Throwing out the baby, bathwater, the tub itself and the whole bathroom

What amazes me in our modern times is the propensity to make everything a binary choice - 0 or 1, right or wrong, good or bad. We seem to be seeing that with immigration now. Many experts are calling for the government to go back to the model in place in the early 2000s, to ‘blow up’ the temporary workers program, to take away work permits for international students, etc. etc. etc. - and, almost most worryingly, to forget about the growing number of retirees. An ‘expert’ from Montreal did a commentary recently where he basically shrugged and said we should just accept a dramatic curtailment of people available to work and the economy would adjust.

Tell that to Japan.

We need to have modest growth in the annual permanent resident admissions to account for the fact that the rest of Canada now needs immigration.

We need to attract international students but it should be clear that only a portion will eventually get to stay in the country long term. If you have 2 million international students and spouses and only 500k PRs this is basic math.

And, still important, we need to have an immigration approach that matches the inflow as much as possible to workforce demand. Those calling to go back to a hard and fast points-based system are promoting a system that inevitably leads to highly educated immigrants working in low skilled jobs. We need to bring in highly skilled talent - absolutely - there is overwhelming evidence to support this - but we also need to be able to address workforce demand as it is - there is certainly need for productivity and automation but to have an industry such as food manufacturing disappear because of a lack of workers - makes no sense to me at all.