Transcript: Tony Keller

An interview with the author and Globe and Mail columnist

Canada’s immigration system was once the envy of the world. For decades, the country enjoyed a bipartisan pro-immigration consensus. But during the Trudeau years, that consensus fell apart. My guest on the program this week delivered the 2025 McGill Max Bell Lectures on this topic. His new book explores where we went wrong.

Tony Keller is a columnist at The Globe and Mail. He is the author of Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong. It’s been shortlisted for the Donner Prize, which will be awarded tonight in Toronto.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: It’s nice to have you back on the show. Your recent book Borderline Chaos, about the collapse of the Canadian immigration consensus, originated as the 2025 McGill Max Bell Lectures, and the book has been shortlisted for the Donner Prize, which will be announced May 14. Congratulations.

TK: Thank you very much. I’m extremely fortunate and extremely excited about that.

TH: It’s exciting. You were last on the show in January of 2024. We were just starting to talk about the immigration crisis in the media at that time. In your Globe and Mail columns, you were working to outline what you’ve described as a decade-long experiment with this particular type of mass immigration. I want to start our conversation today by going back to 2016, to a consultation that the once-immigration minister John McCallum had that you referenced. A group of economists warned the government about the approach it was considering taking with immigration. At that exact moment, as you point out, the U.S. was in the thick of an anti-immigration backlash. Its foreign-born population was 14 percent. At the same time in Canada, we had 22 percent foreign-born and we enjoyed what you have called “a boring all-party consensus.” This pro-immigration consensus extended across parties and remarkably across age groups as well, including senior citizens. Give us the broad strokes of what the Canadian immigration system has been like since its liberalization in the 1960s — and what this group of economists were arguing against back in 2016.

TK: Canada’s immigration history is similar to that in the United States, but it’s got some really important differences. And those important differences, I think, are the reason why Canada had this boring pro-immigration consensus while the United States had this building anti-immigration movement — and at the same time a progressive movement that was going completely in the other direction. So, really deep polarization left-right in the U.S.

Canada, up to the early 1960s, had an immigration system that was extremely pro-immigration. We wanted a lot of people to come to Canada, but we were very restrictive about who we would allow to come. And our restrictions were based on race, essentially. Canada wanted, above all, British people and Americans. We’d also take other Europeans, and we really, really didn’t want anybody from the rest of the world. We actually made it pretty much impossible for Black people, Asians, et cetera, to come to Canada.

In the early ‘60s, we say, “Hang on a second, we can’t run an immigration system like this anymore. We’re going to have a racially neutral immigration system. We’re going to move to an open, racially neutral immigration system, but we are going to have to have some restrictions. We want immigration, but we want limits on how many people come and we’re going to start to build a system that focuses on admitting people with education and skills.” That system gets doubled down and doubled down and doubled down through the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and into the early 2000s. In Canada, it was known as the points system. It’s still known as the points system. You get points for having higher education, for having skills, for being younger but not too young, for having certain work experience, et cetera. It was really focused on what economists call human capital.

We also let in refugees. We also had family reunification, meaning people who are in Canada are able to sponsor close relatives. But the bulk of the system was actually economic immigrants. That’s very different than much of the rest of the world, including the United States. In the U.S., the immigration system is heavily focused on family reunification and a big chunk of it is illegal or irregular immigration, whatever term you want to use. Whereas in Canada, that has traditionally been pretty much not at all part of the system.

So, that continues on all the way until the early 2010s, the mid-2010s. We’re actually getting better and better at it. Then the Trudeau government comes in and they start to change a lot of things about the immigration system. Slowly and very hard to see at first, and then quite rapidly and quite substantially later on.

TH: These economists were warning about things like depression of the low-skill wage. They were warning about all kinds of things that we have now seen come to pass. The inflection point for our immigration policy is 2020. You talk about the government hearing from a range of stakeholders: the provinces, big business lobbyists who were claiming a labour shortage, the higher education sector, which wanted more foreign students, and progressive activists who were supporting high immigration as a moral cause. You write, “Canada’s plutocratic lions and progressive lambs had laid down in agreement” — what a line — first for higher immigration and then for something that you think approaches an open border policy. This happened between 2020 and late 2023. By 2024, 72 percent of Canadians felt immigration was too high and the government started to backtrack. Describe what happened in that period numbers-wise, and in terms of the shift.

TK: The numbers are really important. One of the things about the earlier Canadian immigration system that I talked about was this focus on skills and education. There’s also a very clear focus on controlling the border — meaning that we’re going to welcome more people than the United States, but we’re going to carefully get to decide exactly who comes. So, that’s a big part of the system.

The other thing that’s a big part of the system is very stable numbers. From the late Mulroney years all the way through to the Harper government — a period of more than 20 years — Canada’s immigration level is around 250,000 a year. It’s very stable. That’s another thing that makes it uncontroversial. It’s not a political issue. Nobody is trying to raise it too much. Nobody is trying to lower it too much. Nobody is arguing about it. Nobody is thinking about it. Pollsters don’t ask about it. When they do ask about it, people say, “Immigration is not really on my list of concerns at all. At all, at all.”

What happens under the Trudeau government is first of all, they start saying, “We want to raise immigration numbers substantially. We want to go from 250,000 to 500,000 over the space of about a decade.” So, that’s substantial. But much more substantial is Canada starts opening up all of these temporary immigration paths — the temporary foreign worker stream and the student stream. And there’s also a lot of people who start arriving as refugee claimants, which was not planned at all.

What happens is that 250,000-a-year number that’s been consistent through the ‘90s, through the early 2000s, through the early 2010s, by the time we get to just before the pandemic, that number has basically more than doubled and a large part of that is temporary streams. Then the pandemic happens and the government becomes persuaded that Canada is suffering from a labour shortage. When I say labour shortage, I don’t mean, “We’ve examined the number of plumbers in the country. You know what? We actually need to train more plumbers.” It’s a generalized labour shortage, as in, “There aren’t enough people to do work in Canada. We need a huge influx of new people or else there will be a labour shortage. There will be all these jobs that will not get done.” Interestingly, the jobs that will not get done tend to be bottom-end jobs. Businesses essentially saying there aren’t enough fast-food workers, there aren’t enough warehouse workers. There aren’t enough low-skill, low-education people doing minimum-wage jobs. And the government just buys into that.

TH: It’s a bit convenient.

TK: Yes. That quote that you read from me is exactly that. It is convenient. Because you have this strange intersect between what a lot of progressive lobbyists are saying and what the business community is saying. They are actually both saying the answer is much, much easier immigration. And the route for that to happen is not the publicly announced permanent immigration stream that the government talks about all the time. It’s these temporary immigration streams. So, we go from that 250,000 number for two decades — by 2022, it’s one million. By 2023, it’s 1.3 million. In 2024, as the government tries to pull back, it’s still 900,000. These are enormous numbers.

One of the things that I point out is that in the U.S. under the Biden administration, they had proportionally the largest immigration surge in American history. It blew up American politics. It elected Donald Trump. Canada’s numbers relative to population were three times as large.

We went from having an immigration system that was actually much more generous than the U.S. immigration system in terms of the number of people it let in, but also much more controlled, to a system where the numbers went far beyond what we’d had before. Far beyond anything ever seen in the United States. And we lost control. We didn’t have the selectivity. Previously, we had high immigration, but highly selective. We went to much higher immigration with very low selectivity. I think that is a big part of what upset Canadians, a sense of, “Hang on a second, is anybody in charge? Is anybody governing this or is this just happening to us?”

If I can just make one final point: I think one of the big differences between Canada and the United States, and Canada and most European countries, is the sense in Canada that immigration was a choice, that we wanted immigration. We were happy about immigration. We chose who our immigrants were and so it was not an imposition. I think in a lot of European countries and the United States, many voters have come to see immigration as an imposition. In Canada, you can always say, “But hang on a second, this wasn’t imposed on us. We’re essentially an island surrounded by oceans. We chose everybody who came here. This was not an imposition. This is a choice. Okay, we made our choice. We’ll try to manage it as best as possible.” And Canada tended to manage it fairly well from an economic perspective and compared to most other countries extremely well from a political perspective — in that it was not controversial, it was not a source of political conflict.

TH: Or cultural conflict, I’ll point out. We are special and unique in that. I want to just come back to what you talked about with the labour shortages. I’m not an economist, but just thinking about people that I interviewed during the pandemic … I’m thinking in particular about a grocery store worker who had been living hand to mouth. Then during the pandemic, there was a wave of support for essential workers. He also got, critically, I think it was $2 an hour extra as pandemic pay, which allowed him to save for the first time in his adult life. Isn’t it the case that if you have more jobs and less workers, shouldn’t that be a market thing? Shouldn’t wages be going up?