Canada Day Message

One hundred and fifty seven. That is the amount of years that have now elapsed since the British North America Act created the Dominion of Canada out of what is now Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Of course, this country would grow dramatically in the coming decades to its current size. We now are a nation spanning the width of an entire continent, with names and places known around the world.

All this said, Canada's 157th birthday comes at a time of national unease. A housing crisis allowed to spiral for decades has convinced many young Canadians that we will never own a home; not here anyway. A modest haul at the grocery store will set you back well over a hundred dollars nowadays also. Anyone who’s spent enough time actually walking the streets of downtown Toronto has probably seen a tent city, a litany of businesses that went under, or an overdose case or two. We live in a time where the national feeling is poor, fearful, or outright despondent. The sovereignty debate in Quebec, my home province, once largely settled, has crept back into the public discourse with a very real possibility of a successful referendum by 2030.

Our young people look south to the American dream when we had a dream of our own not that long ago. I myself have wondered for the first time in my life what visa categories I may or may not qualify for. There’s family members that can help me get settled, and I can’t help but wonder what opportunities I would have had if only I were American that my cousins who grew up there and are about my age did have. 

That said, I don’t want to give up on the possibility of a Canadian dream. I don’t want to give up on the country of my birth. But an article like this needs to be written, not as an act of abjuration towards one’s nation, but as an act of patriotism. Young Canadians are moving abroad by the thousands, and that implies a nation in need of profound changes. Our leaders need to feel the pressure and understand the sense of urgency. We risk the loss of everything that’s been built over the last hundred and fifty seven years. We cannot allow this country to no longer be the beacon to which people flee in search of a better life. My parents came to this country because it was something special and rare in the world, and we must do the needful to preserve this. 

So where do we start? How about with the basics? Common sense supply and demand economics dictates that the more something is available, the cheaper it is. So if we want to make young people believe they can be homeowners again, time to start building. No need for a new catalog even. Whip out the one from the post-war years. Those houses were easy to build and of good quality. Can we get to three million new ones by 2031? Maybe not, but if we’re intentional about it, we can make a good run at that goal. This means concerted efforts by all levels of government to remove bureaucratic hurdles and alleviate tax burdens on builders so we can get the units built. Everyone acknowledges we’re in a housing crisis so we need to treat it like an emergency until we’ve ramped out housing starts enough to keep up with the population growth. If we have the right housing supply, maybe young Canadians, Torontonians in particular, can feel like there’s a forever home waiting for them here after all. 

There is also the matter of our over-bloated and highly inefficient bureaucracy. I read somewhere recently that the average response time from the Canada Revenue Agency to an email from a taxpayer is something like fifty seven days. Given my own experience with the CRA back when I was trying to proactively pay off my remaining student loan balance and got hit with some interest charges thanks to their slow action, I can’t say I’m surprised. This same level of inefficiency has become endemic across other federal agencies on which Canadians depend. We need a much leaner, much more efficient bureaucratic machine and if that means there need to be significant personnel changes, then so be it. The civil service is not meant to be a cushy job in which you earn a six-figure salary with little productivity to show for it. Taking a role in the civil service should be for people who are serious about ensuring Canadians get dependable services as needed in a timely manner. 

Moreover, there needs to be far greater oversight in how federal contracts are handed out, to whom, and why. We cannot have sketchy companies sucking $60M off the public teat for no value rendered to build an application that should have cost just a tad bit more than my annual salary which is barely livable. And how is it that companies that hold significant business dealings with Canada's adversaries like China can even be in the running for lucrative federal contracts? We need a procurement ministry that is serious about guarding against the rampant conflicts of interest that keep emerging at parliamentary committees and the inevitable taxpayer money leakage that results every time. The last remark I want to make on this front is that it is incredibly frustrating to constantly see senior civil servants give evasive non-answers or simply not know something that they absolutely should when in front of a parliamentary committee. This behavior is expected of government ministers that we can vote out eventually, but we have no such recourse with these unelected bureaucrats. If they do not know, they must make it their business to find out. Otherwise, they should do the decent thing and quit. 

I want to also dedicate some words to Canada’s standing in the world. Over the last decade, I’ve seen Canada go from one of the most respected nations in the world, to something of a cautionary tale for how a first world country can go bad. Our leaders are not respected. Our allies view us as unserious and I fear that this is not unjustified. For instance, we continue to lack a clear ETA for when we will finally pull our weight and meet our 2% defense spending target as is our obligation within the NATO alliance. The next government, regardless of partisan affiliation, must ensure that we meet that target, no excuses. Smaller countries within NATO with their economic challenges are doing so. The issue is the current government does not make national defense a priority, not that we cannot organize a budget such that we fulfill our end of the bargain towards our NATO allies. 

We also need to be better in supporting democratic allies under duress. We talk a good game on Ukraine, but our material support is relatively paltry, because we also fail to adequately fund our own national defense. On Israel’s war against the terror group Hamas, the current foreign ministry is even more pathetic. It makes no pretense to even support our democratic ally under attack. Instead, this government chooses to bow to antisemetic mobs that think protesting in residential neighborhoods is kosher because its residents are Jews. It blindly parrots mis-information from the most compromised UN agencies who are more interested in whitewashing their own failings than the welfare of Gazans whose foodstuffs are being stolen by Hamas goons. But at least this government acknowledges that Israel exists. Taiwan, a country subjected to daily harassment by China that is an almost comical imitation of an abusive spouse looking to force you back into a relationship, doesn’t even get that courtesy, even though we depend on them for high-end semiconductors. Our foreign ministry has no principles or coherent policies. It sends sailors to dance the conga with enforcers from Cuba’s murderous dictatorship, where people prefer risking death at sea to living there. However, when Israel wages a defensive war against the terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, that incurs that wrath of the minister. The next government will need to have a more coherent and more principled foreign policy.

The last major point I want to touch upon is the matter of immigration. Yes, Canada was built through immigration in many ways. Yes, immigration is good for Canada provided the right absorption plans and screening measures are in place. But when immigration is uncontrolled, without having considered our absorption capabilities and without considering social cohesion, you get our current mess. We’ve spent years trying to absorb far more people than we are able to. Now we have sky high rents, house prices, tent cities, and a reduced standard of living. It’s not fair to anyone involved. It’s not fair to us natural born and raised Canadians and it’s most certainly unfair to the people who came here with a much more hopeful idea of what their new lives in Canada would look like. It is a betrayal to those who trusted our immigration system to help them build a new life in this country. And what do you think will be the impression that high value foreign talent will have of this country after years of this? Do you think that these people will want to bring their abilities to Canada when it’s clear we don’t have our house in order? 

Canada is supposed to be a country where people of diverse backgrounds can build new lives and whose children can feel fully a part of this nation. There’s supposed to be this concept of the Canadian dream. But when people are coming to this country and struggling to make ends meet, it is hard to see that dream becoming reality. When people like myself who are born in this country don’t see something as simple as home ownership as viable, how do you think a new immigrant struggling to find his footing feels? Also, what do you think is the impression new immigrants get of this country when they see that there are people who didn’t embrace the concept of Canada as a nation of many nations all living cohesively and chose instead to import old conflicts and hatreds? Why are we seeing mobs rioting over conflicts half a world away? If people come into this country and import with them racism, antisemitism etc., they should be turned back at the door. There are thousands of people we reject every year that would be far greater assets to this country, even with less impressive educational or employment credentials. I would rather the less skilled person become my new neighbor than someone who refuses to adapt to Canada or wishes to import hatred from the old country. 

Canada can and has been diverse and successful and I firmly believe that anybody of any background can become fully part of this country if they so desire. But they have to desire it. Diversity is just a descriptor. It’s not a trump card. We can be a nation of nations and succeed. We have been that already. But again, the people we bring into this country have to be people who buy into that idea, people who embody the values and ideas on which this country was built. We need people who work hard, who see people from all backgrounds and religious affiliations as their equals, who will raise children who want to represent Canada, who feel pride in Canada.

As Canada turns 157, we have ourselves a nation at a turning point. The Canada of the 21st century will be defined in the next few years. If we continue down the road we’re on, we will lose much of what our parents and grandparents worked so hard to build. That’s why this article has this urgent, even dark tone. But the good news is that it does not need to be this way. We can change the road we’re on and turn Canada into one of the great good news stories of the 21st century. And there’s no need to embrace any of these utopian ideologies like communism or fascism. Neither of these work and would only lead to disaster. What we need is the return of pragmatic, common sense leadership like what we enjoyed for long spells during the 20th century, regardless of which party was in power. We need to treat emergencies like the housing crisis as exactly that, we need to restore credibility with our allies, and we need to ensure that we once again get good, sane governance. More than anything, let’s not give up on our country just yet. Let’s continue to believe in the promise of Canada, now more than ever before.