Canadian Perspectives on Multiculturalism and Diversity

2026/07/13 1 Comment

Encouraging large scale public opinion research highlighting that concern over immigration levels has largely not affected overall support for diversity and multiculturalism. But support for multiculturalism is less for “deeper” multiculturalism when it involves separate group institutions:

Summary recommendations: When asked what multiculturalism means to them, 64 percent of Canadians provide a response that describes multiculturalism positively, saying, for instance, that it means having an accepting society that welcomes people from different cultures. Only six percent describe multiculturalism negatively. However, 30 percent opt not to provide a response.

  • A majority of Canadians (66%) agree that “multiculturalism has contributed positively to the Canadian identity.” One in four (25%) disagree.
  • Even among white or non-immigrant Canadians, the proportions agreeing that multiculturalism has contributed positively to the Canadian identity outweigh those disagreeing by a margin of roughly two to one.
  • Even among Canadians who currently hold more negative opinions about immigration, a majority (about 3 in 5) has a positive opinion about the impact of multiculturalism.
  • There is widespread agreement among Canadians that people should not be discriminated against based on their race, ethnicity or culture. There is also agreement among a majority of Canadians that there are benefits to living in a diverse society. But disagreement outweighs agreement when it comes to setting up separate institutions in areas such as education to accommodate ethnic or religious minorities. While there are differences in the extent of agreement with each of several statements about diversity among Canadians of different backgrounds, what is notable is that the gradient in opinions just described applies for all groups.
  • One in five Canadians express wholly positive opinions about immigration: they are not concerned about the current number of immigrants coming to Canada, and they see welcoming immigrants as part of their vision of the type of country that Canada should be. A larger group (36%) has mixed views, expressing concern about the number of immigrants currently arriving, but nonetheless agreeing that Canada should be a country that fully welcomes immigrants from around the world. A similarly-sized group – about one in three – expresses wholly negative opinions: they believe immigration levels are too high and do not want Canada to be fully welcoming to immigrants from all over the world. Among non-immigrants, the proportion with wholly negative opinions reaches 41 percent….

Source: Canadian Perspectives on Multiculturalism and Diversity

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Trucking companies deemed unsafe permitted to employ temporary foreign workers

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

Another breakdown in immigration:

Nearly 100 trucking companies with a history of safety infractions, labour violations and other regulatory failures have been granted approval by Ottawa to hire temporary foreign workers since 2019, a Globe and Mail investigation has found.

The compliance issues ranged from flunking safety audits to concerns over forged documents. In some cases, companies were approved by Employment and Social Development Canada to use the migrant labour program despite failing to comply with wage theft orders issued by the same ministry. 

One carrier identified by The Globe’s analysis was decertified by Manitoba authorities over chronic safety issues, yet subsequently granted permission to hire temporary workers on three occasions. 

The Manitoba government accuses the company of setting up a related carrier in Alberta linked to a fatal collision in Brandon, Man., in late May. The incident prompted the province to call for the creation of a national trucking registry to better track bad actors in the sector. …

Source: Trucking companies deemed unsafe permitted to employ temporary foreign workers

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The Population Forecasts Are Grim. They’re Still Too Optimistic.

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

More on demographics:

…There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office.

Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home. The supply of would-be migrants will shrink as more countries run out of young people, and the skilled ones every aging country covets will be fought over. With most countries staring down the same cliff, and with emigration from the United States rising, permanent high net migration is more of an aspiration than a forecast.

But the second act of wishful thinking has an even bigger effect. Many forecasters are assuming that current low fertility rates are temporary, that women are merely delaying having children rather than forgoing it entirely. But this isn’t true: Research shows that delays in childbearing are usually not made up, and, anyway, estimates that take deferred childbearing into account have fallen by just as much as the headline fertility rate.

Up until quite recently, the Social Security trustees’ main scenario assumed that fertility rates will rise from now until 2050, and stabilize at 1.9 children per woman. In 2023, the Census Bureau predicted that fertility rates will only gradually decline from 1.64 to 1.58 by 2075. Spoiler: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already shown a 1.57 fertility rate for 2025. The U.N. expects that the U.S. fertility rate will be flat at about 1.65 through the entire 21st century. To its credit, Social Security trustees released new numbers just last month that revised their expectations down to 1.75 in 2050, but that is overly optimistic. The Congressional Budget Office is more realistic, but even it predicts that fertility will decline to 1.53, then stabilize….

 Lyman Stone is the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies and the director of research for the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence.

Source: The Population Forecasts Are Grim. They’re Still Too Optimistic.

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French: MAGA’s Birthright Meltdown Is in Full Effect

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

…The people above — who range from a sometime trillionaire to billionaires to government officials to journalists and pundits — aren’t exceptional on the populist right. They’re emblematic of a movement that, like Trump, is constantly arguing that this country is minutes away from midnight and that only the most extreme measures can yank America back from the brink of destruction.

And to them, Exhibit A of the destruction of America is the birthright citizenship case, the ultimate symbol of national suicide.

But how could that be? The Supreme Court’s decision did nothing more than confirm a legal status quo that’s existed since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 — a ruling that’s rooted in centuries-old British and American conceptions of citizenship.

Part of the rage seems to be rooted in a sense that MAGA came oh so close to winning. Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The fact that it was 5-4 — so agonizingly close — just underscored that the legal community on the right and left has been so wrong for so many years, saying this was going to be a 9-0 ruling against President Trump.”

But that’s not quite right. Yes, there were only five unqualified votes for the constitutional status quo, but there were six total votes for birthright citizenship (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that birthright citizenship was required by statute, not the Constitution), and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent indicated that he was mainly concerned with citizenship for the children of temporary visitors.

As Gorsuch wrote about the children of unauthorized immigrants, “What matters isn’t whether a child’s parents are citizens. What matters is whether they (and, by law, their child at birth) have made this place their home and are thus ‘domiciled within the United States.’” The strong implication was that Trump’s order denying citizenship to undocumented immigrants was far too broad.

Now, by this reckoning, we can count seven justices who would retain the status quo for the children of unauthorized immigrants, at least when those families wish to stay in the United States. Birthright citizenship — at least for those people whose families live in the United States — is far more secure than MAGA seems to believe. Or wants to believe…

That’s why we believe that any person born in the United States is a citizen. The creed has helped create and sustain a culture, and then both creed and culture tell us that each person in this country is of equal worth and equal status. If the creed isn’t central to our identity, then why does the oath of office bind the president to “preserve, protect and defend” a constitution, not a country?

The Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address — these are the proclamations that define who we are. They are the core of the American creed, and without that creed, America might retain its name, but it will not retain its nature.

Source: MAGA’s Birthright Meltdown Is in Full Effect

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McWhorter: Euphemism Won’t Save Young Black Men’s Lives

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

Plain speech rather than euphemisms or ignoring reality (e.g., pregnant people):

…Euphemism can feel so right. We imagine that if we create a new term for something we can get people to think about it differently. Surely more will understand that a “bum” isn’t a reprobate if we refer to him as “homeless.” I’m just old enough to remember when “homeless” was the new default in the 1980s — it sounded so polite, open-minded. But before long, sentiments associated with “bum” transferred to “homeless.” We now have the dismissive slang term “homelessy.” So we’re supposed to say “unhoused.”

Hence “gun violence.” The key contrast is that if someone said “knife violence” we’d feel like they were trying to hide something. It’s the same with “gun violence.” We seek euphemism, maybe to avoid thinking about who is doing the shooting. “Gun violence” encourages us to see Black men who shoot one another not as self-destructive killers, but as people beset by a larger force unrelated to blame.

But we need not euphemism, but action, so that eventually there isn’t anything more to euphemize about.

We should think more of initiatives like Save Our Streets, part of a nationwide movement in which former gang members and others who have committed crimes are enlisted to act as experienced mediators between young people on the verge of using guns. A study by the sociologist Patrick Sharkey and co-authors Gerard Torrats-Espinosa and Delaram Takyar has shown that nonprofit organizations that focus on crime and community life can help reduce murder rates. Precision policing or focused deterrence, zeroing in on the tiny percentage of people in a neighborhood committing crimes, rather than canvassing the entire population, has been shown to reduce homicides.

The tragic effects of these shootings, including the convulsive grief of thousands of mothers, demands stark honesty that treats the lives of poor young Black men as reality, not as an abstraction. This includes talking about them rather than around them.

Source: Euphemism Won’t Save Young Black Men’s Lives

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Clark: Carney opens the Senate doors wider to partisans

2026/07/10 2 Comments

Most of the commentary has understandably focussed on the formal removal of non-partisanship in appointments. But little has been said regarding the diversity of appointments, whether of minority groups, sectoral or ideological. While the initial four appointments are too few to establish a trend, half are political, three-quarters are men, one visible minority but no Indigenous. The two non-political appointees appear to be more centrist than some of the activist senators appointed under the Trudeau government:

The chamber of sober second thought is apparently too sober for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s liking, and tends to waste all kinds of time in second thought. What it needs, we are told, is more party loyalists.

So Mr. Carney appointed his principal secretary and campaign manager, Tom Pitfield, to the Senate, alongside Conservative MP Richard Martel, 65, who bolted from Pierre Poilievre’s joyless Conservative caucus for another nine years and eight months of job security.

But the PM also changed the appointment process for new senators to remove the nominal requirement of non-partisanship, thus opening the door wide to former politicians, aides and fundraisers.

It seems strange for a Prime Minister with so little partisan history of his own, but it was not the first time Mr. Carney has removed restrictions on partisanship in power. Last year, he loosened rules on the government spending on partisan ads – and now Mr. Carney’s Canada Strong campaign slogan is often heard in TV commercials.

Source: Carney opens the Senate doors wider to partisans

And Stephen Maher’s take:

…Trudeau was wise, I thought, to stop putting hacks, fundraisers and failed candidates into the upper chamber, and he never had to deal with any blowback.

The backroom fixers in the Liberals and Conservatives are glad to see Carney set aside Trudeau’s reforms, offering thin arguments about political tradition, but that is because they and their friends want to get in there.

It looks dirty, and Carney will wear it if these appointments go wrong.

Source: Opinion | With his Senate appointments, Mark Carney is undoing one of Justin Trudeau’s smartest decisions

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Triandafyllidou: How AI and digital data shape our understanding of migration

2026/07/10 Leave a comment

Captures some of the challenges well in terms of integrating and understanding what the various data sources and the need to ensure the underlying data is solid. Data is rarely perfect:

…No single dataset offers a complete picture. Administrative records provide legal and demographic precision but often arrive slowly. Surveys reveal motivations and lived experiences but are costly and difficult to conduct during crises. Digital traces offer speed and scale but may overlook important populations and contexts. 

Each source captures different dimensions of migration. Together, they provide a richer understanding than any could alone.

As governments invest in artificial intelligence and data-driven governance, this lesson becomes increasingly important. The availability of real-time big data should not obscure other types of data that complement the picture.

If AI is truly to work for all, as the Canadian AI strategy suggests, we must look beyond algorithms themselves and pay closer attention to the data on which they depend.

The question is not whether we use proxies to understand migration. We always have. The real question is which proxies we use, what they reveal and what they leave unseen.

Source: Triandafyllidou: How AI and digital data shape our understanding of migration

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Khan: The Temporary Foreign Worker Program Can’t Be Fixed

2026/07/10 Leave a comment

There will always be some need for temporary workers, particularly seasonal work and some of the groups under IMP. But the design for lower skilled temporary workers invites abuse and scams:

THE TEMPORARY FOREIGN WORKER PROGRAM has, for a litany of reasons, cemented its place as the poster child for all things wrong with Canada’s immigration system. Corruption? Check. Exploitation? Check. Profiteering? Check. A growing majority of Canadians now blame the program for bringing in too many immigrants and contributing to the housing shortage, a crumbling health care system, and for some on the far right, a perceived crisis of too many Brown people. 

The critiques are mostly political and occasionally racist. But a recent British Columbia Supreme Court decision in a class action suit tells a more sobering story: the TFWP is merely a tool bad actors can weaponize against the vulnerable in a broader immigration system that places a person’s productive value above their human value. 

What makes this case extraordinary is its scale: between 2011 and 2016, a Surrey-based immigration consultant named Kuldeep Bansal ran a glitzy foreign worker recruitment operation out of a luxury hotel in Dubai, disguised as a series of job fairs, that defrauded hundreds, potentially thousands, of vulnerable workers with offers of jobs in Canada that, in many instances, didn’t exist. 

The suit accused Bansal of charging vulnerable workers in Dubai between $2,000 and $8,000 for “services” related to obtaining these “guaranteed” jobs for Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc. (The company, which has been rebranded as Circle K, is owned by Quebec-based Alimentation Couche Tard, which is not named in the ruling.) The hiring representative for Mac’s, a man named Geoff Higuchi, was accused of knowing about the scam but still helping Bansal secure work permits through the TFWP, then breaching contracts with the around 125 workers who actually arrived in Canada and were told the jobs they had applied for were no longer available….

Canada is no stranger to the exploitation of temporary workers. It’s been a feature of the Canadian labour market practically since Confederation, from the contract labour schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the seedy “labour brokers” they spawned, to the introduction of the TFWP in 1973, the birth shortly thereafter of the immigration consultant industry, the abuse of agricultural and domestic workers that followed, and the expansion of the program during the low-wage labour shortages of the early 2000s and during the pandemic. By 2023, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery declared the low-wage stream of the TFWP a “breeding ground” of modern enslavement.

Over the decades, successive governments have used a largely economic argument to justify temporary labour: businesses need flexibility in hiring to help them navigate the ups and downs of the labour market. The logic of that argument, experts say, places short-term economic needs above humanitarian obligations. And the results have been predictable: flexibility has turned into dependency, dependency into abuse. 

Today, with Canada facing an uncertain economic future, the demand for temporary foreign workers is on the decline. But when that changes, the machinery of exploitation will lurch back into motion. We will see more businesses lobbying the government for more access to cheap foreign labour and more immigration consultants leveraging that demand to enrich themselves, leaving in their wake a trail of broken lives. 

That cycle will endlessly repeat, as it has for more than a century, until Canadian politicians finally admit what the real problem is: temporariness itself. 

Adnan R. Khan is a freelance writer and editor based in the Netherlands and the author of the Canada in the World newsletter.

Source: The Temporary Foreign Worker Program Can’t Be Fixed

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Canada’s multicultural success story is built on class inequalities, not just cultural differences

2026/07/10 Leave a comment

Well, should Canada give priority to immigrants that are not credentialed, don’t speak English or French, immobile and not networked or not easily understood. Arguing for those not compatible with Canadian institutions?:

…Our interviews suggest something more mundane and more selective is happening underneath the multicultural branding. People who arrive already resemble a Canadian middle-class template. Like most Canadians, the newcomers we interviewed are credentialed, English-speaking, mobile and networked and have an easier time being “legible,” or easily understood and categorized, by many institutions outside of Québec. 

Multiculturalism, therefore, isn’t really about managing radical differences. It’s about smoothing over fairly minor cultural differences, insofar as Canadian immigration and refugee systems filter for people who are already compatible with the Canadian ideal of being and acting middle-class.

Canada’s emergency and resettlement programs, like its immigration system more broadly, don’t admit a random cross-section of Ukrainian or Afghan society. They tend to favour people with education, professional experience, language skills or existing ties to Canada — the very same traits that emerged as the connective tissue in our interviews. 

In other words, the “shared values” newcomers are so often expected to possess may have less to do with adopting Canadian culture after arrival and more to do with already holding a class position and mentality that made them compatible with Canadian institutions in the first place.

Source: Canada’s multicultural success story is built on class inequalities, not just cultural differences

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Canada’s universities are recruiting hundreds of international researchers. They’re not just coming from Trump’s America

2026/07/08 Leave a comment

Reminder that talent can be found in many countries:

As Canada strengthens efforts to recruit academic talent from abroad, U.S.-based scholars make up the largest cohort selected in the first round of a new federal funding program, with the University of Toronto receiving the biggest share of graduate and post-doctoral researchers.

A detailed breakdown obtained by the Star shows that nearly half of the 659 recipients of the inaugural Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards are citizens of the United States, China, Iran and India.

Health research, including biotechnology, is the leading field of study in this first wave of allocations, which are also heavily concentrated among 10 universities that together received nearly 60 per cent of the awards….

Source: Canada’s universities are recruiting hundreds of international researchers. They’re not just coming from Trump’s America

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