Keep Immigration Coming
I’ve spent my entire life moving around the country. I grew up in a military family, and continued the habit of moving every few years into adulthood. At this point, I’ve lived or worked in eight of Canada’s 10 largest cities and every province west of the Maritimes. As a public policy generalist, I similarly move from one file to the next, whether that’s economic policy in the Prairies, housing policy in Canada’s big cities or industrial policy all over. No matter which area I’m working on, immigration is part of the conversation— and with good reason.
Canada is well on pace to hit 100 million Canadians by 2100; that’s a positive thing. Population growth allows for greater economies of scale to tap our natural resources. It attracts the best and the brightest from around the world to spur innovation and cultural diversity. And one increasingly relevant upside is that rapid growth affords smaller countries some much-needed geopolitical heft. At 41 million people, Canada is still a relatively modest country in a highly unstable world (for now, at least). And with America becoming a less reliable partner, we’ll have to stand on our own two feet. Having more people would give us a lot more clout in a world where it’s easy for the large to push around the small.
But problems arise when you take shortcuts, as Canada has, attempting quick population growth without the basic infrastructure required to support it. For example, we’re still building roughly the same amount of housing as we did in the 1970s. And while it makes sense that most immigrants tend to settle in larger, more diverse cities with more economic opportunities, these urban centres are already bearing the brunt of the national housing shortage, which then spills into other communities. It’s easy to see why many Canadians were frustrated by the post-COVID surge of new residents.
The solution? Making the sparser parts of the country more attractive—a practice that dates back to the days of John A. MacDonald—rather than cracking down on its overall growth. Canada is a gigantic country, but two-thirds of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border. Canadians should view future immigration as an opportunity to upgrade some of our mid-sized cities, the anchors of regional economies, to allow them to become more competitive and support higher levels of services and amenities, like health care and even restaurants. We don’t just need Maximum Canada, as some have called it; we also need Maximum Saskatoon and Maximum Sault Ste. Marie.
Winnipeg is a great example of mid-sized city growth done right. When I first visited in the late ’90s, I took a walk around the Exchange District on a weekday night; it felt like the whole city had closed up shop. By the time I moved there in 2012, I found some green shoots in the form of third-wave coffee shops and breweries. (Even the Jets were back!) Since then, a number of neighbourhoods surrounding downtown have blossomed. Revitalization projects like the once-dated Forks Market—now a food hall—have become legitimate attractions. I’d argue that, dollar for dollar, Winnipeg has a quality of life that’s hard to match. How does this tie-in to immigration policy? Well, just over a quarter of the city’s current residents are immigrants.
Roughly 98,000 newcomers arrived between 2001 and 2021, which may not seem like a big deal from Toronto’s POV, but it’s huge for a city that starved for growth after the Prairie-wide immigration boom at the turn of the 20th century. According to the 2021 census, about six per cent of Winnipeggers were recent immigrants, arriving between 2016 and 2021 and comprising nearly a third of the city’s population growth during that period. Tagalog is Winnipeg’s second-most-common mother tongue. At this rate, its metropolitan area could hit a population of one million in just over 20 years. Having that larger tax base means that it will be able to provide amenities comparable to those of Edmonton. It also now has a more diverse economy beyond old mainstays, like insurance and agribusiness, as a result. (Hello, Ubisoft and Skip!) That’s made it easier for the city to retain workers in search of their next opportunity.
Replicating Winnipeg’s success in, say, Sault Ste. Marie, will involve more than just better marketing of less dense cities by the government. It largely boils down to building enough infrastructure—and as we’ve seen with recent projects like the Ottawa LRT or the Trans Mountain pipeline, Canadians are not in the habit of doing that on time and on budget. If we’re going to encourage more immigrants to move to smaller centres, we should ensure those communities can support growth in a way that adds to the local quality of life, rather than subtracts. That means not only expanding transit, but also interprovincial power transmission, and thinking big about long-term infrastructure projects like ports and roads that can help diversify our export markets and promote Arctic security. This is where entities like the Canada Infrastructure Bank, or CIB, come into play. Multi-billion-dollar projects can be difficult to finance, particularly in northern or remote areas. Having an entity like CIB that is able to leverage private capital to build infrastructure to support smaller and mid-sized cities can help.
The second part is, of course, to scale up housing production. Immigration isn’t just a source of demand, but of supply. If we’re going to get serious about building homes, we’ve got to rally more builders. More productive techniques like prefabrication—manufacturing housing components in factories rather than on-site—would help, too, but they require more regulatory standardization. After all, you can’t mass produce housing if different municipalities have different design rules. Two recent federal programs point the way forward: the first is the Housing Accelerator Fund, which was used to encourage municipalities to end detached only zoning. The other is the housing design catalogue. Incentivizing municipalities to buy into a standard design would allow the prefabrication industry to speed up, and hopefully, achieve the scale required to bring down costs. That would bring us in line with countries like Sweden and Japan that have successfully scaled-up factory built housing. Once we have an industry that can build apartments quickly—and permission to build them in more places—we’ll have adequate space for many more people.
Lastly, we need to think bigger about regional economic development opportunities. It’s easy to say that Canada should transition to lower-emitting technologies or develop critical minerals, but this doesn’t just happen. There is immense risk in building out new tech, particularly when they require massive infrastructure and capital investments. (The oilsands were once seen as a longshot that the Government of Alberta took a gamble on.) Take critical minerals, for example: the Northwest Territories have 23 of the 31 minerals the Canadian government deems critical. There are two key problems, though. First, there’s no year-round road access to the prospective mines and, second, we don’t have the facilities or manpower to process many of them. There’s a massive growth opportunity for Canada here, but it’s one that will be powered by workers from Yellowknife, Edmonton and Saskatoon, among other communities. Let’s draw more of them there.
Canada’s combination of untapped geographic potential and a growing economy sets us up well for a world where uncertain alliances spell trouble for smaller countries. We help power the global economy through our vast energy reserves, and our vast agricultural production feeds the world. Basically, we have what the world wants, and plenty of space for people from all over the world. When I moved to Saskatchewan in 2011, I spent a lot of time talking to employers about their needs; immigration constantly came up. They’re ready to grow, even as people in the GTA squabble over space. The good news is Canada is more than just Toronto. Edmonton was a city of roughly 148,000 just 75 years ago. There’s no reason why today’s cities of that size—your Barries and Reginas—can’t be the Edmontons of the next century. We should embrace that nation-building spirit again.
Steve Lafleur is the research director at the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal
