Among the less commented-on results of the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election was the performance of the People’s Party of Canada, the populist-nationalist party led by former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier. If you missed it, here it is: they got 234 votes, or 0.63 per cent of the total.
What a disappointment this must be for the PPC, after winning 2.67 per cent of the vote in the riding in the past general election. But it’s in keeping with the trend nationally. In the 2021 election the PPC took nearly 5 per cent of the vote. Nowadays it’s mired in the two-to-three-per-cent range.
This is extraordinary. Consider what has happened in the interim. Net immigration has nearly doubled, from roughly 250,000 per year prior to 2021 to nearly 500,000 today. In addition, hundreds of thousands of non-permanent residents – mostly students and temporary foreign workers – have entered the country, and remained. Combined, they have added nearly three million people to Canada’s population since 2021 – 3.2 per cent in 2023 alone, the fastest annual growth rate since 1957.
The increase is widely blamed, fairly or unfairly, for the spike in housing prices, strained health care resources and declining per-capita GDP. And yet, for all the predictions of an imminent public backlash, the party that has made opposition to “mass immigration” its signature issue has seen its support cut in half.
Everywhere else the nationalist right – hard right, far right, call it what you will – is on the rise, largely on the strength of its opposition to immigration. In France, the Rassemblement National is poised for victory in the first round of parliamentary elections, and may emerge with an absolute majority.
In Britain, the current election campaign has seen a surge in support for the anti-immigrant Reform Party. In Italy, the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy is the dominant partner in the governing right-wing coalition.
In Germany, the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, ran second in the recent European elections. And, of course, in the United States Donald Trump remains the favourite to win the November presidential election.
But in Canada, the country with the highest rate of immigration in the Group of Seven and very likely the highest of any developed country, anti-immigration sentiment is largely dormant.
Not only is the PPC floundering. Its more mainstream rival, the Conservatives, have had relatively little to say on the subject, beyond a promise to tie immigration levels to the level of housing starts.
To the extent immigration has been an issue here, moreover, it has been mostly confined to the non-permanent resident classes. Permanent immigration, even at rates approaching 500,000 annually, has attracted less controversy, outside of Quebec.
What accounts for this Canadian exceptionalism on immigration? Part of it, admittedly, is the accident of our geography. It is harder to stoke nativist fears of being “engulfed” when you are 3,000 miles away from the nearest likely source of migrants.
But a large part of it, I suggest, is self-fulfilling. Canadians do not oppose immigration, on the whole, because larger and larger numbers of Canadians are immigrants, or know people who are.
Canada has always been a nation of immigrants, of course. But the coincidence, in recent years, of rising immigration rates and declining birth rates, has wrought a further transformation: we are, increasingly, a nation of recent immigrants.
Indeed, we are about to cross a significant threshold. As of the 2021 census, 23 per cent of Canadians were immigrants – a record. Add to that the 17.6 per cent of the population with at least one foreign-born parent, and more than 40 per cent of the population were either first- or second-generation immigrants.
That was three years ago – before the current great wave of immigration. By now that number must be at least 42 or 43 per cent. Add to that the 6.8 per cent of the population, as of April 1 of this year, made up of non-permanent residents, and we are very nearly at 50 per cent.
That proportion is only likely to grow. Two years ago – again, before the great wave – Statistics Canada projected first- and second-generation immigrants would make up 52.4 per cent of the population by 2041. But that was on the basis of a projected total population of 48 million. It is already at 41.4 million.
There is no going back from this. We have crossed the immigration Rubicon. It’s easier to campaign against immigration in a country with little experience of it. But in a country where immigrants, and their children, make up the majority? It is not going to happen.