So it’s worth cutting through the rhetoric and trying to understand their policies on their own terms.
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As recently as 2022, the government – as part of its Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration – claimed that:
“Immigration is critical to Canada’s economic growth, and is key to supporting economic recovery”
There you have it. It’s at least officially about the economy. To be fair, the report also argued that immigration was necessary to address labor shortages, support an aging domestic population, and keep up with our “international commitments”. But economic considerations carried a lot of weight.
Now what I’d love to know is whether the “immigration-equals-better-
One possible way to measure economic health is by watching per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates. Insofar as they represent anything real, the inflation-adjusted GDP rates themselves are interesting enough. But it’s the rates by which GDP grows or contracts that should really capture our attention.
The green line in the graph below represents Canada’s (first quarter) GDP growth rates from the past forty years. To be clear, when measured against, say, its 1984 value, the GDP itself has trended upwards fairly consistently. But looking at changes from one year to the next makes it easier to visualize more detailed historical fluctuations.
The blue bars in the chart represent each year’s immigration numbers as a percentage of the total Canadian population. That rate leapt above one percent of the population in 2021 – for the first time since the 1960’s – and hasn’t shown any signs of backing down. Put differently, Canada absorbed nearly 12 immigrants in 2023 for every 1,000 existing residents.
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Seeing both trends together in a single chart allows us to spot possible relationships. In particular, it seems that higher immigration rates (like the ones in 2018-2019 and 2022-2023) haven’t consistently sparked increases in the GDP.
With the exception of those COVID-crazed 2020 numbers – which are nutty outliers and are generally impossible to reliably incorporate into any narrative – there doesn’t ever seem to have been a correlation between higher immigration rates and significant GDP growth.
So, at best, there’s no indication that the fragile economy has benefited from that past decade’s immigration surge. As well-intentioned as it might have been, the experiment hasn’t been a success by any measure.
But it has come with some heavy social costs. The next chart shows the painful disconnect between an artificially rising population and a weak housing construction market. The blue bars, as before, represent immigration rates as a percentage of total population. This time, however, they go back all the way to 1961. The red line tells us about the number of single-detached housing starts per 1,000 people.
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With the exceptions of the mid-1960’s and the past few years, each of the historical immigration surges visible in the graph was either preceded or accompanied by appropriate home construction rates.
As an anomaly, the 1960’s surge was for obvious reasons far less damaging. Back then you could still purchase a nice three-bedroom house in what’s now considered midtown Toronto for no more than two years’ worth of an average salary. I know that, because that’s exactly when, where, and for how much my parents bought the house in which I spent most of my errant youth. Those elevated immigration levels didn’t lead us into economic crisis.
But what we’re witnessing right now is different. The housing supply necessary to affordably keep us all sheltered simply doesn’t exist. And, as I’ve already written, there’s no reason to imagine that that’ll change anytime over the next decade. (Can you spell “capital gains tax inclusion rate change”? I knew you could.)
Just to be complete, the disconnect doesn’t apply only to detached “built-to-own” houses. This next chart demonstrates that housing starts of all flavours – including rental units – grew appropriately in the context of historical immigration surges, but have clearly been dropping over the last couple of years.
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Since housing starts data isn’t the only tool for measuring the health of a housing market, here’s a visualization of rental apartment vacancy rates in Canada:
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The combination of a sluggish construction market and an immigration-fueled population explosion has been driving up prices and making life miserable for countless families. And things appear to be headed in the wrong direction.
So sure, immigration should play an important role in Canadian life. But by this point in the game, it’s pretty clear that recent government policy choices failed to reverse economic weakness and contributed to disastrous outcomes. Perhaps it’s time to change course.
Now it’s your turn. I hope you’ll take this very brief (and anonymous) survey.
Share your thoughts. Click to take the Immigration Policy survey.
Assuming we get enough responses, I’ll share the results later.
For the full experience, please subscribe to The Audit.
I Testified Before a Senate Committee About the CBC
I recently testified before the Senate Committee for Transport and Communications. You can view that session here. Even though the official topic was CBC’s local programming in Ontario, everyone quickly shifted the discussion to CBC’s big-picture problems and how their existential struggles were urgent and immediate. The idea that deep and fundamental changes within the corporation were unavoidable seemed to enjoy complete agreement.
I’ll use this post as background to some of the points I raised during the hearing.
You might recall how my recent post on CBC funding described a corporation shedding audience share like dandruff while spending hundreds of millions of dollars producing drama and comedy programming few Canadians consume. There are so few viewers left that I suspect they’re now identified by first name rather than as a percentage of the population.
Since then I’ve learned a lot more about CBC performance and about the broadcast industry in general.
For instance, it’ll surprise exactly no one to learn that fewer Canadians get their audio from traditional radio broadcasters. But how steep is the decline? According to the CRTC’s Annual Highlights of the Broadcasting Sector 2022-2023, since 2015, “hours spent listening to traditional broadcasting has decreased at a CAGR of 4.8 percent”. CAGR, by the way, stands for compound annual growth rate.
Dropping 4.8 percent each year means audience numbers aren’t just “falling”; they’re not even “falling off the edge of a cliff”; they’re already close enough to the bottom of the cliff to smell the trees. Looking for context? Between English and French-language radio, the CBC spends around $240 million each year.
Those listeners aren’t just disappearing without a trace. the CRTC also tells us that Canadians are increasingly migrating to Digital Media Broadcasting Units (DMBUs) – with numbers growing by more than nine percent annually since 2015.
The CBC’s problem here is that they’re not a serious player in the DMBU world, so they’re simply losing digital listeners. For example, of the top 200 Spotify podcasts ranked by popularity in Canada, only four are from the CBC.
Another interesting data point I ran into related to that billion dollar plus annual parliamentary allocation CBC enjoys. It turns out that that’s not the whole story. You may recall how the government added another $42 million in their most recent budget.
But wait! That’s not all! Between CBC and SRC, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) ponied up another $97 million for fiscal 2023-2024 to cover specific programming production budgets.
Technically, Canada Media Fund grants target individual projects planned by independent production companies. But those projects are usually associated with the “envelope” of one of the big broadcasters – of which CBC is by far the largest. 2023-2024 CMF funding totaled $786 million, and CBC’s take was nearly double that of their nearest competitor (Bell).
But there’s more! Back in 2016, the federal budget included an extra $150 million each year as a “new investment in Canadian arts and culture”. It’s entirely possible that no one turned off the tap and that extra government cheque is still showing up each year in the CBC’s mailbox. There was also a $93 million item for infrastructure and technological upgrades back in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. Who knows whether that one wasn’t also carried over.
So CBC’s share of government funding keeps growing while its share of Canadian media consumers shrinks. How do you suppose that’ll end?
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Javier Milei in Argentina, Musk and Ramaswamy in the US.. What does DOGE in Canada look like?
Under their new(ish) president Javier Milei, Argentina cut deeply and painfully into their program spending to address a catastrophic economic crisis. And they seem to have enjoyed some early success. With Elon Musk now primed to play a similar role in the coming Trump administration in the U.S., the obvious question is: how might such an approach play out in Canada?
Sure. We’re not suffering from headaches on anything like the scale of Argentina’s – the debt we’ve run up so far isn’t in the same league as the long-term spending going on in South America. But ignoring the problems we do face can’t be an option. Given that the annual interest payments on our existing national debt are $11.7 billion (which equals seven percent of total expenditures), simply balancing the budget won’t be enough.
The underlying assumption powering the question is that we live in a world of constraints. There just isn’t enough money to buy everything we might want, so we need to both prioritize and become more efficient. It’s about figuring out what can no longer be justified – even if it does provide some value – and what’s just plain wasteful.
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Some of this may seem obvious. After all, when there are First Nations reserves without clean water and millions of Canadians without access to primary care physicians, how can we justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding arts projects that virtually no one will ever discover, much less consume?
Apparently not everyone sees things that way. Large governments operate by reacting to political, social, and chaos-driven incentives. Sometimes those incentives lead to rational choices, and sometimes not. But mega-sized organizations tend to lack the self-awareness and capacity to easily change direction.
And some basic problems have no obvious solutions. As I’ve written, there’s a real possibility that all the money in the world won’t buy the doctors, nurses, and integrated systems we need. And “all the money in the world” is obviously not on the table. So the well-meaning bureaucrat might conclude that if you’re not going to completely solve the big problems, you might as well try to manage them while investing in other areas, too.
Still, I think it’s worth imagining how things might look if we could launch a comprehensive whole-of-government program review.
How Emergency Cuts Might Play Out
Imagine the federal government defaulted on its debt servicing payments and lost access to capital markets. That’s not such an unlikely scenario. There would suddenly be a lot less money available to spend, and some programs would have to be shut down. Protecting emergency and core services would require making fast – and smart – decisions.
We would need to take a long, hard look at this important enumeration of government expenditures. There probably wouldn’t be enough time to bridge the gap by looking for dozens of less-critical million-dollar programs. We would need to find some big-ticket items fast.
Our first step might be to pause or restructure larger ongoing payments, like projects funded through the Canada Infrastructure Bank (total annual budget: $3.45 billion). Private investors might pick up some of the slack, or some projects could simply go into hibernation. “Other interest costs” (total annual budget: $4.6 billion) could also be restructured.
Reducing equalization payments (total annual budget: $25.2 billion) and territorial financing (total budget: $5.2 billion) might also be necessary. This would, of course, spark parallel crises at lower levels of government. Similarly, grants to settle First Nations claims (total budget: $6 billion) managed by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada would also be at least temporarily cut.
All that would be deeply painful and trigger long-term negative consequences.
But there’s a far better approach that could be just as effective and a whole lot less painful:
What an All-of-Government Review Might Discover
Planning ahead would allow you the luxury of targeting spending that – in some cases at least – wouldn’t even be missed. Think about programs that were announced five, ten, even thirty years ago, perhaps to satisfy some passing fad or political need. They might even have made sense decades ago when they were created…but that was decades ago when they were created.
Here’s how that’ll work. When you read through the program and transfer spending items on that government expenditures page (and there are around 1,200 of those items), the descriptions all point to goals that seem reasonable enough. But there are some important questions that should be asked about each of them:
- When did these programs begin?
- What specific activities do they involve?
- What have they accomplished over the past 12 months?
- Is their effectiveness trending up or down?
- Are they employing efficiency best-practices used in the private sector?
- Who’s tasked with monitoring changes?
- Where are their reports published?
To show you what I mean, here are some specific transfer or program line items and their descriptions:
Department of Employment and Social Development
- Workforce Development Agreements ($722 million)
- Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Transformation Initiative ($374 million)
- Payments to provinces, territories, municipalities, other public bodies, organizations, groups, communities, employers and individuals for the provision of training and/or work experience, the mobilization of community resources, and human resource planning and adjustment measures necessary for the efficient functioning of the Canadian labour market ($856 million)
Department of Industry
- Contributions under the Strategic Innovation Fund ($2.4 billion)
Department of Citizenship and Immigration
- Settlement Program ($1.13 billion)
Department of Indigenous Services
- Contributions to provide income support to on-reserve residents and Status Indians in the Yukon Territory ($1.05 billion). Note that, as of the 2021 Census, there were 9,150 individuals with North American Indigenous origins in Yukon. Assuming the line item is accurately described, that means the income support came to $114,987/person (not per household; per person).
Each one of those (and many, many others like them) could be case studies in operational efficiency and effectiveness. Or not. But there’s no way we could know that without serious research.
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