Heather Scoffield: Canada Needs More Immigrants – and not Only for the Economy

There’s a problem in persistently defining immigrants as economic drivers that will take Canada to a more prosperous place.

It’s not that the pitch is wrong.

It’s that it is myopic, and it’s pushing Canada to evaluate the movement of people as a pure dollars-and-cents exercise. And that’s short-sighted at a time when we need all the compassion we can get.

Canadians’ impressions of their country as an open and tolerant nation that thrives on diversity have been deeply challenged over the past two weeks – first with the discovery of the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., and then by what police say was an intentional attack on a Muslim family in London, Ont. that left four people dead.

“There’s a growing feeling that we aren’t holding together as best we should,” says Sen. Ratna Omidvar, a vocal proponent of ramping up immigration – and in a way that is not just about economics.

“We need to be more intentional about social cohesion,” she says.

Repeatedly making the case for increasing diversity almost solely on an economic basis doesn’t help – as the federal Liberals themselves used to sense.

In 2016, a group of influential economic advisers led by Dominic Barton, now Canada’s ambassador to China, came up with a list of strategies to ensure Canada’s prosperity over the long term – a list that carries weight to this day. Barton told the federal Liberals that among other things, they should dramatically ramp up immigration as a way to propel Canada’s economy forward.

A few cabinet ministers thought it was a great concept at first, but even as the Liberals embraced most of Barton’s other growth recommendations, they eventually balked at the idea, unsure of their ability to sell the public on a complex argument.

Five years later, however, not only are they making the argument, it’s almost to the exclusion of anything else when it comes to immigration. And yes, it’s complex.

Canada’s economy isn’t growing fast enough to maintain our standard of living and fund all the social safety nets we have come to expect, it goes. Plus, labour shortages are all around us, and if they’re not here now, they soon will be.

Since Canadians are retiring faster than they can reproduce, we need to replenish the workforce and bolster the financial foundation of our social safety net by adding many, many more immigrants.

The pandemic set us back in our immigration plans because of closed borders, but the federal government is now actively making up for lost time and then some – a key plank in the recovery strategy. The economic messaging is central – everywhere in Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino’s comments in the House and speeches to the public, the policy documents issued through the immigration department and the pitches Liberal MPs make to their constituents.

Immigrants create small businesses, fill job vacancies, make our health-care system work, spend money, and support their children to make more money than they did, the message goes.

While Omidvar makes those arguments herself, she says there’s a danger in thinking narrowly.

“You make it about one thing only,” she says. “We have turned immigration into too much of a transactional experience.”

She talks about her own experience moving to Canada from Iran in 1981 and finding her way by joining a local gardening club and planting daffodils with her neighbours.

While she appreciates all the politicians’ speeches about diversity and inclusion in the wake of the London attack, she warns that social cohesion – an essential for quality of life, economic and beyond – comes from a community-based, proactive approach and not the reactive approach she has seen on display over the past couple of weeks. And that means a focus on immigrants as whole people who are valuable members of our communities.

Economist Mikal Skuterud, a professor at the University of Waterloo, doesn’t buy many of the economic arguments around immigration that the federal government is making these days. “It’s hyperbolic, it’s completely exaggerated, and it’s not honest in a lot of cases,” he says.

He argues that immigration could bolster Canada’s prosperity if newcomers are more productive than existing workers, but that’s not always the case. He also points out that if immigrants have the same age distribution as the existing workforce, they won’t do much to change the way the labour force pays for a growing contingent of retirees.

But he does agree with Omidvar that it’s important to evaluate immigration on factors that go well beyond labour and economics, especially if we want to enrich our culture and not just our wallets.

Public opinion polling suggests that Canadians generally view immigration as beneficial to Canada, but the top reasons people give for being pro-immigration are around diversity and multiculturalism. Contributions to the economy come second, says Andrew Parkin, executive director of the Environics Institute for Survey Research.

For the sake of social peace, perhaps our political rhetoric should take its cue from the public in this case.

Click here to read the article in the Toronto Star