Sure, it comes with some demographic challenges. With increased demand, the cost of housing in Canada’s major cities is under extreme stress. But that is something that smart government immigration policy can plan for.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on March 27, 2023.

OTTAWA—One million new Canadians is something to celebrate.

Statistics Canada’s announcement last week that the country’s population will shortly reach 40 million was something of a shocker.

I remember when we were only 15 million strong.

But what is so fantastic about this population jump is that the majority of Canadians are happy about it.

In most nation-wide surveys, by and large, Canadians believe the country’s immigration has led to economic prosperity.

Sure, it comes with some demographic challenges. With increased demand, the cost of housing in Canada’s major cities is under extreme stress.

But that is something that smart government immigration policy can plan for.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced last week that his department would be making some changes to the immigration policy. They include targeting specific subsets of workers for the immigration fast track, and incentivizing the immigration point system for people who are willing to move to underpopulated areas of the country.

Both moves make sense. We need skilled workers to cover off the job gap in certain sectors, and if they can come from abroad, the holes will be filled more quickly than waiting for apprenticeship and college graduates.

That doesn’t minimize the need for the government to aggressively promote apprenticeship and interprovincial migration of skilled labour. But it can supplement the shortages on a short-term basis.

As for the changes to where new immigrants live, that will be met with approval by big-city and small-town politicians.

Big-city mayors know that increasing populations put additional pressures on high-ticket items like local transit and infrastructure.

Municipalities are also grappling with the challenge that most downtown locations are becoming too expensive for the locals, pressuring developers into messy evictions and legal disputes with long-term tenants.

By moving immigrants into smaller communities, the changes plug the workforce gap that those communities are facing and simultaneously encourage local economic growth with the arrival of new families who need to purchase housing, appliances, furniture, and other big-ticket items.

With the exception of the People’s Party of Canada, most federal political parties seem to approve of the direction the government is taking in announcing an increase in the number of annual immigrants welcomed into the country.

Parties usually follow the wishes of the population. In most regions, the population is favourable to the hike in numbers.

However, Quebec is always tricky as the voters there do not want to see the French language undermined by immigrants who have a tendency to prefer raising their children in English.

Quebec has not exactly rolled out the red carpet to newcomers, with rules that prohibit religious headgear in public service positions, including teaching.

It is probably the only province where the majority of citizens would likely oppose a plan for mass migration.

As for the rest of the country, most provincial governments have experienced a direct economic boom related to immigration.

If the current population growth rate continues, the country will end up with almost 50 per cent immigrants within the next quarter century.

At the moment, immigrants comprise one-fifth of the country’s population.

But you only have to visit cities like Toronto and Vancouver to see the impact of migration on the new face of Canada.

And thus far, communities seem to be adapting and thriving.

Of course, there are problems. Triads and some gang elements well-established in their home countries have taken root in Canada.

But most studies show that Canadian-born residents are far more likely to commit crime than those who have come from other countries.

That doesn’t stop PPC Leader Maxime Bernier from railing against all forms of immigration.

But the Conservatives are playing it a lot smarter. For those who oppose immigration, they have been very active in demanding that the government close off leaky borders. In that respect, they are able to satisfy those who oppose immigration while at the same time wooing the communities who very much depend on family reunification and the chance to move to Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to tackle that issue when the American president put migration front and centre on the bilateral agenda.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Ottawa has partly focused on amending the safe country agreement so that land borders cannot be used by those who want to transit illegally from the United States to Canada.

With a better safe country agreement, the boom is welcome.

It makes the country stronger.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

Time to move on from COVID.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on January 24, 2022.

The return of Parliament should provide a much-anticipated channel-changer from the constant barrage of COVID news that still saturates the airwaves.

Most people I know have simply tuned out to the daily update of hospitalization and infection information from every part of the country.

They are also taking the medical advice with a grain of salt. Travel advisories emanating from Ottawa are being discounted even by federal government service providers. Last year, the majority of snowbirds heeded the government’s advice to stay home and refrained from travelling because of the danger of contracting COVID.

This year, those same people have decided to ignore the repeated warnings and are heading to warmer climes to avoid the bitterly cold Canadian winters.

Even the federal government pensioners’ payment website has a general proviso that the travel prohibitions emanating from Ottawa have no affect on their insurance policies or plans.

Likewise, the travel industry is starting to fight back publicly.

Last week, the major airlines and Canada’s largest airport joined to urge the government to end the redundant random PCR testing that faces some travellers upon their return to Canada. They pointed out that the infection rate on planes hovers around two per cent and every single passenger has already undergone a PCR test to get on a plane so it makes no sense to undergo a second test on landing when tests are so scarce and the local infection rate stands at 20 per cent.

Infected residents cannot access tests because of a shortage while travellers are double-tested in an effort to discourage their movement.

The opening of the House of Commons will focus public attention on issues other than the pandemic, with inflation rearing its ugly head just in time for the return.

Statistics Canada inflation numbers published last week painted a grim picture with calculations showing the highest levels of inflation in three decades.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole immediately tweeted out the negative results, claiming the Liberals are showing zero leadership on tackling the cost-of-living crisis.

O’Toole did not provide any specific suggestions himself, nor did he walk back his finance critic’s claim three days earlier that the cost-of-living figures were “vastly underestimated” in the methodology applied by Statistics Canada to the role played by inflation in the Consumer Price Index data.

Poilievre is great on grabbing the headlines, but the claim that Statistics Canada is cooking the books does not resonate well when his leader is about to launch a national campaign based on the very numbers the critic is questioning.

The chance for the Conservatives to make their mark on the inflation issue should not be muddied because their critic questions the veracity of Statistics Canada.

That kind of dog-whistle politics may serve Tories well in their fundraising endeavours, but it does little to prove to Canadians that they are really ready to govern the country.

To be that government-in-waiting they need to consider the big picture. Just like inflation could be a looming issue in this parliament, the Tories will want to make an example out of cultural policy when the government reintroduces legislation to amend the Broadcasting Act.

But by taking a hard line against new rules that put streaming services like Netflix on a more level playing field with traditional broadcasters, the Conservatives risk being viewed as a marginalized fringe party.

The Liberal legislation that passed a previous House of Commons vote was supported by the New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois so the Tories’ support is not required for passage.

The new minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, has also been in the portfolio before and has the kind of political savvy that will make him a real champion for the legislation.

He will not get sucked down the rabbit hole of responding to social media influencers who think their blogs are the equivalent of major streaming services.

If the Tories have any hope of forming the government, they have to be able to broaden their reach in Quebec. And by fighting against C-10, they simply manage to reinforce their image as a right-wing, anti-culture party that really does not care about Canadian content, on traditional media or via the internet.

They have a small rump of ten members of parliament in Quebec. Perhaps those members will be able to convince their colleagues that a more moderated approach to broadcasting amendments will serve their long-term political agenda.

The return of the House will be a welcome channel changer. Time to move on from COVID.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

Public-sector employers are under more pressure from voters to even the odds for women and minorities; not so for the private sector. Their veil of secrecy needs to be lifted.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on March 1, 2021.

Kudos to The Globe and Mail for digging into the darker side of Bay Street’s dirty little secrets.

In a series on workforce gender bias last week, The Globe published confidential information on the remuneration of partners in one of Canada’s largest business law firms. At Cassels, Brock & Blackwell LLP, female equity partners earn almost 25 per cent less than their male counterparts.

Women are fewer in number, and women of colour are literally at the bottom of the pay grid.

That should not be surprising to anyone who looks at the corporate makeup of Bay Street.

What is surprising is how hard it is to identify discrimination because all law firms keep their business very private.

Inequality was even more glaring when it came to bonuses. According to an internal email leaked to The Globe, “over 80 per cent of men got a bonus, only 44 per cent of women did. Men took home 69 per cent of the total bonus pool given out to years one through seven.”

Despite the Globe’s efforts to dig deeper into the money trail at several other law firms, none was transparent with their partner payouts or employee numbers on gender imbalance, even after a two-year Globe investigation.

This journalistic investigation paralleled an internal review by the Canadian Bar Association prompted by a request from the Women Lawyers Forum, a branch of the association. The forum began by asking multiple law firms to reveal the details on partner compensation to verify or disprove the gender gap many women lawyers anecdotally identified.

According to The Globe “the majority of the firms were unwilling to release compensation amounts—even expressed as a percentage of total partner income. The final report was published last October with no information on the gender wage gap. The WLF could gather only some data on partner representation—the firms that participated had an average of 49 partners, 30 per cent of whom were women—and some insights into how firms determine compensation. Just 27 (unnamed) law firms out of 65 responded to the survey.”

The fact that more than half of the law firms refused to even respond to a survey from one of the branches of the Canadian Bar Association speaks volumes about the depth of the problem.

Sadly, one could move to most other Bay Street areas of business to find the same lack of commitment to gender equity or transparency. Only 24 (or about 3.5 per cent) of TSX-listed Canadian companies had a woman CEO as of July 2019. Women represented an average of 17.9 per cent of executive officers in S&P/TSX Composite Index companies as of December 2019.

According to the first ever Statistics Canada report on corporate boards and the gender gap, published in 2019, only 19.4 per cent of corporate board members in Canada are women.

The Globe series, by Robyn Doolittle and Chen Wang, took a deep dive into Canada’s gender inequality. Their first review involved the public sector, in a series published last month. In that review, the pair undertook an unprecedented analysis of public sector salary records, involving 90,000 employees across the federal, provincial, municipal ranks, and including Crown corporations, university and even liquor store remuneration practices.

The pair reported that “women aren’t only underrepresented at the apex of the public sector ladder, but on the many rungs below, as supervisers, managers, senior managers, directors, executive directors and vice-presidents, as well as deans and professors. In most cases, men made more than their female counterparts with the same title. Sometimes the difference was small—one or two per cent—but the gap steadily widened on the way to the top. (At publicly owned corporations, for example, women on executive teams made an average of nine per cent less than the male executives.)”

While still not equal, that appears to compare favourably with the mostly secret salaries of partners and juniors in the legal profession.

When it comes to the public sector, transparency has been the law of the land for decades. In Ontario, the so-called “sunshine list” has mandated the release of all public-sector salaries exceeding $100,000.

With transparency comes accountability. When executive salaries are released annually, it is easy to identify gender and diversity gaps in hiring and promotion.

Public-sector employers are under more pressure from voters to even the odds for women and minorities; not so for the private sector. Their veil of secrecy needs to be lifted.

It is time for a private-sector sunshine law.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.