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The Globe and Mail shows up at the party in fine style but 50 years late

December 18, 2023
John Meyer

Konrad Yakabuski on Immigration

Executive Summary

“Canada faces a grim future of unaffordable housing, substandard health care [...] That is a recipe for economic decline, if not political bedlam.“

Konrad Yakabuski

Canada’s population has surpassed the 40-million mark. Had we had a balanced level of immigration (as many entering as leaving) instead of a mass immigration policy, our population would now be 28 million and nearing stability.

This growth-at-any-cost policy, which is the goal of corporate Canada’s Century Initiative, would see a tripling of Canada’s population by 2100. The goal of 100 million people, despite serving only the interests of cheap labour employers, developers and debt mongers, has been strongly promoted by the mainstream media, notably The Globe and Mail as well as our “public” broadcaster, the CBC.

The media stance has always been in sharp contrast to public wishes as there has not been significant public support for a larger population for over 100 years. Unsurprisingly, Canadians haven’t wanted what politicians and their growth policies have been serving up for the past several decades. (Read how Canadians really feel about immigration and its impacts, in our full opinion poll.) Furthermore, studies have consistently indicated bad outcomes for the people and the environment if a larger population policy was pursued, especially if driven by mass-immigration. Fifty years of decline have proven these studies right. But really, the evidence was clear over 40 years ago.

In a huge reversal of policy, the media (except the CBC) is now awash with stories linking immigration to inflating housing costs, cheap labour, health care shortages and sprawl. But none of this coverage has gone into the detail that Konrad Yakabuski provided in his 5000-word article in the Globe and Mail.

Canada’s Immigration Plan is a Recipe for Economic Decline

https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/281560885484439

Has the growth lobby gone to ground or just loosened their grip on the media corporations they control? Below are some of the points made in our commentary of Yakabuski’s piece.

The economic viability of mass immigration was called out. Simple growth is no longer good business.
There is still no mention of biophysical impacts such as on wildlife, farmland, greenspace, energy or food resiliency.
Public opinion is mentioned – are Canadians starting to matter?
Yakabuski addresses ageing, productivity, per capita income and fiscal balance in the context of mass immigration. Immigration has thus lost its singular sacred cow status.
Yakabuski connects continued high immigration to the likelihood of civil disruption.
We ask where does a changing national conversation leave us after 50 wasted years of a media enforced growth mandate.

Why the Yakabuski article is important.

The article is a major reversal of the Globe and Mail promotion of population growth and extreme immigration levels. For those few who have trusted the mainstream media to provide them with a balanced perspective, this article will be an ice bath.

Yet, even now, politicians are doubling down on their efforts to drive Canada’s population ever higher. The largest policy failure in Canadian history has allowed immigration to evade all social and environmental impact assessments but now it may be questioned publicly.

Does this mean cannon-fodder economics is now dead? Not by a long shot. That it has taken 50 years for the concept of the impact chains of mass immigration/housing demand/housing inflation and cheap labour/ low productivity/increasing working poor/government deficits to make it into the mainstream media conversation is a testament to the power of the immigration lobby. And what lobby is going to walk away from a Ponzi scheme of the magnitude shown below in the “Scale of Profit Potential” graph?

But regardless of the power of the immigration lobby, Canada’s mass immigration policy won’t survive this kind of public exposure if it continues. Add in the environmental impacts, the stark impossibility of growth-forever being a solution to anything as well as the very large elephant of corruption, and it is certain that some politician will ride this issue into office.

Read below the full commentary on the Yakabuski article; what he includes and what he leaves out.

Analysis of Konrad Yakabuski’s article: “Canada’s Immigration Plan is a Recipe for Economic Decline”

Canada’s population has surpassed the 40-million mark; 12 million more than 40 years of balanced immigration would have produced. This is a direct result of the Globe and Mail’s promotion along with that of the other corporate media, including the CBC, of the Century Initiative goal of tripling Canada’s population by 2100. There is not, and never has been, any public support for this, while studies have consistently indicated bad outcomes for the people and the environment if a larger population policy was pursued, especially if driven by mass-immigration. Fifty years of decline have proven both these studies and common sense to be right.

This piece by Konrad Yakabuski is a good example of the growing number of expert articles being published by mainstream media on the pure economic and social folly of mass immigration. This signals a sea change for the political class.

Yababuski goes into detail on the disconnect between the size and rate of growth of the commercial economy and the economic welfare of Canadians. He verifies that per capita income potential is reduced by higher levels of immigration and that mass immigration is and was bad business. This simple distinction is a major challenge to the current political order as mainstream dogma has held the rate of growth of the GDP as the one and only measure of the health of the nation.

GDP is a cashflow indicator that cannot distinguish between good and bad events or between productive and unproductive activities. It only measures paid activity in the commercial marketplace. National policy needs to look beyond the commercial market to the real physical world on which we depend and to social indicators which illuminate the health, rather than just the size, of our nation.

Everyone outside of the glass tower elites, including the creators of the GDP-based national accounts system, has known this for decades, but increasingly, reality is starting to shine through the cracks of the growth lobby’s embargo of any discussion challenging their cash cow.

While not straying far beyond the microcosm of the commercial economy Konrad Yakabuski implies that a bigger economy no longer makes good business sense or produces a healthier society. He gives an updated version of facts which were well-known 5 decades ago. It’s nice to see some rational and responsible opinion gracing the pages of a major media corporation, but our knowledge base has broadened and deepened greatly in those many years.

KY’s piece simply doesn’t move the yardsticks on placing biophysical reality into the political mainstream. Neither does he lay out the sum of our predicament and how much worse it has been made by 5 decades of reckless growth.

Nevertheless, “ .. Recipe for Economic Decline” should serve as a wakeup call to the corrupt politicians at all levels who have prescribed immigration-fuelled growth as the cure-all for our problems while never once stopping to consider that it might be the cause of most of them. Visions of political donations, good press, directorships and consultancies can have that effect.

Is the national conversation starting to become meaningful once again or it this just another diversion and deception tactic? Or perhaps a strategic withdrawal. Let’s see what Yakabuski covers.

He expands on some key points such as:

Housing affordability
Per capita income
Ageing
Culture
Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs)

And touches lightly on several others:

Uncontrolled border
Labour shortages
Fiscal balance
Productivity
Quality of life / urban sprawl / congestion

The above are all important factors to consider in forming national policy but they must be placed against the backdrop of a depleting resource base and a climate moving into a temperature strata with weather patterns never before experienced by sophisticated human societies.

To be sure, KY punctures some long rigorously promoted misconceptions and widens the view of what should be considered in a population strategy. For that he goes to the head of the journalistic class. Maybe his article signals that information may once again matter in the national conversation. But still, he does not address the many 3D elephants in the room which mutes the new (for mainstream media) points he does make. What does he leave out? See the table below.

The New World Declines to Old World Status

When Europeans first arrived in the Americas from their crowded, depleted continent, they could not imagine an end to the treasure chest of resources that lay before them. In 2024 we can clearly see definable limits and we need to carefully measure the health and the capability of the resources remaining to us. For this, money-based commercial economics is of less than no use and we need to apply physical metrics ASAP.

Life in Canada requires a huge amount of energy compared to more temperate regions and energy is the resource upon which the availability of all other resources depends. Hence its prominent position in the blossoming field of biophysical economics.

A brief overview of issues through the real world lens of:

BioPhysical Economics

BPE isn’t new, it is how sustainable societies have looked at the world around them through history but now it is not just culture, it is science.

BioPhysical Economics measures physical stocks and flows in physical units as opposed to the dollars used in the commercial market. Here are a few examples of where it is used and where it should be used:

Develop a fishing policy for cod based on current stocks of rate of reproduction of cod to determine sustainable catch ranges. Canada is already doing this.
Calculate the rate of biomass creation per hectare to understand forest dynamics and ultimate capacity. We are doing this as well.
Critically! Measure the energy required to produce additional units of energy. I.e. EROI – Energy Returned on Energy Invested (see Charles Hall). We desperately need to include this metric in policy decisions.
- EROI was as high as 100 barrels of oil produced for each barrel invested in exploration and production (100:1) in the early days of huge virgin conventional oil fields. The world average is now ~ 17:1 with the oil sands coming in at ~ 3.5:1 (a world low).
- A sophisticated society requires an EROI in the 8:1 range to maintain itself.
- The oil sands are viable only because we use abundant natural gas (EROI ~ 17:1) to harvest the oil from the sand. “Which is like spinning gold into lead.” – Robert Hoffman
- In northern latitudes, biofuels like ethanol might be commercially viable due to a myriad of financial incentives but from the point of view of energy (EROI ~ 0.7:1 to 1.4:1) and carbon emissions it is a waste of time. Or worse, a diversion.
- The EROI of solar PV is around 8:1 while wind is close to 15:1. Both change with technology, recycling advances and changes in climatic conditions.
Canada is paving over its best farmland over faster than probably any other nation. At what point do we become a net food importer? Shouldn’t we be thinking about this?
How many litres of oil and kg of fertilizer does it take to produce one tonne of wheat? Is this trending up or down?
The world and northern nations like Canada were built on mining huge reserves of fossil fuel energy, timber and minerals whose stocks and richness are now depleting rapidly. Transitioning to renewables is a massive challenge that grows larger the further north one goes. Canada is not Arizona, France or Okinawa.
Canada’s “abundant” hydro resources need to be put in perspective and our energy consumption and generation need to be represented in digestible terms for policy makers.
- Our current, all sources energy budget is approximately 335kWh per capita per day.
- In a completely electrified economy with repatriated manufacturing, the increased efficiency of electricity and huge conservation measures, our budget can safely shrink to 150 kilo Watt hours daily.
- Hydro, the ideal fast-reaction baseload for variable solar and wind energy, currently contributes 26kWh per capita per day or 17% of the future demand of 150kWh.
- That is with a population of 40 million.
- With a population of 100 million, hydro will only be able to contribute 7% of per capita demand while for a population of 28 million, it would cover 25%. The difference is absolutely critical and represents collapse vs sustainable progress.
- Since, like most other resources, the richest sources have been exploited, hydro capacity can only be expanded by an additional 10% – 15%.
A biophysical economics view distinctly shows that the big issue isn’t just population; where the population lives also matters a great deal. Certainly over-consumption in developed countries is a big part of the problem but higher resource demand from heating, infrastructure demand and food transport makes northern living simply more resource intensive.
Consequently, the Canadian immigrant stream sees its carbon footprint growing by a factor of over 4 when they come to live here. If we wanted a climate-rational migration pattern, people would be moving from northern regions to the more temperate regions. If someone can suggest a more disastrous global policy than moving large numbers of people from low consumption regions to high consumption regions, please sent it in to us. We will publish the top 3 contenders.
None of the above issues can be represented by money metrics or successfully dealt with by market mechanisms.

Social cohesion requires that we measure progress in human well-being terms rather than by the size of the economy. An unequal society will be far less able to absorb the shocks of the transition to renewable energy.

A dollar based economy can grow infinitely large in theory. A real economy cannot grow beyond its actual sustainable limits.

Issue	Does Yakabuski cover it	Comment
Per capita income	Yes	At last, the distinction between economic well-being and the size of the GDP!
Ageing	Yes	Growth has been conflated with progress in the media. Clearly now, that claim has not been true for decades according to KY and others. Which experts now would actually advocate continued mass-immigration as being good for Canada or as a cure for ageing? Surely that is a claim made only by promoters speaking to audiences they view as naïve. See our article on Ageing here.
Culture	Indirectly	85% of Canadians don’t want immigration used to change Canada’s culture. Almost the same percentage don’t want to live in a big city.
Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs)	Yes	The most effective way to derail productivity increases is really just a subsidy for cheap labour employers.
Uncontrolled border	Yes	So many uncoordinated programs of immigration, how do they add up?
Labour shortages	Yes	Cheap labour employers will always be short of workers in a progressive country.
Fiscal balance	Yes	Increasing % of workforce in lower wage jobs = structural deficit. i.e. immune to band-aide fixes
Productivity	Yes	The core driver of per capita income and individual economic well-being.
Quality of life / urban sprawl / congestion	Yes for urban sprawl and congestion	Yakabuski mentions them once in the context of the Golden Horseshoe Greenbelt in Southern Ontario being under pressure. “It is simply disingenuous to suggest that Canada’s population could reach 100 million without leading to more urban sprawl and congestion.” Actually any population increase will increase both sprawl and congestion as the last 50 years have demonstrated.
Equality Levels	Indirectly	Yakabuski dances all around it but never mentions this critical social metric outright. However, declining job quality and general increases in poverty combined with inflating housing costs could be considered a proxy for declining equality levels.
Social Issues
Farmland loss	No	Food resilience is a necessity for long term social stability
Energy resilience	No	Our society runs on energy and cheap energy is fading into history. Energy interruptions drive food, transport, health and housing into crisis very quickly in the north.
Job quality	Yes	Repatriation of manufacturing gets our best jobs back, improves job quality and boosts investment in Canadians.
What Canadians want	Indirectly	Opinion polls shows a complete disconnect with the political class agenda. KY acknowledges the disconnect by forecasting possible political turmoil unless there is a course change.
Democracy	Yes	Democracy needs to run true to its ideals and perform or the form of government will change.
Repatriation of Manufacturing	No	Not having control over the production of essential goods means international disruption can have severe consequences. Manufacturing resilience also broadens the economy, builds human capital, increases equality and reduces global CO2 emissions as our grid is vastly cleaner than that of China or other cheap labour economies.
National Conversation	Indirectly	The health of national conversation is critical to a working democracy. By simply writing what he did KY illustrated how out of kilter the conversation has become. In itself, showing that GDP growth has not been the omniscient oracle of progress it was once held out to be does not solve any problems. But it still helps the conversation enormously by taking the blinders off our political class and leaving us, 50 years late, free to discuss what the first step might be to get us started along the path to sustainability.
Environmental issues	No	All policies need to be assessed for their environmental impact and they have to be made cohesive so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.
GHG emissions	No	Why Canada has the worst GHG emissions record in the world in terms of breaking our commitments and missing our announced targets by huge margins. A journalist would have a field day with this. But when it comes to corruption, GHG emission, land use and job quality fails, corporate journalists show a remarkable lack of curiosity.
Climate change resilience of infrastructure	No	At this late date, no matter what we do; we will be hit by substantial and broad-spectrum climate change impacts. We need to invest in minimizing the inevitable damage to keep it below the societal disintegration level.
Biophysical economics vs Commercial economics	No	KY states that conventional commercial economics theory has misfired on immigration but doesn’t explore or acknowledge our dependence on the natural world.
No social or environmental impact studies	No	KY doesn’t mention the evasion necessary for our current level of immigration to have been enacted.
Societal Memory	No	Our society needs to remember what drove our ancestors to embark on a very dangerous journey to an unknown and harsh land. The reason was desperation driven by a depleting resource base, crushing poverty and no prospects for improvement. These conditions were created by a growing population demanding more than the land could sustain. They then fled the civil disruption, famines and wars which followed even though the New World presented appalling mortality rates in the early decades. We need to remember that our world holds no New Worlds to which we can flee. Why don’t we try to get it right this time?
Global Responsibility	No	The worst conceivable climate policy is population growth at northern latitudes by moving people from low emissions regions to high emissions regions. Per capita GHG emissions of current immigrant stream quadruples in Canada. For some African countries the ratio is 15:1. Canada needs to dramatically increase its foreign aid to promote solutions in the countries where problems originate. We should not imagine that these problems can be absorbed by us or any group of nations.
Resiliency	No	The ability to maintain supplies of food, energy and medical necessities during global or national disruptions. Redundancy and flexibility can prevent crises from spiralling into civil order threatening disasters. If Covid had been a bit more potent we would have paid a far heavier price for off-shoring our mask and medical supply production. A just-in-time global market system is the low cost option in a stable world but it is exactly the wrong system during energy/food/climate/conflict interruptions.
Economic Issues
Debt at all levels	No	Who owns the debt? Are these the same people promoting mass immigration and globalism and the off-shoring or our best jobs?
Housing affordability Ponzi scheme	Yes	Housing is long term consumption, not regenerative investment and asset inflation is the main objective and profit generator of mass-immigration supporters. KY’s article more or less put paid to the contention that immigration does not cause housing shortages.
Housing - regenerative investment or long term consumption?	No	We need to be clear that housing is consumption not long regenerative investment. In terms of macro-economics, housing may produce financial gains for some individuals but these gains come not from an increase in production but from a transfer of money from one pocket to another. Housing inflation is a tax, a wealth transfer from the people who produce wealth to those who accumulate it and from the young to the old.
Yakabuski covers the ageing misrepresentation.	Yes	Current immigrant stream has next to no impact on age structure. Using immigration/population growth to counter aging means an ever-growing population until it crashes as all exponential curves do. Nature hates a vacuum but it loathes an exponential curve even more. The world is ageing. Ageing represents an enormous opportunity to reduce consumption. The completely incoherent policy designed (for public consumption) to offset ageing – a fool’s errand if there ever was one – claiming necessity while doing massive damage on all aspects of social, environmental and fiscal files.
Real costs vs Inflated prices	No	We need to differentiate between rising real costs due to depletion, weather events, interruptions in supply chains etc. and inflated prices which are the result of demand outstripping supply and money printing. We have to know what the real costs are to make real world rational decisions.
Corruption
The means by which this destructive policy was brought to fruition	No	KY does not name names, describe the means or call for accountability
Who depends on growth?	No	- Developers - Cheap labour employers - Speculators - Debt mongers Every business would like to have a growing market but real wealth producers can survive on stable demand. The above interest groups can survive only if the market is always growing and if demand outstrips supply. For those dependent on a growing GDP driven by population growth, developing our human resources and building environmental assets makes no economic sense whatsoever. They do not profit from higher wages, productivity and equality levels or even from reductions in government deficits.
Subsidizing outdated business models	No	Subsidizing outdated business models with an endless supply of cheap labour
The mass immigration policy is not an accident.	No	The mass immigration policy is not an accident – it didn’t just rain, a small group manipulated the democratic system to turn on the sprinklers.
Criminal Investigation Needed	No	That mass immigration was allowed to become a core policy of all the mainstream parties – even the Greens and the NDP, who should have been 4 square against it – brings the question of criminality to the fore. This was not simply the attempt to import loyal voters to keep sleazy politicians in office; it was a deliberate act to create immense profits for a very small minority. This cries out for the creation of a full RCMP organized crime task force to investigate the breakdown of good government. 60% of Canadians support this initiative.
Peace order and good government
All the hallmarks of a corrupt government	No	All the hallmarks of a corrupt government. No national human development and environmental health goals. No national strategy
No broad public input into process	No	Narrow focus on a metric useful only to select interests
Yes-men process of rubber-stamping growth	No	Yes-men process of rubber-stamping growth
Evasion of environmental impact assessment	No	Evasion of environmental impact assessment
No verification of effectiveness	No	No verification of effectiveness (no surprise when there are no goals or metrics)
Abundant evidence for decline	No	Abundant evidence for decline already in even most basic human and environmental indicators
National Goals	No	Yakabuski makes clear we are failing on a number of key fronts but does not offer goals we should be focusing on.

The immigration lobby

A cabal of developers, cheap labour employers, speculators and debt mongers – will apply all of the pressure they can through the deep state of corruption they created to fight any movement away from mass immigration; their one and only true core issue.

To cover all of the above topics in the detail Yakabuski covered those he did mention would have required a small book, but basic biophysical economics should have been at least pencilled in as the context into which commercial economics should be placed.

We do live on a finite and depleting planet after all.

Hopefully we aren’t going to wait another 50 years to include the natural world and social health in policy making.

Facts and analysis were never shortcomings in the population stabilization camp and no responsible government would have embarked upon a policy of population growth based on scientific, fiscal or social considerations. But neither has a willingness to spike good government been a problem for the growth lobby.

Will information become relevant and inform a new, progressive policy? That would be genuine change.

Green Paper on Immigration - 1975

Bigger isn’t better for most citizens. Immigration lower per capita income potential. The higher immigration goes, the lower will be per capita income growth.

Intelligence Advisory Committee (Government of Canada) - 1991

The environment: marriage between Earth and mankind. CIE [Canadian Intelligence Estimate] Chapter 11, May 1991. From Part 2 (Overview) Page 9:

"POPULATION GROWTH - THE UNDERLYING CAUSE?"

"22. Controlling population growth is crucial to addressing most environmental problems, including global warming. For naturally occurring restraints to effect population control would mean acceptance of famine, disease, lower living standards, unemployment, political instability and environmental destruction.

Spencer and Denton Demographic Modelling - 1970s

Balanced immigration yields a stable population of 28 million which would be occurring approximately now. Mass immigration has added 12 million people more to the Canadian population.

Graphs from the Past that got it Right

One could call the graphs below “commercial economics with accountability” as they implicitly link economic statistics to social well-being. Isn’t that what government policy is supposed to do? Look at these 4 graphs depicting very easy to understand trends so crucial to the welfare of the country and the people. What honest and responsible government in their right minds would sign on to a policy that delivered these negative outcomes?

These two graphs might be news to some who require third party reports to supply their all of their information but to anyone working in manufacturing or services, the productivity freezing effect of an endless supply of cheap labour was self-evident. 50 years later, maybe this is filtering up to mainstream writers.

And what can we guess is coming with low productivity? Oh yes, creation of an increasing proportion low paying jobs. The graph below should have set off alarm bells in the media and policy committees across the country. Could it have been true that politicians genuinely did not understand the magnitude of the impacts of declining equality levels and increasing deficits or was focus on the cheap labour issue derailed by growth lobbyists? (“immigrants needed to do the dirty, low paid jobs Canadians won’t”)

The CIBC Job Quality Index told the same story. Yakabuski’s comment “That is a recipe for economic decline, if not political bedlam.“ says it rather well. Are our political class such oxen that they can’t comprehend the implications of a fire alarm going off?

Canadian equality levels declined from #2 in the world in the early 1960s to the mid-30s currently, a decline unmatched by any other nation. Just as our rate of immigration has been unmatched save for that of Australia. Cheap labour jobs and inflating housing prices are the perfect inequality generator. Yes, KY says “, Canada faces a grim future of unaffordable housing, substandard health care, dilapidated infrastructure and a shrinking tax base as, year by year, its inhabitants grow relatively poorer.” Which is effectively equivalent to rising inequality but he doesn’t actually use this well-known term.

Below is a graph of our forecast done in 1990 of housing cost as a percentage of income for the year 2036 which shows the predictability of housing inflation/unaffordability that was very much the incentive for developers and debt mongers to push for ever higher levels of immigration.

In 1990, housing ate up 42% of personal income. If Canada had had a balanced level of immigration (as many people coming in as leaving) we forecast that by 2036 housing costs might have risen to 44% of income. This modest increase due to the low additional demand as our population would have been nearly stabilized. The price of housing would have been largely based on cost, rather than deliberately inflated demand.
But given the extreme levels of immigration since 1990, the actual housing cost in 2023 is 62% well on its ways to the 2036 forecast levels in the 75% range. Of course, not only do housing costs rise but the cost of all goods and services is inflated since businesses have to pay higher property and lease costs.
Even in 2023, we are paying almost 50% more of our income (from 42% to 60%) for housing than we would have been, given a balanced immigration policy. In less than 15 years from now that may increase to nearly 100% more if the immigration lobby continues to maintain control of the media and politicians.
Ponzi supporters may tout their promotional mantras as to why this is good, but “the wealth effect”, “asset enhancement”, “property appreciation” and like terms are just code for wealth flowing to the pockets of the wealthy from the hands of everyone else.

Guns, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling … nothing has the scale of profit potential that real estate inflation does.

Does the growth lobby pocket all of the $280 billion on the table? No, but they take a juicy chunk of it and ultimately, a huge proportion of increased housing valuations shows up in increased mortgages, net capital gains for owners of more than one residence and rent increases.

The dismal results illustrated in the graphs above, the forecasts made in the mentioned reports and in the articles at the end of this piece came to pass. And everyone should be absolutely clear that the Canadian public has not wanted a larger population since the 1950s. As our latest opinion poll so definitively shows (https://sustainablesociety.com/what-do-canadians-want-opinion-research-report/) they absolutely don’t want the massive negative impacts of our current immigration policy.

What Should We Do?

The leaders who built this country spoke of nation building. The politicians who occupy their places now are dedicated only to market building. This theme is enforced by the corporate media.

A coherent policy set would be one in which policies are working together towards clear goals. What would those be? Let me suggest, constantly increasing productivity, higher job quality, real cost based housing, fiscal balance, reduced consumption, greater access to nature and a higher quality of life along the way to greatly increased food and energy resilience.

We need to develop a scientific overview of our dynamic world and we need to have decision making tools which are designed to illuminate the choices we will be making. Our monetary/economic metrics have to produce pricing structures where the sticker price reflects the whole cost.

This is the opposite of our current mindless pursuit of growth. Are coherent policies locked onto human well-being and environmental health so hard to conceptualize?

We also need to clean house of the yes-men and predatory manipulators and open the national conversation back up to a broad base of experts and public opinion; a national conversation informed by our biophysical reality and Canadian values rather than money-based fog.

Yakabuski’s piece flies in the face of the growth mandate but it offers nothing that hasn’t been known and published for over a generation. By now we should have been well along the path to developing a coherent biophysical economics policy framework with clear national environmental and social goals. Simply put, we should get back to nation-building and developing people rather than farmland. A future, very different from our past, looms ahead and we need to be ready for it.

“Canada’s Immigration Plan is a Recipe for Economic Decline” implies that Canada will go into decline if mass immigration continues. The fact is that the land and the people of Canada have been experiencing decline for over 4 decades. We have been going broke on the growth that the media has lauded and only now is beginning to recognize as destructive.

How was this allowed to happen?

Mass immigration is a backroom deal, not a well-considered and vetted piece of public policy. It is not a case of error or oversight or “irrationally exuberant enlightenment”. This was deliberate manipulation of the process of national policy formation to enrich the few at the cost of the many. It didn’t just rain; someone turned on the sprinklers.

60% of Canadians want the RCMP to launch an organized crime task force to investigate the connections between developers and politicians. Given the bewildering failure of the political class to develop responsible policies on such clear issues, perhaps criminal investigations along the line of the USA’s RICO process – designed to tackle complex high-level crimes with many participants – is the only way of restoring good government. And public trust.

That such a destructive, corrupt and future-killing policy could continue to survive should set off red flares amongst those who hope and believe that democracy is still the best form of government.

“ … Recipe for Economic Decline” does indicate Canada has made a huge mistake but falls short of illuminating just how huge that mistake has been. Furthermore, it lets the matter rest as a mistake when, in fact, it was a crime.

John Erik Meyer

Author:
The Renewable Energy Transition, realities for Canada and the world (Springer Nature) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-29115-0
The Post-Pandemic World, Sustainable Living on a Wounded Planet (Springer Nature)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91782-1