We can build a strong, sovereign Canada by recruiting talented foreigners to play for our team.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.
Many of the sweeping reflections and recommendations in this year’s Canada Day opinion pieces dealt with trade: internal barriers to it, American tariffs upon it, the attending need to diversify it, et cetera. But in a modern knowledge economy, where more than 90 per cent of the S&P 500’s value is comprised of intangible assets, Canada’s most important import is not any one good or service – it is people, and the knowledge they bring.
The Carney cabinet’s mandate letter acknowledges this, setting a goal of “attracting the best talent in the world to help build our economy.” But that sentence concludes with a crucial caveat of doing this “while returning our overall immigration rates to sustainable levels.”
This neatly captures Canada’s confused immigration policy. We want to attract global talent. Just not too much. Our awkward aversion to too much talent gives rise to niche proposals like the Canada Discovery Visa, which would fund 1,000 of “the world’s top scientists and engineers” to live and work in Canada. It’s a good idea from Canadian tech entrepreneur Michael Serbinis. Let’s do it. But why stop at scientists? Broader calls to systematically poach U.S. talent are also smart. But why just Americans? The world is full of people with proven experience in solving Canada’s thorniest problems. They should be playing for our team.
Canada’s per capita health care spending is about 20 per cent higher than Japan’s, yet the Japanese, on average, live a full two years longer. Iceland, Italy, Israel, South Korea and Spain likewise boast higher life expectancies at dramatically lower costs. Shouldn’t we recruit people who know how to deliver better care at lower costs to provide these improvements for Canada? Ontario’s plan to allow American health care workers to practise immediately upon arrival is a start. (It would also help to move globally trained health care professionals who are already here from the sidelines to the front lines. In Ontario alone, an estimated 20,000 globally trained nurses are prevented from practising – mostly without good reason.) But why just Americans, and only front-line workers? Why not the hospital administrators and civil servants who manage these evidently superior systems?
Canadian housing also suffers from serious productivity issues. In Sweden, 90 per cent of housing fabrication occurs in factories. In Canada, we bring each piece to a lot and assemble it on site, which is both more expensive and takes longer.
We could entice Swedish companies to set up branch plants here, driving profits and intellectual property out of Canada, but wouldn’t it be better to recruit Swedish experts to move here and build businesses that don’t just deliver cheaper housing fast, but also accrue knowledge, capital and intellectual property for our economy?
No matter what, our ambitious housing targets are not achievable without a major influx of skilled labour. Many believe that Canada lacks the housing to support greater immigration, but perhaps Canada lacks the immigrants to support greater housing construction. We will lack about 85,000 construction workers in the next decade, with an estimated 134,000 residential construction workers set to retire by 2033. Yet Canada is selecting 75 per cent fewer immigrants with construction skills than we did in the 1980s.
Transport is another example. In a modern, sovereign economy, people move quickly and cheaply between cities to build connections and close deals. The Canadian narrative is that high-speed rail is too expensive to build. But excellent research by the University of Toronto shows that Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Finland, Spain and South Korea “deliver transit projects comparable to those in Canada at as low as one-10th the price per kilometre.” The people behind those projects should be playing for Team Canada, especially the civil servants.
A confident Canada would stop dwelling on arbitrary immigration targets and instead recruit people who have solved the very challenges we’re currently stuck on, in whatever numbers are required. Fundamentally, we have a mindset problem. We’re stuck in the antiquated paradigm where hardscrabble immigrants arrive with $5 in their pockets and build good lives upon hard work and Canadian generosity. In this paradigm, immigration is a favour we do for immigrants.
But today’s truth is that immigration is one of Canada’s top three talent development pathways, alongside our education system and our innovation industries. We often fault immigrants for lacking Canadian experience, while ironically overlooking the pre-Canadian experience they have in solving the precise problems we face.
Canada is a great country, but we face many serious challenges. Talented people around the world have solved our problems – only they’ve done it elsewhere. They know how to do what we don’t. We can build a strong, sovereign Canada by recruiting them to play for our team.