Commentary
The intellectual foundation underlying the Canadian policy of continuous, high immigration is showing considerable strain as key weaknesses are exposed in several of the arguments most commonly used by proponents.
One of the most common reasons cited by politicians to explain why Canada needs a high annual immigration inflow is to offset declining domestic fertility rates. A core flaw of this argument was just exposed in a paper published in Population Research and Policy Review, a longstanding peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of demography.
The paper was published on July 17 and given the rather mundane title of “Immigrant Fertility in Canada 2001–2021: A Brief Report” but in fact provides fascinating insights into Canada’s immigration policy that are bound to keep policymakers up at night.
The authors explain that “if recent waves of immigrants have the same or lower rates of fertility than native-born Canadians, then immigration becomes a demographic revolving door rather than long-term solution for the country’s population pressures.”
It turns out the widespread perception that immigrants have a high fertility rate is “based on research from the late 1990s” that no longer holds water. The authors note a measurable “trend towards convergence” between immigrant and native-born fertility rates, with a quicker drop in fertility among newcomers than among native-born Canadians.
Not only is the fertility gap between immigrants and the native-born rapidly narrowing, but even more strikingly, the paper notes that immigrant women from every single one of our top 10 immigration source countries have “below replacement fertility” once in Canada. This term refers to the rate of 2.1 children per woman at which a population replaces itself over time.
The paper concludes that immigration is “not a sustainable solution to long term demographic pressures” and is “a short-term solution to population loss, but does not create population replacement.”
This paper is simply the latest confirmation of 20 years of research debunking the “aging society” argument for high immigration.
In 2006, the C.D. Howe Institute published “No Elixir of Youth: Immigration Cannot Keep Canada Young,” a report concluding that “immigration cannot relieve Canada of the challenges of an aging population.” In February 2025, the Migration Policy Institute released a study finding the only way to counteract the fact that immigrants “age and eventually retire along with their native-born peers” would be the untenable option of “continuously increasing the scale of immigration on an indefinite basis.”
The other major plank in the foundation of the high immigration position is the claim that Canada is experiencing severe labour shortages.
We heard this recently in a press release from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) that made the rounds through Canadian media titled “Jobs filled by temporary foreign workers are the ones Canadian youth don’t want.” The release cites research by CFIB finding that “more than a third” of Canadian youth are “unwilling to look for jobs that are mainly outdoors and exposed to weather conditions, or jobs that pay at or near minimum wage.”
The idea that Canada is experiencing a labour shortage is increasingly derided on social media and even in the opinion columns of newspapers that once rarely published a skeptical word on immigration.
A labour shortage is indeed hard to square with a youth unemployment youth unemployment rate of 12.7 percent, which regularly manifests itself in such dramatic instances as this year’s Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto receiving 50,000 applications for just 5,000 jobs, with videos of long lineups of youth vying for these scarce positions circulating on social media.
Whereas the fertility rate argument for high immigration can be concretely refuted by pointing to fertility data, the labour shortage argument is more conceptual. A 2013 paper published in the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy titled “All the Workers We Need: Debunking Canada’s Labour-Shortage Fallacy” tackles the theory head on and rejects the central premise.
The paper’s author, academic Kevin McQuillan, argues that Canada does not face a labour shortage per se but rather a labour misallocation, which he defines as “a widening imbalance between the skills that the labour market demands and the skills that workers are equipped with, as well as between where the jobs are and where available workers live.”
Thus, McQuillan posits that solving Canada’s labour woes “does not require an increase in the labour supply” but rather a concerted effort to train up the existing Canadian workforce and “find ways to better mobilize unemployed workers from regions with lower demand for workers, to provinces with a greater need for workers.”
A strategy of reallocating labour within Canada rather than importing labour from overseas is possible, and is sporadically implemented by various levels of government. In April, the Carney government announced a nationwide effort to “recruit up to 100,000 skilled trades workers” to make up the shortfall in blue collar labour. This policy should be the norm, not the exception.
Yet broadly the federal government continues to pursue high immigration. Ottawa aims to bring in 380,000 permanent residents annually for the next three years, along with 148,000 additional permanent residents in certain one-off initiatives. This amounts to nearly 1.3 million permanent residents over three years, and does not include foreign workers, students, and asylum seekers.
The arguments underlying Canada’s policy of a high, continuous immigration inflow do not hold up under scrutiny. The time has come to fundamentally rethink this approach.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
