Good morning. For many decades, Canadian immigration was kind of like functioning plumbing: It just hummed along in the background. The average Canadian rarely thought about it, and even more rarely worried about it. I started looking closely at immigration three years ago, as it became clear to me (and many others) that things were rapidly changing, and not for the better. That’s in focus today along with a quick look at some hot market plays.

Lawsuit: Fiera Capital and its recently terminated infrastructure head sue each other as fund’s redemption queue hits $700-million

Media: Corus Entertainment lenders try anew to fix a broken balance sheet at one of the country’s largest media companies

Rita Trichur: Washington buying stakes in Canadian miners creates national-security dilemma for Ottawa

• Today: We’ll be watching Canada’s employment report for September. Experts are expecting the unemployment rate to rise, and the average hourly earnings are expected to be up as well.
• Weekend: The American League Championship Series is set to start Sunday in Toronto, with tickets to watch the Blue Jays selling out almost as fast as they went on sale yesterday.

Hi, I’m Tony Keller. I’m a columnist for The Globe and Mail, and I’ve just written a book on immigration. It’s about how well the Canadian immigration system used to work, and how the Trudeau government – with help from business, higher education, the provinces and a marriage of progressives and Bay Street – broke it.

(I’m also this year’s McGill Max Bell Lecturer, with lectures on immigration coming up in Calgary, Halifax and Toronto.)

My feature in Saturday’s paper is an excerpt from the book.

Canadians may not have known exactly what the immigration system was up to or how it all worked – again, kind of like plumbing – but from the 1990s to the mid-2010s there was a high degree of public confidence in the system, and that governments were managing it in such a way that immigration worked for Canada.

That made Canada a happy outlier.

Immigration sparked growing political conflict and polarization in Europe and the United States, but in Canada until recently it barely registered as an area of public concern. Polls showed that Canadians had the world’s most positive and welcoming attitude toward immigrants.

Immigration was also a non-issue in Canadian politics. From the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien to Stephen Harper’s Conservative administration, there wasn’t much daylight on immigration — not in the shared positive attitude toward legal immigration, nor in their common concern to limit illegal and irregular immigration, nor in the actual numbers of new residents accepted each year. For a quarter of a century, immigration levels were stable, at around a quarter million arrivals a year, and the broad strokes of immigration policy did not whipsaw when the party in power changed.

All of this positive feeling about immigration existed even though Canada had a higher immigration rate than most developed countries. From the year 2000 to 2015, Canada’s immigration level, relative to the size of the national population, was consistently two, three and sometimes even four times higher than the U.S. rate.

And then things went very, very wrong.

The traditional front door to Canada – immigrants selected to become permanent residents and future citizens – had been superseded by a side-door for temporary foreign workers, which was much larger than the front door, and wide open. Foreign students were the biggest part of this new foreign-resident work force, and their numbers had exploded to more than one million. A large share of these students were attending low-quality or entirely notional educational institutions, working full time in low-wage jobs, and essentially trading tuition for the right to enter Canada, in the hope that they could remain.

The regular immigration system had limits, giving Canada its high but stable immigration rate from the 1990s until the mid-2010s, but in the temporary streams, numbers were unlimited. The permanent immigration system had traditionally focused on recruiting educated, skilled and experienced immigrants, but the temporary system stood that on its head, with a focus on filling alleged “labour shortages” in some of Canada’s least well-paid jobs.

Immigration selectivity went down. Immigration numbers went to the moon.

Between 2022 and 2024, Canada had an unprecedented immigration surge, taking in 3.1 million new people. To put it in perspective, that’s about four times the immigration level for an average three-year period during the Chrétien or Harper eras. In the peak year of 2023, more than 1.3 million people arrived; that was five times the immigration rate in 2015.