Everything is (still) immigration

None of this matters if the 'Buy Canadian' crowd doesn't 'Hire Canadian.'

Conestoga diploma mill attendees overwhelm an Ontario job fair.

(Update: Media coverage of this call-to-action in the Western Standard, the Toronto Sun, and on Toronto Today.)

Despite all promises to the contrary, all the sudden and supposed interest in nation-building efforts that stretch from Victoria’s Inner Harbour to the Bay of Fundy, all the ‘Buy Canadian’ horseshit lapped up by a portion of the electorate that votes like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, Canada’s once-in-a-generation betrayal of its labour market — and its very present and future — continued at pace to begin 2025.

The numbers are pants-shitting-ly grim.

The latest federal immigration data shows that Canada welcomed more than 817,000 newcomers in the first four months of 2025 when tallying up permanent and non-permanent streams.

Between January and April 2025, 132,100 people were granted permanent residency, while 194,000 study permits and 491,400 work permits (including extensions) were finalized by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. (Juno News)

Via Cosmin Dzsurdzsa, Juno News/True North Wire Service.

At a time when 89% of Canadians under 34 have been beaten into believing that “owning a home is only for the rich” (Ipsos poll), along comes the worst summer job market in two decades to match the continued Liberal failure to course-correct on the mass-immigration, replacement-caste grift.

The two are of course inextricably linked.

With even the Bank of Canada speaking uncomfortable truths, that the foreign ‘student’ surge and ‘temporary’ foreign worker bacchanal lead to wage suppression and job displacement for Canadian workers, for 2025’s numbers to continue to blow through any semblance of well-meaning, sustainable targets, is as “bonkers” as it is seditious towards any citizen with an investment in Canada’s future.

The grift, the very lie, that “shortages” drive corporate Canada’s need for a basement-apartment economy has been disproved time and time again.

"All we hear about are labour shortages, [but] we have to begin to recognize that this really is a self-serving narrative mostly coming from corporate Canada," said Mikal Skuterud, labour economics professor at the University of Waterloo.

Given an inch during Covid and taking a mile (by no coincidence at this point), the disloyal and dishonest businesses and fake schools among us aren’t kicking their newfound habit willingly. Mark Carney has promised a vague return to “sustainable levels” of immigration, but sustainable according to whom? The Brookfield-linked companies building more forever rental projects? The BlackRock and Century Initiative spiritual Bond villains who bend his ear? The Liberal and Liberal-lite politicians who have benefited from greased palms and destroyed towns?

All Canadians, but particularly Canadian under-45s, find themselves in a perilous little window here. After a back-breaking four weeks of real work in 2025, the House of Commons fucks off again as of June 20th — until September 15th. In that time, maybe one greenlit energy project, and, maybe, the commissioning of a stall-ball study on removing interprovincial barriers to trade can be expected from a group that started on imagined, rhetorical war-footing, and now appears to be settling into a kind of, “Hey, let’s be less bad; but we don’t have to be good, either.”

Getting more so out of the way on energy, energy independence, and choosing to keep the country together from west to east is indeed of the utmost importance. Cutting down needlessly punitive barriers — all for it. Precisely none of it matters if the same ‘Buy Canadian’ crowd doesn’t ‘HIRE Canadian.’ None of it matters if plans remain to replace the Canadian middle and underclass with an under-underclass of anything but temporary caste members. None of it matters if the centre cannot hold, if the public infrastructure can’t keep up, if the offers from other countries become merely adequate enough to entice kids who once grew up playing road hockey on safe streets, and now dodge blacked out Challengers with crossed swords dangling from the dash.

The country where sweet little old ladies need to take out newspaper ads in the hopes of finding a family doctor just welcomed another 817k in four months — on top of its already-missing million-plus, and with millions known to be in need of a one-way ticket home. You’ll forgive some of us for not dollar-store David Frum-ing it over orange man bad.

And in a country where foreign sex offenders are now free to roam, where the military-aged ByWard Market crowd follow you into your building and threaten you at your door, where new arrivals photograph your kids playing at the park and go in for a tickle-fight, fentanyl dealers receive same-day parole, and where your new neighbours may park seven to a lawn and driveway, cheap out on the rent, and fly flags of foreign conflict that shouldn’t be our damned problem to begin with — you’ll forgive some of us for not spending our days opining on military build-up and expanding our exports to Asia.

If the Liberals are indeed serious about making Canada a little bit less bad for the millions dramatically bamboozled by the last decade, these next three weeks are the “put up, or shut up” period of a lifetime.

A generation of Canadian workers will be watching and listening closely. We won’t be giving up, but expectations couldn’t be lower.

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

Alexander Brown is a writer and non-profit director. Of late, his work has appeared in the Toronto Sun, The Hub, and the Western Standard.