Canada needs newcomers long term
There’s a sound drifting into Canada from south of the border, and the rising crescendo will become deafening if we don’t address its source. It’s the sound of shutting down.
Against the backdrop of rising unemployment and high costs, public tolerance for newcomers is waning. We need more newcomers to prevent a declining standard of living, but we’re being goaded into questioning that relationship — and worse.
The federal government has responded by belatedly restricting entries of some newcomers who enter Canada on temporary permits.
First it tripled its intake of international students between 2015 and 2023, then it scaled back by 35 per cent in January, followed by reducing the number of hours they can work.
Next week, the ballooning intake of low-paid temporary foreign workers it has engineered since 2021 will be tightened. The changes to the small but politically fraught temporary foreign worker program will almost exactly mirror Jason Kenney’s choices a decade ago.
Expansion. Contraction. Policy always lags reality. Although it’s not uncommon for decision-makers to oversteer and course-correct, a bigger factor is at play that we dismiss at our peril: population aging.
Between 2019 and 2023, almost a million Canadians aged into the 65years-and-older category, the average retirement age. By 2030, the youngest boomers will have turned 65.
Over the next 15 years, another 7.5 million will be added to the ranks of seniors. The 139,000 kids who are today not yet 15 years old will enter labour markets, but will be followed by a shrinking youth cohort because the birth rate has been falling for the past 40 years, rapidly since 2019 due to the pandemic and soaring housing costs.
More Canadians are exiting the labour market than entering it. We need newcomers. Not for the short term. For the long haul.
The classic dependency ratio measures the population aged 1564 who support the population too old (65 and older) or too young (younger than 15) to work. In 2006, there were more than 2.27 working-aged people for every person too old or too young to work — the least pressure in Canadian history on the working-aged.
In 2023, the figure was 1.9, and would have plummeted if it weren’t for newcomers.
Those aged 80 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the population. They are living longer, and are far more likely to be living in rural and remote locations than our youngest residents (younger
than five), half of which live in Canada’s seven biggest cities. How many people will relocate to pour their coffee, provide their health care, pick up their garbage, shovel their snow?
Insane news cycles from the U.S. in the last few days feature acknowledgment by political leaders that stories of migrants eating pets are made up, and cities like Springfield, Ohio, would face further decline without newcomers.
What happens in Springfield won’t stay in Springfield. Without newcomers, Canada’s labour market would be shrinking, not growing. That’s especially true in smaller communities. Not sometime in the future. Now.
As Canadian-born and older immigrant populations age out of the labour force, younger landed immigrants and non-permanent residents are taking up the baton. Souring sentiments point fingers at newcomers for shortages in housing and health care, problems triggered by chronic public underinvestment. Population surges designed to address short-term business needs have become convenient scapegoats, though they’ve prevented that hard landing everyone was afraid of as interest rates soared. The needs aren’t temporary. Why not make the workers permanent?
On Nov. 1, new hard caps are expected on both the number of permanent residents we accept (immigrants) and the number of temporary residents we permit to stay, the latter a long-overdue development.
Though we have always had immigration targets, we have never placed limits on the total number of people who enter the country under temporary permits to work or study since the first temporary program, for seasonal agricultural workers, was introduced in 1966.
It’s hard to set targets against the backdrop of rising and falling unemployment, or lingering shortages for housing and health care; but it’s not just a numbers game.
It’s about how we treat our invited new neighbours when they get here. It’s about believing that if they are good enough to do the work we need done, they’re good enough to stay and build their lives, just like millions of immigrants before them. High and low skill. High and low pay.
You can’t build the future of a nation on the backs of a class of the permanently temporary, but that’s what we’ve been doing.
The restrictions on temporary permits thus far announced are small. Some would say performative.
So far, no political leader, including those who argue they are working for workers, has acknowledged dialing back the numbers too far would reduce the size of the labour force. That’s like campaigning to shrink the economy, not just for a recessionary period, but for years on end.
Those are the stakes. Who among our political leaders will be clear on this account? The cause of our problems is not newcomers. They are the solution. That’s a hard reality to convey when anti-immigration emotion is in the air, supercharged by the vitriol of the U.S. election.
It goes beyond messaging. As inflation stabilizes and unemployment falls, it will be a tricky balancing act to develop a policy mix that better develops the skills of people already here and invests in technology that enhances or even replaces labour while adding people to the mix from outside Canada to do the jobs that technology can’t do.
When I spoke to a group of provincial and territorial labour market policy directors a few days ago, I acknowledged the economic and political challenges they faced. I closed by saying bon courage, and good luck.
They’ll need it. So will we.