Irfhan Rawji is managing partner of Relay Ventures. Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.
There is a new fashion among the commentariat of questioning whether Canada has the capacity to accommodate greater immigration, particularly in housing and health care. The underlying defeatism of this position – the belief that we’ve achieved all we can – would leave Clifford Sifton depressed and ashamed.
In 1896, prime minister Wilfrid Laurier tasked this enterprising, 35-year-old Manitoban to “populate” the Prairies with European farmers, following years of net emigration from Canada. Laurier envisioned an agricultural powerhouse to provide an abundant, reliable food supply for our nascent country while solidifying Canada’s claim to the region.
Sifton met this challenge with a radically simple plan: find immigrants with experience farming similarly harsh terrain – people made of “the toughest fibre” – and lure them to Canada with free land.
After considering various candidates, he settled on Eastern Europeans, who had farmed inhospitable steppes like ours for generations. Sifton dispatched agents across Europe circulating ads in Polish, Czech and Ukrainian, promising “160 acres of free land in Canada,” and paid them generous commissions.
We need not condone that Indigenous nations were illegally displaced from this land to appreciate the sheer audacity of Sifton’s achievement. Within five years, he doubled the Prairie population. Within 10 years, annual immigration to Canada increased 840 per cent. And 125 years later, the farms these immigrants established feed not just Canada, but much of the world.
Contrast Sifton’s can-do optimism to the despondent attitude of pundits today, who are unsure how we might handle immigration levels that, at around 1 per cent of the population, are half the rate they were in Sifton’s era.
There are growing calls to constrict immigration until the housing crisis is “resolved” – imprecise though that is. We would be wise to recall what Sifton knew. Immigrants are not the cause of Canada’s failings. Actually, they’re a big part of the answer.
Immigrants don’t simply occupy existing housing. Fact is, they built most of our current housing stock and could build even more. Each worker occupies one home (less, if they share) and builds dozens more for everyone else – an irrefutable net gain.
Yet even when we grasp this seemingly obvious fact, our response falls short. Ontario recently announced that it will almost double the number of skilled workers it welcomes each year, to 18,000 by 2025. Yet even this seemingly ambitious plan is not designed to succeed. If current trends continue, about 6,000 of those will be construction workers. Yet Ontario Labour Minister Monte McNaughton has said that in “construction alone we’ll need 100,000 skilled workers over the next decade.”
Six thousand is not an appropriate target; 60,000 is closer to the mark.
A recent federal plan to specifically prioritize construction workers for immigration applications is similarly enlightened yet tepid. It comes with no targets. Were we genuinely committed to solving the housing crisis, we would aggressively recruit the people who can do so, and in huge numbers.
Where would they live upon arrival? Are we really so bereft of purpose and creativity? In Sifton’s day, newcomers lived in government-operated immigration halls until they found their feet. Hardly glamorous, but sufficient. Calgary is pioneering the conversion of vacant office space to residential use. Given the severity of the housing emergency, we should also consider unconventional options, including convention centres and military facilities. It just makes sense to house those whose labour could house us all.
As with housing, newcomers are not the cause of Canada’s health care failures. But they could be an answer. For example, Ontario reportedly needs 24,000 more nurses. That’s just 5 per cent of the 465,000 permanent residents Canada will welcome in 2023. Strategic immigration could eliminate this shortage in mere months.
Some might call these proposals naive: simplistic attempts to impose a 19th-century frontier mindset onto today’s stifling, maximally bureaucratized reality.
These are the weak excuses of the undetermined. We need not inhabit Sifton’s era to honour his ethos: a confident belief that we can overcome existential threats to Canada’s viability. We cannot (and should not) give the most in-demand newcomers stolen Indigenous land, but we can offer other perks, like expanded and expedited family reunification privileges. Intransigent provinces? Withhold transfer payments. Intransigent medical guilds? Show the public who is keeping much-needed help from reaching the front lines of care. These are emergencies. We should act accordingly. Do whatever it takes.
Housing and health care failings pose existential threats to Canada. The only shortage more acute than that of skilled people to provide these vital services is the shortage of audacity to believe that we are capable of solving these problems: the confident ambition to make big dreams come true.