Statistics Canada Reports II

acottawa · #11 Posted **Jun 19, 2026, 2:47 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by isaidso

Surely, it's common knowledge that rebounding after COVID was only part of the rationale for the big intake numbers? Demographers had been pleading with Canadian Federal governments for 25+ years to significantly raise immigration numbers due the impending demographic time bomb.

With Boomers retiring, the worker to retired ratio kept declining leading leaving the national pension system under funded. Cutting benefits was a non-starter as workers had paid into the system for decades. No policies seemed able to raise the TFR (birth rate) to replacement levels so the only option left was to significantly increase the number of work aged people coming into Canada. The caveat had always been that the longer we waited, the more dire the situation became. With government after government ignoring pleas, the issue had become unavoidable by 2020.

The Trudeau govenment was the first to take this seriously but was absolutely careless and reckless in their execution. It caused chaos but also a backlash to immigration in general. The problem is we still need to keep padding the size of our labour force but the appetite for it has evaporated.

I'm not suggesting a return to the extreme numbers we saw a few years ago but we wiill be in trouble a decade from now if we don't get back to large scale immigration. The 1% figure we often point to (410,00/annually) will have to increase because we'll soon see Natural Decrease (more deaths than births). Eventually, we'll need large scale immigration just to keep the population stable.

Large scale immigration does not really solve the demographic problems. The average age of an immigrant is 32, which is only 8 years younger than the average age of the population as a whole.

It also isn’t a long term solution. Birth rates are collapsing around the world, there will not be a big enough pool of viable immigrants available. We already saw this with the low quality “students” who came in when Trudeau opened the floodgates. The 90s is over and it ain’t coming back.