More than a century ago, Wilfrid Laurier envisioned a Canada bigger and more powerful than the United States. It was as bold a prediction as it was incongruent, made by Canada’s first francophone prime minister, who in his youth had called Confederation “the tomb of the French race and the ruin of Lower Canada.” But by 1904, when Laurier was in his sixties, frail from illness and with nearly a decade of experience running the country under his belt, something had changed. “Let me tell you, my fellow countrymen,” Laurier told a swooning audience during a speech at Toronto’s Massey Hall, “all the signs point this way, that the twentieth century shall be the century of Canada.”
At the time, Canada barely had 6 million citizens. Compared to its southern neighbour, with its population of 76.3 million, Canada was a rural backwater, surviving largely on resource extraction and agricultural products while lagging far behind the US in manufacturing capacity and innovation. To turn things around, Laurier adopted the language of American exceptionalism, calling on Canada to be “the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come,” and predicted its population would surge to 40 million by the mid-twentieth century.
In an effort to reach that goal, Laurier launched an ambitious immigration policy that opened up Western Canada to a new wave of settler colonization. In the first decade of the new century, 1.5 million people arrived in the country while 740,000 left, reversing a decades-long trend of migratory outflow. The vast majority were white Europeans—Laurier’s Liberal government passed racist laws barring or taxing most non-white immigrants from entering Canada. Many of the new arrivals settled in the prairie provinces on land stolen from Indigenous peoples.
As ugly as it was in practice, Laurier’s ambition was grounded in legitimate concerns over the scarce population in Canada. The country needed more people, not only to expand the workforce but to justify building the infrastructure to support a modern industrialized economy. Otherwise, Canada would be relegated to a raw materials repository, feeding a booming US manufacturing base.
Over the subsequent decades, Canada struggled to hit Laurier’s mark. By 1950, the population was inching toward the 14 million mark. In 1962, still below 20 million, the Progressive Conservatives under John Diefenbaker finally abandoned the most outwardly racist elements of immigration policy and allowed non-white immigrants. By 1968, a year after the launch of the points system for skilled immigration, scholars and business leaders began calling for a population of 100 million Canadians. This was the number most experts believed Canada needed to reach if it wanted to adopt Laurier’s vision in earnest. Seven years later, a study by the Canadian Department of Manpower, the predecessor to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, landed on the same number, concluding that Canadian industry could reach its full potential only when Canada reached the 100 million mark.
The idea continued to gain traction into the twenty-first century. In 2009, a new group of scholars, business leaders, and politicians banded together to form the Laurier Institute, initially attempting to revive Laurier’s vision of a Canadian century. In 2015, the institute was rebranded as the Century Initiative and explicitly adopted the goal of 100 million Canadians by 2100. Two years later, the Liberal government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth recommended increasing immigration to reach that milestone.
At the time, the proposal was broadly acceptable to most Canadians, even Conservatives. The economic case was compelling: given Canada’s aging population, the rising cost of health care, and plummeting fertility rates, beefing up the tax base with imported citizens was seen not only as a good idea but a desperately needed economic intervention. But the conundrum Canada faced a century earlier hadn’t gone away: How do you develop a vibrant, innovative society, and an economy not dependent on natural resources, in a country where the population is so sparse that building the accompanying infrastructure makes little economic sense?
Canada has never entirely overcome that challenge. It has developed a few localized hubs where world-leading innovation happens—the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, for example. But in many instances, talented Canadians have had no choice but to leave Canada to find the audiences and collaborators they need to fully achieve their potential.
The problem, demographers generally agree, comes down to numbers. As Doug Saunders points out in his 2019 book, Maximum Canada: Toward a Country of 100 Million, there’s a kind of gestalt at work when populations achieve a certain critical mass. Years of studies, Saunders writes, show that high-density urban centres act as “clusters of expertise” where “groups of skilled and educated people . . . work closely together, sharing knowledge, enterprise, and funding, in order to create new products, services, and scientific advances.” In Canada, that would mean 100 million Canadians clustered around existing urban centres like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, forming a few high-density “mega-regions” spread across the country, each its own engine of economic and creative activity, and each connected to the other.
Proponents say that reaching the 100 million target would give Canada the centres of gravity it needs for such clusters to form; critics say the plan is nothing more than a corporate push for more profits, backed by multinationals like McKinsey & Company and BlackRock. Leaders in Quebec also reject it, saying such a massive population expansion would wipe out Canada’s francophone culture, while environmentalists decry the devastating impacts they claim so many people would have on Canada’s ecosystems.
Saunders himself raises a few red flags. “Canada is now a more complex, multilayered, difficult, and expensive place,” he writes, comparing the Canadian economy in 2019 to the decades of growth preceding it. “If we expect another 65 million people to become successful Canadians, we need to ask whether we have the ready resources that helped the current 35 million get there.” Without careful planning, he continues, rapid population growth could backfire and turn popular opinion against immigration.
In recent years, this is in fact what has happened. Faced with massive labour shortages during the pandemic, the Liberal government, under pressure from businesses, leaned heavily on temporary worker programs, pushing temporary immigration to unsustainable levels. The results were predictable; today, nearly six in ten Canadians believe Canada is letting in too many immigrants, a seventeen-point jump since 2022 and the highest level since 1998, according to a 2024 poll from the Environics Institute for Survey Research.
With housing prices soaring and health care services struggling to meet demand, Canadians aren’t feeling as welcoming to outsiders as they once did. A January 2024 report by two National Bank economists arguing that Canada has fallen into a “population trap” has only reinforced that notion. Runaway immigration, the economists warn, is making it impossible to improve living standards, “because population is growing so fast that all available savings are needed to maintain the existing capital-labour ratio.”
Not everyone agrees. Critics of the population-trap hypothesis point out that it ignores the role governments can play in spurring investments. It’s not that Canada has let in too many immigrants, they say, it’s that successive governments have failed to invest adequately in the project of population growth. The health care crisis, for instance, may have been exacerbated by a growing population, but it has been decades in the making, driven by a lack of investment as well as a shortage of health care workers. Ironically, Canada has imported plenty of health care professionals from abroad but has made obtaining Canadian licensing so onerous and expensive that many end up taking jobs in other sectors or leaving Canada altogether.
Meanwhile, skyrocketing housing prices have less to do with immigrants, experts say, than with the financialization of the housing market in the neoliberal era. Rather than a social good, housing is now seen as an investment to promote capital accumulation. Consequently, few affordable units have been built in the past three decades, and social housing now accounts for less than 4 percent of the total housing stock in Canada.
A similar emphasis on profit over people has plagued Canada’s immigration policy. Canada has treated population growth as “a function principally—if not exclusively—of the national need for new labour,” Irvin Studin, president of the Toronto think tank Institute for 21st Century Questions, wrote in 2010. “Specifically, in this early 21st century, new labour to replenish an ageing workforce.”
Immigration so narrowly defined has produced, since even before the pandemic, an explosion of temporary labour. This surge has largely been driven by the business community’s insatiable appetite for cheap workers who, along with international students on temporary visas, have made up the vast majority of immigrants in some years for more than a decade. This reliance on temporariness may be a short-term fix for labour market gaps—and a cash cow for educational institutions—but such economic incentives are poor drivers of sustainable immigration. They do plenty to pad bottom lines but nothing to build communities.
Studin has pointed out that Canadians tend not to consider population strategically. Strategic thinking, he argues, would frame immigration in terms of Canada’s place in the world and how a larger population could help shape its destiny. Would a bulked-up Canada be as exposed to Donald Trump’s economic bullying as we are today? Would strategic planning for population growth boost investments in the infrastructure and institutions that form the sinews of thriving communities?
Last October, the federal government reduced immigration targets and made deep cuts to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and the number of visas available to international students. Canada currently has an overabundance of temporary workers and international students who are looking for ways to become permanent residents. A pause on immigration, coupled with the easing of requirements to transition from temporary status to permanent residency that allows people to join the Canadian family, would be a good thing. But the hand wringing over too much immigration is premature.
Canada’s overall immigration numbers have not been, by any measure, outrageous. Since 2000, annual population growth has, on average, stayed within the sustainable range recommended by the National Bank economists—somewhere between 300,000 to 500,000 a year. Even the massive spike in temporary workers since 2021 hasn’t pushed the overall average past that half-million ceiling.
The problem lies in Canada’s reactionary approach to population. In their obsession with fine-tuning immigration to address short-term labour market needs, successive governments have abandoned the idea of growth as a long-term strategic investment. According to some experts, striving toward 100 million by 2100 is the right thing for Canada. The exact number isn’t so important: 100 million is really just a rounded-off metaphor for what Canada could be if population is assessed strategically.
Maintaining the average yearly increases recommended by the National Bank economists would put us on the right track, but even their conservative estimates require careful planning, in collaboration with First Nations, French Canadians, and environmentalists. Counterintuitively, more Canadians could, in fact, be a boon for sustainability, providing Canada with the population density it needs to build out green infrastructure and reduce suburban sprawl. But the plan also needs bold leadership.
Canada could be Laurier’s “star” toward which people everywhere in the world turn for the promise of a better future. If we build it, those people will come.
