Math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine, who hail from either outer space or Saguenay, Quebec, won the Polaris Prize for both album and song of the year at Massey Hall this week.
Last week, Statistics Canada revealed the country’s population had actually grown by roughly 190,000 people between July 2025 and July 2026, not shrunk by a quarter-million as the agency’s own earlier estimate had it. The revision was a data-quality story — StatCan had been undercounting non-permanent residents who renewed rather than left — but that didn’t stop the usual suspects from using it to grind their usual axes.
The restrictionist camp gloated that per-capita GDP growth, once you back out the correction, looks weaker than Ottawa claimed, and that non-permanent residents are still running above the government’s 5 per cent target. The maximalist camp — including the Globe’s Doug Saunders, who has argued for fifteen years that Canada is chronically underpopulated — used the same numbers to say Ottawa has throttled growth too hard and is strangling the economy it claims to be trying to build.
What unites both camps is the assumption that doing immigration policy is about counting heads, then arguing over whether it’s too many or too few. That focus on raw numbers is actually a symptom of the real failure, which is the ongoing incoherence of Canada’s approach. Under Justin Trudeau, immigration became the instrument for a half-dozen unrelated agendas — a soft type of foreign aid, a revenue model for underfunded universities, a release valve for employers unwilling to raise wages, a way of virtue-signalling next to America. Once immigration is doing five jobs, arguing about the top-line number is the only real debate left, because nobody can agree on which job it’s supposed to be doing.
It is worth remembering, then, why Canada built a points system for ranking immigration applicants in the first place. It was meant to strip out the racial and national-origin preferences of the pre-1967 system, limit political meddling, and select for general human capital, on the theory that educated, adaptable people are more likely to thrive in, and contribute to, their new country.
That’s the theory. In practice, the Comprehensive Ranking System — built to rank candidates by age, language, education, and occupation, and let the top scorers in — is doing a shrinking fraction of the actual work. Economic-class admissions run at 58 to 60 per cent of total admissions, but Express Entry, the only part of the system that actually ranks candidates against each other on human capital, accounts for barely half of that — roughly 29 per cent of all admissions, per IRCC’s own most recent reporting. Within the one stream explicitly meant to select for economic potential, the CRS is doing the ranking for scarcely half the candidates.
The biggest of the other routes is the Provincial Nominee Program, which now admits more people than Express Entry (120,000 planned spaces against 117,500 for 2025 and 2026) on criteria that vary by province and is nothing resembling a national, transparent ranking. Most PNP nominees do arrive with an actual job offer, which is arguably a sharper signal than an abstract score with no employer attached. But that’s an argument for redesigning the CRS around demonstrated demand, not for ignoring the fact that that the largest stream of “economic” immigration barely touches the national points system.
Then there’s the carve-out inside the CRS itself. Express Entry’s category-based draws invite candidates who meet specific criteria ahead of the general pool, and the largest such category by far is French-language proficiency. Canada issued 48,000 invitations under this category in 2025, more than every occupation-based category combined. These candidates had an average CRS score of 449, against general-pool cutoffs that ran as high as 546. IRCC’s target for French-speaking admissions outside Quebec is 9 per cent this year, rising to a committed 12 per cent by 2029, and Express Entry is, in the government’s own words, “the primary lever” for hitting it.
None of this is new or illegitimate on its own terms. Supporting minority official-language communities has been a formal objective of Canadian immigration law since 2001, alongside the objective of maximizing economic benefit. The problem is that one ranking system is serving two statutory objectives that don’t trade off nicely, and as the linguistic target has climbed, it has done so inside the very mechanism meant to measure economic potential, without anyone in Ottawa having to explain how much of the latter they’re trading away.
If this is a selection problem, Tobi Lütke’s Build Canada memo from last year argues Canada also has a retention problem. As he notes, the ten-year citizenship rate has fallen from roughly 75 per cent in 2001 to 45.7 per cent today, and close to one in five immigrants leave within twenty years of arriving. His fix, which proposes tying permanent residency and citizenship to demonstrated post-arrival contribution, not a one-time credential check, doesn’t ask whether we are letting the right people through the door. Rather, he asks whether Canada tracks what they do once they’re through it.
So here’s the uncomfortable symmetry. The maximalists have to accept that “more immigrants” isn’t the win condition they think it is if nobody’s tracking human capital. The restrictionists have to accept that a lower annual target changes nothing if the selection criteria still can’t tell a household with one earner from one with two, or a high-potential migrant from a low one. But the worst is that while everyone keeps arguing over the top-line number, the federal government itself has never been held publicly accountable for introducing so many contrary and contradictory objectives into a system that is no longer operating as designed.
The Break-Even Immigrant
On a related issue to the above, a chart has been making the rounds this month that is worth taking note of. A Stanford working paper by Usama Polani, written up by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch, asks a simple question, if loaded, question: for a couple arriving in a country at age 30, where on the national pay distribution does the primary earner need to sit before the household, over a 60-year lifetime, pays more into the state than it draws out?
The answer varies significantly by country, and a lot depends on how a state’s tax and benefit rules interact with the shape of its own income distribution. Burn-Murdoch’s headline finding is that the UK needs its main earner at the 55th percentile of national pay before the household becomes a net fiscal contributor. By contrast, in France the break-even is the 45th percentile, and in Germany, only the 28th. The reason is that Britain taxes low earners lightly and hands out a flat state pension regardless of how much anyone paid in, while Germany taxes low earners hard and pays pensions that track lifetime earnings closely. State generosity that isn’t tied to individual contributions is what pushes the number up.
Nobody had run Canada’s numbers, so we built a version of the model in Claude using the same method, the same assumptions (a couple with two kids, second earner at two-thirds the primary earner’s pay, 1.8 per cent real wage growth, 3 per cent discounting over a 60-year horizon), applied to Canada’s actual income tax, CPP, EI, OAS, GIS, the Canada Child Benefit, and public healthcare costs.
The result is that to break even, Canada needs a meaningfully higher-earning main applicant than either the U.S. or the UK. Depending on the province, the break-even point lands somewhere between the mid-60s and mid-70s percentile, against roughly the 52nd percentile for the US and the 55th for the UK.
The reason for this is that Canada layers a flat, non-contributory pension — Old Age Security, topped up by the income-tested Guaranteed Income Supplement — on top of an already-proportional CPP, so low- and middle-income retirees draw meaningfully more than their CPP contributions alone would justify. Add a healthcare system that costs the public purse about a third more per capita than Britain’s NHS, and a Canada Child Benefit considerably richer than the UK’s Child Benefit, and you need to get considerably higher up the ladder before the books balance. (For what it is worth, the main reason the U.S. break-even percentile is so low is largely due to the absence of a comprehensive publicly funded health care system in that country).
Another interesting tidbit: When you break out the Canadian numbers by province, you get a pretty counterintuitive result. Quebec, of all places, needs the lowest-earning main applicant of the three provinces we modelled — roughly the 66th percentile, against Ontario’s 73rd and Alberta’s 74th. This is the France-versus-Britain logic playing out within our federal system: Quebec taxes labour harder at every rung, with a QPP rate nearly half a point above that of the CPP, and has provincial tax brackets that bite earlier and climb higher, so it simply collects more from a given earner before that they cross into net-contributor territory.
The policy implications of all this are left as an exercise for the reader.
This week in building Canada
Sep 28 On this day in 1972, Paul Henderson (above) scored the winning goal in the Summit Series against the USSR, at the time the most-watched event in Canadian broadcasting history.
Sep 29 Alouette 1 launches, making Canada the third country in space (after the USSR and the US), on this day 1962.
Sep 30 Great Canadian Oil Sands (the predecessor to Suncor) opens its Fort McMurray plant in 1867. It was the first commercial oil sands operation in the world and, at the time, the largest single private investment in Canadian history.
Oct 1 Happy birthday to Great Canadian Builder Jim Pattison! The billionaire business magnate, investor, and head of the Jim Pattison Group, based in Vancouver, British Columbia was born in 1928.
Oct 2 The Nova Scotia House of Assembly met for the first time on October 2, 1758, marking it as the first elected legislative assembly in what is now Canada.
Alberta vs the rats
Some Albertans delight in referring to their compatriots from outside the province as “Ratlanders.” It isn’t (necessarily) as derogatory as you might think — it speaks not to their view of the moral standing of outsiders, but to their pride in Alberta’s status as one of the very few rat-free places on Earth. And it isn’t by accident.
Alberta has spent 75 years perfecting the art of not having rats, and it takes the job very seriously. The saga began in 1950, when Norway rats turned up near the Saskatchewan border and provincial officials, alarmed by the threat of plague as well as what an army of rats could do to crops and livestock, declared war. The weapon of choice was geography: with mountains to the west, boreal forest to the north, and Montana’s empty plains to the south, the only door rats could use was the 600-kilometre stretch of eastern border with Saskatchewan. So Alberta built a wall out of inspectors, poison, and paperwork, patrolling a 29-kilometre-wide “Rat Control Zone” along the border.
Seventy tons of arsenic and thousands of inspected barns later, it worked. Alberta remains the largest rat-free jurisdiction on Earth, which is why on Friday, when a dead rat was found near Bowden, Alberta, the province responded the way it always does to an unauthorized rodent on its soil: by calling in the rat patrol.
News and Noted
If there is one thing Canadians and Americans can agree on these days, it is that Donald Trump is in the wrong on the trade war. At least, that’s according to a new poll from Politico.
NASA and SpaceX have announced that they are targeting October 1 as the earliest launch date for the Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station. One of the four crew members is Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency, who will be on the ISS for six months.
Élections Québec is telling polling staff to only speak French with voters unless they have a right to English education or are Indigenous. And fresh off a snap election call, B.C.’s leaderless Conservatives have jumped out to an 8-point lead in the poll.
The Globe has a good profile of Sabian, the New Brunswick company that makes some of the best cymbals in the world. And alien math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine has won the Polaris Prize.
Kraft has launched a KD-flavoured soft drink in Canada.
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Interesting article, "The Break Even Immigrant". Can you do an assessment of whether the findings (i.e., that Canadian immigrants need to earn more to "pay for themselves" than in the UK, US, et al.) is specific to immigrants, or a much broader result of Canada providing richer benefits to all seniors and retirees? I would suggest that how seniors benefit from Canada's tax/welfare system much more than younger generations is an even bigger policy challenge than immigration benefits alone.
It's good that you're asking all the right questions on what an immigration system is supposed to be for and what the overall objectives should be. There's another one that no one wants to talk about - the need for immigration to prevent our population from a precipitous decline in future years due to our lower-than-replacement level birth rate. I live in Quebec, and the discussion on immigration is, well, surreal. The entire debate focuses on two things: overall numbers, and whether or not immigrants speak French when they arrive. No one talks about Quebec's coming demographic apocalypse, and what level of immigration the province needs just to keep the population even. Also, Immigration is a handy policy tool that politicians can wield with greater effect than, say, reducing grocery prices or the price of gasoline at the pump, where they are pretty impotent. It's a sad testimony on where our politics is.