Maximum Canada: Why 35 million Canadians are not enough to keep making the rich richer

Doug Saunders has been pounding the maximum immigration drum for a few years now, and he’s got a new book out that promises to up the decibel level a few notches. What better way for his publisher to ensure a friendly reception for the book than to farm out the review to Irvin Studin, who has himself been banging on the same drum for the better part of a decade?

For better or worse, Studin gives the game away with a shout-out to The Century Initiative, “an ambitious new think tank… created explicitly to prepare Canada for our evolution to 100 million.”

Created by whom, you ask?

Good question! A cynic might say The Century Project is a side project for big biz/big gov mega-consultants McKinsey & Co, and they’d be more or less correct. As such, they bring a particular world view to bear on their vision for the future. Specifically, they are aghast that current demographic trends will invariably impair the growth of Canada’s GDP.

The solution? Open the immigration floodgates! Recruit the best and the brightest from around the world in their tens of millions! It’s the only way to ensure our continued prosperity, don’t ya know!

I’m not so sure. I get that when these folks look out the windows of their multi-million dollar homes they see the lovely diverse and prosperous Canada of their cliches, but that’s not the Canada most Canadians live in. Most Canadians struggle with housing affordability, job and income insecurity, child-care availability, and a litany of similar pedestrian concerns that don’t trouble the tenured and the connected.

That aside, hasn’t the notion of perpetual growth in a finite world lost some of its lustre over the past few decades? We should be focused on ensuring sustainable prosperity for the 35 million who call Canada home today, shouldn’t we? And we have a very long way to go in creating that inclusive prosperity for all before we even get around to worrying about its sustainability.

We need to get our house in order before we put out the welcome mat for tens of millions of “new Canadians.” Otherwise, they’ll just be propping up an economic model that has long outlived its usefulness.