Canada the Good
Immigration and the Advantageous Influx of Ideas
Recent polling suggests that many Canadians are shifting their perspective on immigration. We live in stressful times. Jobs feel less secure, housing remains painfully unaffordable, and many people feel public services becoming harder to access. It’s natural for people to look at the resource well a bit more anxiously than in more buoyant times.
I wanted to write this to remind people that immigration isn’t about stretching the same resources over more people — it’s about expanding the pool of possibility.
Through my work with newcomers — as a settlement advocate, coalition builder, and policy analyst — I’ve conducted hundreds of interviews with Canadian newcomers and those who support them. This includes service providers, sponsors, interpreters, employers, and of course, newcomers themselves — young, old, refugee, student, entrepreneur, from all over the world.
Just yesterday, I attended the Swearing In Ceremony of a room full of newcomers, now new Canadian citizens. The judge himself was a newcomer, having come as a youth from Malaysia; he served in the Canadian military for more than a decade before getting into his current line of work. As each of the newcomers in the room stood before the judge, he asked them what they do, work-wise. There were as many answers as there were individuals; HR specialists, financial analysts, data scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare practitioners, mechanics, tool and die makers, carpenters. There were a couple stay-at-home mothers as well, doing the very important work of raising the next generation of Canadians.
This has always been the case; the people who have migrated to Canada bring hope and hard work, leaving their entire worlds behind to strike out a new path in a new land. One of my favourite stories of settlement involves a Syrian family that came to Canada, encountered a world wholly different than what they knew and, with the help of their new neighbours, set up a thriving business and established a family that to this day plays an important role in their community. Not the Hadads and Peace by Chocolate, though I did have the fortune of interviewing Tareq and his dad many moons ago; the family I’m referring to came to Canada in the late 1800s. The notion that some folk with incompatible cultures will come here to do harm falls flat when you realize that everyone from everywhere has been coming to Canada since day one, and we’re still Canada the Good.
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By and large, the concerns being raised about immigration aren’t about the people themselves, but about resource allocation — this brings us back to the affordability of housing and strain on the healthcare and other service sectors. It’s worth noting these are structural issues that overlap between all-too-often siloed sectors. Advances in medicine and technology mean people live longer, and have more health concerns that need more management. New technology comes at a cost. Mental health and substance abuse concerns are on the rise and come with health, economic, and social costs; the fact these concerns are on the rise means that they can also be decreased with the right interventions, which is a separate conversation.
There’s the additional challenge that exists in Canada whether there are newcomers or not — everyone wants to live in the same places where opportunities and housing are scarcer. While cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal struggle with population-related woes, there are other cities facing severe labour shortages that are actually offering incentives to attract newcomer talent.
If we look at the big picture, none of the structural challenges we face — whether it’s population dispersion or tech costs, mental health or aging at home — are insurmountable. If anything, what they need is a bit of entrepreneurial spirit and hustle to innovate and drive new solutions.
You know who tends to be entrepreneurial and creative? People with the drive to pick up and move across the world and start something new.
One of the greatest advantages of newcomers arriving with different cultural lineages and different geopolitical experiences is that they bring fresh insight and new perspectives to our Canadian reality. Yes, integration is a project, but as with evolution, the constant infusion of new people and new ideas keeps Canada on an adaptation curve, testing and adopting and experimenting with new practices, policies, and approaches.
As the world goes through a transformation that we won’t fully grasp until it’s over, newcomers, properly supported, will help keep Canada competitive on the world stage.
The next time you meet a newcomer, make a point of asking them about them, about what brought them to Canada, and what their dreams are. You might be surprised by their answers. Better than that — you might just find yourself inspired.
And that is the beauty of Canada.
