Canada is currently subjecting itself to a bizarre experiment in extreme population growth due to pedal-to-the-metal legal immigration.
Canada’s population rose about 1 percent per year for the first decade and a half of this century. But the Justin Trudeau era began in 2015, and growth was goosed to 1.5 percent by 2019. After a brief pandemic pause, the Trudeau government is now opening the borders extraordinarily wide.
In response, Canada’s annual population growth rate hit 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2023, the kind of rise normally associated with Bangladesh in the 1980s. Over the summer, Canada’s population reached
40 million, up from 30 million in 1997.
The number of nonpermanent residents was allowed to soar by almost
700,000 in the past twelve months. There are now 46 percent more foreigners in Canada temporarily, mostly on work and study permits, than one year ago, the largest annual increase in the half century for which the Canadian government has data.
Granted, some of these recent arrivals are Ukrainian women refugees, but the government’s target is 465,000 permanent immigrants this year rising to 500,000 in 2025, about 1.2 percent of the population annually, four times the rate at which the United States lets in immigrants.
It’s a big world out there, and billions of people live in countries that their kin have helped make lousier than Canada. So there’s no end to how many immigrants Canada can recruit. (At least until Canada’s standard of living converges with its source countries like Pakistan.)
The official Statistics Canada government agency
projected in 2022:
…the Canadian population would reach 47.7 million in 2041, and 25.0 million of them would be immigrants or children of immigrants born in Canada, accounting for 52.4% of the total population…. Canada’s population may reach…between 44.9 million and 74.0 million in 2068, according to the various projection scenarios.
Back in
1996, less than 6 percent of Canada’s population were minorities. But according to the
government:
In 2041, about 2 in 5 Canadians will be part of a racialized group.
To digress briefly, if you are wondering what’s the point of the euphemism “racialized” for nonwhites, this is another Canadian innovation in woke jargon, like “BIPOC.” The idea is, apparently, that, because all good people know that Race Does Not Exist Genetically, but on the other hand, the government is obsessed with counting by race, the Canadians have squared that verbal circle. They’ve decided that while nonwhites aren’t nonwhite racially, because race doesn’t exist, they are thought to be “nonwhite” because they’ve been
racialized by whites, whose lying eyes tell them that the racialized look like they might have different ancestors than they do.
Or something...