NEW YORK TIMES
This week’s Letter will be a little unconventional.
I’m going to try to put Canada’s shifting immigration policy in a global context. But, if you’ll permit, I’d like to first take a moment to introduce myself.
Hello! I’m The New York Times’s new Canada bureau chief.
My family and I relocated to Toronto in August from Brussels, where I was the paper’s bureau chief, covering the European Union. In my five years there I focused on the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine and other major news stories that affected Europe.
I also wrote a lot about refugees and immigration policy, reporting from the field, something I’ve been doing since I started my career in my hometown, Athens, in the mid-2000s.
Apart from immigration, I am very interested in deeply investigated stories that hold the powerful to account. I have a track record of covering malfeasance, both by the state and by the private sector, and I enjoy cultural stories, too. More about my background and previous lives here!
If you have a story for me, especially a story that someone in power doesn’t want out, you can email me: matina.stevis@nytimes.com.
To share documents and tips anonymously, you can use our TipJar and include my name. Your tip will get to me securely.
You can also find me on X and on Instagram. I welcome fan mail, criticism and Canada life advice, so please get in touch.
And with that, back to business.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday announced the latest and biggest changes to the country’s immigration targets for the coming year, and the backlash was instant.
Business leaders decried the 21 percent cut in the country’s permanent resident program, calling it detrimental to the economy; advocates for migrants’ rights said it was a reversal of decades of welcoming policies toward newcomers that would harm the country’s image and society. They also raised concerns that the changes would put existing immigrants on temporary status in limbo, and potentially push them into being undocumented.
Since arriving here, and particularly while reporting this article about how changes to the temporary foreign resident program are affecting international students, I’ve been struck by the broad consensus in favor of immigration and immigrants in Canadian society.
“What we’re debating are the levels of immigration,” Michael Haan, a demographer who is an associate professor of sociology at Western University in London, Ontario, told me. He succinctly summarized the attitude I’ve found so striking here: “We collectively believe that we’re still a frontier economy where the only path forward is growth: economic and population growth.”
From that as a starting point, here are some reflections on Canada’s changed policies and the discourse around immigration.
Canada’s societal support for well-managed immigration is unique in the developed world. A broadly cited Environics poll about public support for immigration dropping in Canada makes the crucial distinction between wanting lower levels of immigration and being anti-immigration. It’s an important one. In the European Union, Britain, Australia and the United States, public views have shifted against immigration, and that’s reflected in public discourse and political debate.
The announced changes feel big, but they’re also temporary. Despite the fact that Mr. Trudeau laid out changes to the immigration targets that he said were for the next three years, polls suggest he could well not be prime minister beyond 2025. Documents explaining the government’s plans also highlight that these changes are temporary. It’s not clear what a Conservative government would do, and that would be something to press the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre on. “They commit to fairly solid changes in 2025, but beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess — will the Liberal government even be in power?” Mr. Haan told me. “I think it’s too early to tell if it’s an end of an era,” he added.
Canada is looking for the right level of immigration, and it may actually deliver it. The idea that a country can take in a specific number of newcomers is new to me, despite my experience covering immigration systems around the world. It’s down to the luck of geography. Australia is somewhat similar by virtue of being a remote island. As Mr. Haan said, “We are geographically privileged: We can be bombastic about how open we are because we don’t have people drowning in the Mediterranean to get to our shores, or waiting at the Mexican border.” Still, he added, it’s not an exact science. “Our immigration levels are a grand experiment. No one knows what that magic number needs to be.”
Will the voices of business, provinces and colleges become less important? The revision of the influence of the sectors that have, over the past decades, determined federal immigration policy may be the biggest shift we’re seeing. Mr. Trudeau on Thursday called out business, colleges and provinces for abusing their freedom to bring in workers and students. “Everyone has a vested interest: Employers want a surplus army of labor; universities want tons of international students because they salivate at the prospect of higher fees. All those groups push the government to open the taps,” Mr. Haan said. “Now the government is saying, ‘We’re going to close the tap a little, and see what happens.’”
