Juno News - August 07, 2025


The hidden cost of mass immigration

Topics
family formation
Guests
Michael Boner
Mentioned
Thomas Malthus Steve Pakin Trudeau
Majority of immigrants not making payments on gov loans Nova Scotia premier put on notice over forest ban

Episode Stats


Length

26 minutes

Words per minute

138.89

Word count

3,630

Sentence count

204

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A long time ago, Thomas Malthus warned us that the world s population would outgrow its resources. To explore what s driving this crisis, why immigration may not be the silver bullet we ve been sold, and what it would take to spark a Canadian baby boom, I m joined by Michael Boner, political consultant, historian, and author of In Defense of Civilization.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A long time ago, Thomas Malthus warned us that the world's population would outgrow its resources,
00:00:05.180 a fear that has shaped policy and sometimes in pretty terrible ways.
00:00:10.040 The problem is, he was wrong.
00:00:12.060 Instead of famine and collapse, the last century saw explosive growth in population and prosperity.
00:00:18.900 But now we face a very different problem.
00:00:21.560 Across the developed world, fertility rates have plunged well below replacement rates,
00:00:26.560 and Canada's no exception.
00:00:27.760 Our birth rates have fallen from nearly four children per woman in 1959 to just 1.26 today.
00:00:36.680 Immigration has been billed as the fix-all, but that model is starting to crack.
00:00:41.320 And we've built a welfare state that is based on the assumption of endless growth,
00:00:46.000 yet the workers needed to sustain it are vanishing.
00:00:49.340 To explore what's driving this crisis, why immigration may not be the silver bullet we've been sold,
00:00:54.840 and what it would take to spark a Canadian baby boom,
00:00:57.760 I'm joined by Michael Boner, political consultant, historian, and author of In Defense of Civilization.
00:01:04.440 He recently published an article in the C2C Journal called The Desperate Need for a Baby Bump.
00:01:09.420 So we'll dive into the numbers and lay out what the stark challenge is for Canada's future.
00:01:14.580 I'm Melanie Bennett.
00:01:15.760 This is Disrupted.
00:01:16.880 Michael, thanks for joining me.
00:01:27.560 Pleasure.
00:01:28.080 Thanks for having me.
00:01:29.700 I really enjoyed your article.
00:01:31.960 I don't think we'll have time to get to the Malthusian element of that article,
00:01:36.680 but let's start with the main premise about demographics.
00:01:41.840 We're going through a bit of a demographic cliff in Canada currently.
00:01:46.380 Certainly, your article illustrates that very clearly.
00:01:49.800 But maybe we could start off by talking about the population decline
00:01:54.000 and what this might mean for Canada in the next decade or possibly two decades.
00:02:00.040 Right.
00:02:00.640 Well, the basic idea is that fertility has been falling everywhere in the world
00:02:08.220 over the past 100, 150 years or so, and Canada is no exception.
00:02:12.640 Fertility peaked in 1959, and it's been steadily on the way down since then.
00:02:23.720 And in all industrial societies, it tends to be lower than it is in any other alternative economic arrangement.
00:02:35.740 Now, a lot of people will look at that or hear that and say, well, so what?
00:02:39.600 Well, it matters a great deal if you have created an economic system that is based on consumption,
00:02:52.000 people spending money and buying things, and secondarily, a welfare state that is predicated on taxing
00:03:01.080 a large, bulky, working, young population to pay for those at the top of the population pyramid
00:03:11.840 and those at the very bottom who don't or can't support themselves.
00:03:17.600 Now, strangely, you might say, Canada, as did many other Western countries,
00:03:24.480 we built these welfare states right as fertility peaked.
00:03:31.700 And, you know, one could look back on that and think that that was perhaps unwise.
00:03:36.680 But the assumption sort of baked into that was that the population of taxable young workers
00:03:43.400 would always be large enough to pay for this system, to pay for the welfare state.
00:03:53.100 And that's no longer a viable assumption.
00:03:58.340 Haven't we been discussing this issue since the 90s?
00:04:00.980 Because I remember discussions around the fact that there were too many older people
00:04:05.780 compared to the number of younger people.
00:04:08.300 I'm sure I heard warnings even 30, 40 years ago about this particular problem,
00:04:13.360 and yet we're still in the same position.
00:04:17.600 How would this – I mean, so what does this mean for ordinary Canadians
00:04:21.040 when we're talking about things like pensions or health care
00:04:24.880 or other kinds of public benefits that are dependent upon this tax?
00:04:30.160 I don't know if you want to call it income, but this welfare state.
00:04:33.080 Well, it has been discussed or raised – I don't know if I would even go as far as it has been discussed.
00:04:43.120 I mean, it's certainly come up.
00:04:45.140 Books have been written about it.
00:04:48.580 There have been – there's been at least one episode of the agenda,
00:04:52.820 formerly with Steve Pakin, in which this topic was discussed.
00:04:57.440 I suppose that counts as a discussion.
00:04:58.880 But it always ends the same way, historically.
00:05:01.480 It has always ended the same way.
00:05:03.760 And that's something like, well, this is an inevitable consequence of modernity.
00:05:10.060 There's nothing we can do about it.
00:05:13.160 But we'll always be able to count on immigration to fill that gap.
00:05:19.140 And throughout the 20th century, we did.
00:05:21.080 And I think that Canada managed that – not only immigration,
00:05:28.920 but also the welfare state tolerably well.
00:05:31.120 But what ended up happening also, and this is something that's worth exploring in its own right,
00:05:38.840 is that the welfare state grew.
00:05:43.500 And what was expected of government in terms of services – I mean, it's debatable whether you want to call that the welfare state or not,
00:05:50.180 but for lack of – there's no point in getting into a terminological discussion – but what was expected from the state became ever more substantial.
00:06:00.820 And this meant lots of borrowing, public debt rose, and taxes went up also, and the government became ever more generous.
00:06:12.500 So, in that respect, immigration didn't always solve the problem because the expenditures of the state outpaced revenues quite rapidly.
00:06:27.400 So, how does that affect the average person?
00:06:30.080 Well, it has meant, in the past, it has meant things like higher taxes brought on by greater public debt,
00:06:40.380 and then eventually austerity.
00:06:41.920 You know, the 90s was a huge boom in many Western countries, not really so much in Canada because we had about a decade or so of deep cuts
00:06:59.380 and efforts to rein in public spending and bring this sort of difficult fiscal situation under control.
00:07:10.400 And it may come to mean that again soon.
00:07:15.620 I'm hearing about a lot of looming cuts to the federal bureaucracy right now.
00:07:22.960 Now, the idea that we can solve this problem by bringing in more workers is going to run up against two problems.
00:07:38.380 The first problem is that immigration has become very controversial, more so than any other time I can remember in my life.
00:07:45.520 And this is a political challenge, which may take quite some time to resolve if it ever does get resolved.
00:07:55.220 The second problem, though, is that the entire world is facing this problem.
00:07:59.600 There are fewer and fewer – there are not fewer and fewer people.
00:08:03.580 You can see that the population is, you know, still rising because there are still areas in sub-Saharan Africa and a handful of other places, India still, for instance,
00:08:18.940 where birth rates are still quite high, but they're falling there too.
00:08:23.600 And they're falling in such places faster than they fell over the past century in the industrialized world.
00:08:34.120 What that tells me is that I think it's reasonable to foresee a time very soon when we just won't be able to count on an extra large surplus population of young people
00:08:45.340 ready and willing to move to places like Canada, seek their fortune, work, and be taxed.
00:08:52.340 There still will be some people, but not in the huge numbers that we have expected.
00:08:57.820 So that will feel, I think, that will feel like a sluggish, slowing economy unless we can find some way to increase our own productivity,
00:09:13.440 maybe trim down state expenditures a bit and do something to keep those in the workforce, aging workers in the workforce, you know, productive and happy for a bit longer.
00:09:29.260 So in the current state of immigration, I mean, we've had a large boom of immigrants over the past several years, more so than ever before, a large spike.
00:09:39.300 And we're talking about a different kind of immigration as well.
00:09:42.780 And so the immigrants that are coming are lower skilled, for example, in temporary foreign work apartments and things like that. 1.00
00:09:49.320 How does that change the welfare state? 0.66
00:09:52.420 Like, what is that doing to the welfare state?
00:09:53.580 What I mean by that is, do we have data, and I think you do have this sort of data in your article,
00:09:59.720 whether those immigrants are net contributors or net beneficiaries of that welfare state?
00:10:05.400 Well, when it comes to the temporary foreign worker program, they are not contributing.
00:10:13.520 And I think that there are, well, let's put it this way.
00:10:16.360 So businesses that use the temporary foreign worker program, not as a last resort, as it was intended, but as a business model,
00:10:25.320 they do that in order to keep wages low and to have, for lack of a better term,
00:10:35.320 a biddable population of workers who don't belong to unions, who don't have high expectations for, you know, living quarters and so forth.
00:10:48.880 The whole thing is horrible.
00:10:50.720 And, you know, it's very unfortunate in and of itself that this program has been allowed to run rampant for so long.
00:11:01.300 It amounts to, at any given year, millions of people who work for the minimum wage, who have no stake in our society.
00:11:18.460 And I think, as I say, this is bad in and of itself.
00:11:23.120 Now, the economic effect that it can have, it can function, it functions sort of like a sugar high.
00:11:31.280 It's like an economic sugar high, whereby there seems, it feels at first as though there's a huge increase in productivity because,
00:11:42.300 and in GDP growth, because prices are kept artificially low by lower wages.
00:11:51.620 So your Tim Hortons coffee costs less than it normally would because you don't have to pay a higher wage.
00:11:59.680 But what ends up happening is that the GDP per capita ends up going down because the population gets bigger and productivity falls.
00:12:10.820 So, you know, this is absolutely not the kind of solution that is needed to the problem that we're faced with.
00:12:23.200 We need to keep the domestic population as productive as possible to train them and to ensure that, you know, 0.94
00:12:32.880 basically the net result should be a higher per capita GDP rather than a lower one.
00:12:39.920 Yeah, so one of the things that you brought up in your article about the types of immigrants and the effect on the welfare state
00:12:47.800 was this idea of the reunification program as well, right?
00:12:50.980 So it's not just temporary for workers, for example.
00:12:52.620 It's bringing family members that might be accessing, or older family members who may not necessarily be entering the workforce,
00:12:58.600 who might be accessing health care and so on and so forth.
00:13:02.300 And so there's some dynamic there that's a little bit detached or seems a little bit detached from the economy.
00:13:08.920 But I want to take you back just a second to this idea of peak humanity where there's a much smaller pool of immigrants to pick from 0.99
00:13:18.060 to bring to Canada or possibly in the future.
00:13:21.020 But when you were talking about that, it made me wonder if the global population at some point is going to be in decline,
00:13:28.660 if all these birth rates are falling all across the world, what would that mean?
00:13:32.880 Where would we get all our skilled immigrants? 1.00
00:13:34.740 How would that prop up our economy in the future?
00:13:37.300 Is there any evidence that the government has taken this into consideration at all?
00:13:42.120 I don't know whether anybody has taken it into consideration or not.
00:13:45.920 I mean, the last time I worked in federal politics was over a decade ago,
00:13:52.640 and I had a job as a political advisor to the Minister of Immigration.
00:13:59.920 This was not a concern that we tended to face.
00:14:10.380 There was a report, I can't remember the date, I think maybe 2006 or something,
00:14:15.420 there was a report by the Senate which looked at this issue a little bit.
00:14:22.640 But again, the result was always, well, we have to, you know, we won't be able to ask people to have more kids,
00:14:33.260 and we won't be able to do anything about the demographic problem,
00:14:36.100 so we just have to keep counting on.
00:14:39.120 Just kicking the can down the road, basically.
00:14:42.060 Right.
00:14:42.500 So sooner or later, we won't be able to do that.
00:14:46.240 It just stands to reason.
00:14:48.200 So the fact, you know, I think that this is exactly the kind of thing that people ought to be thinking about within government.
00:14:55.240 I mean, I think that most Canadians still want to be welcoming and generous.
00:14:59.080 The country is far from full, no matter what anybody may say about that.
00:15:03.260 And I think that if we, you know, if we're thinking about completely pulling up the drawbridge or something,
00:15:09.900 which I guess some people are, you know, I think that that's not the right way to think about it.
00:15:13.880 There should always be some room for high-skilled immigration.
00:15:19.200 But, you know, what we're now faced with will not be helped by rampant use of the temporary foreign worker program.
00:15:30.880 And the family reunification program where you bring your parents and grandparents over,
00:15:37.220 I mean, this is just, I mean, it's, I know the Canadians want to be generous and so forth,
00:15:43.460 but that doesn't, it doesn't really have a beneficial effect at all for the country.
00:15:49.580 But first and foremost, what our businesses need to do and what government has to be able to help with or spur on or inspire
00:15:57.040 or whatever the right terminology is, is to get Canadians, get people who live here already educated, trained up,
00:16:08.740 you know, invest in skills training and get that productivity up.
00:16:15.280 You know, I think Canada right now is comparable in productivity to, you know, states like Alabama or Mississippi.
00:16:25.100 And there's not really a good reason for that.
00:16:27.300 And arguably, arguably the consistent use of the temporary foreign worker program over decades has contributed to that stagnation.
00:16:39.460 And if there's any role for government here, it would be not to be providing this huge subsidy of cheap foreign labor,
00:16:49.300 but rather, you know, like use whatever is required, the bully pulpit or, you know, some kind of tax breaks or whatever
00:16:59.300 to inspire these same businesses to hire and train Canadians.
00:17:03.140 That's what we should be looking at, while still being open to a lower level of high-skilled, high-wage immigration. 0.92
00:17:15.540 So it's one thing that you mentioned just now was having babies.
00:17:19.960 The government doesn't want to encourage people to have babies, but that seems like, 0.98
00:17:23.520 and it is a core part of your article, is about baby bumps and birth rates.
00:17:29.020 And so is there a shift into that?
00:17:31.320 Now, can you talk a little bit about what kind of things that Canada can do to perhaps increase the amount of children born within the country?
00:17:39.180 So the first point is that I think that people are right when they say,
00:17:44.600 well, you know, the government cannot just issue a decree or an instruction for everybody to have kids.
00:17:55.160 That won't work.
00:17:56.060 But if you use incentives.
00:17:59.940 They can and they should.
00:18:02.160 But the framing of the problem, if you think of it in that regard, is wrong.
00:18:13.160 And the reason I say that is that people are not able to have the number of children that they reportedly want,
00:18:24.000 women and men both.
00:18:25.280 Recent studies have revealed this not only in Canada, but there was a report only a few months ago from the United Nations Population Fund, I think.
00:18:42.660 I can never get these acronyms right.
00:18:44.100 But this is a worldwide problem that couples are not having the number of kids that they profess to want to have.
00:18:53.980 So if when I looked at the Canadian data on this, if everybody who wanted to have, you know, one extra child who claimed couldn't,
00:19:08.080 you know, we would be much closer to and possibly slightly above the replacement rate.
00:19:15.940 So what government needs to look at, I would say, is what are these impediments?
00:19:22.860 Like what is standing in the way of people?
00:19:26.220 You know, what is preventing them from not having the number of children that they want? 0.96
00:19:30.540 Now, I don't, I don't have, well, I was going to say, yeah, some are obvious.
00:19:36.760 I mean, I think, I think that, you know, a very long commuting time would be, I think, I think, you know, that's one obvious thing.
00:19:44.640 Or housing.
00:19:45.380 Yeah, so there are those things that I think need to be addressed.
00:19:53.800 Now, there are some countries in the world that have addressed them.
00:19:58.700 There are things, you know, Quebec, places like Norway and Sweden, you know, they have very generous, what do you call it, daycares, nursery schools.
00:20:09.500 And, you know, generally people tend to live in such places, they tend to live a little bit closer to where they work.
00:20:17.760 That will probably help, but it won't be all of it.
00:20:22.440 We have to change the way we think about parenthood.
00:20:27.460 And I think we need to speak of parenthood and especially motherhood as, you know, good things in and of themselves.
00:20:33.220 And there should be a higher social esteem in which we hold motherhood.
00:20:39.500 Right.
00:20:44.720 And to give you an example of why I say that is that I recall as a young political staffer, there was a debate about, I don't know what it was, in the House of Commons.
00:20:56.020 And someone on the conservative side was talking about how, you know, a stay-at-home mother has a challenging, difficult job as much as any challenging, difficult job can possibly be.
00:21:14.460 And then a member opposite stood up and shouted, being a stay-at-home, and this was paradoxically another woman. 0.98
00:21:25.960 She said, being a stay-at-home mother is not a real job. 0.70
00:21:29.540 As though it's something to be upset about, you know, it's shameful or somehow of less.
00:21:37.440 Well, listen, sometimes the worst critics of women is other women. 1.00
00:21:40.960 I mean, we know that.
00:21:43.020 Yeah.
00:21:43.220 So that is absolutely unsurprising.
00:21:44.800 And it was very, I wasn't married and I didn't have kids at the time, but it was upsetting to me that someone would say that.
00:21:54.160 I mean, first of all, whatever people choose to do with their lives, you know, within obviously certain reasonable limits, you know, I mean, surely we can get beyond like public condemnations of things like that.
00:22:06.280 Or sort of vocal criticisms that, you know, someone turned out to be a mother and not a lawyer or something.
00:22:12.520 You know, that's, I think that's silly.
00:22:14.180 But there is an attitude, there's a bad attitude that I think needs to be addressed.
00:22:19.380 And the second reason I say this sort of thing is that there's a very curious example in the country of Georgia, in the Caucasus, the birth rate had been low for a very long time.
00:22:34.320 And everything was tried to drive it up.
00:22:39.620 And the one thing that worked was that the patriarch of Georgia, the Orthodox patriarch of Georgia, promised to baptize everyone's, I think, third or fourth child personally, that he would do it personally.
00:22:55.100 And everyone thought that was great.
00:22:58.240 You know, this is a sort of a sign of public affirmation and prestige that comes from having a figure of, you know, social and religious and probably also political importance, baptize your kids.
00:23:17.580 So that worked.
00:23:19.120 I don't think it would work here.
00:23:21.860 I don't think it would work in Canada because we don't have the same kind of culture surrounding, say, the, you know, the Anglican Archbishop of Toronto or something like that.
00:23:33.060 You know, just I don't think people would care if he did that.
00:23:35.940 Although something like that might be worth trying.
00:23:38.240 But there are definitely cultural matters.
00:23:41.420 There are local cultural concerns, I think, that affect this problem.
00:23:49.500 And it's there that I think we should be looking when it comes to things like incentives and so forth, above and beyond what we already do, the baby bonuses and, you know, the child benefit and that sort of thing.
00:24:05.920 So, both culture and economics.
00:24:11.640 Speaking of incentives and policy and things like that, just to wrap up the episode, I'd be curious to know from your perspective, if there was one particular policy shift, one thing that you would do that would change course, what would you put in place?
00:24:26.160 Oh, one thing that you have me on the spot.
00:24:29.700 I would.
00:24:31.400 Or what would you try?
00:24:33.280 Okay, this is what I would do.
00:24:34.400 I would put a, they call them a lens.
00:24:38.820 In the federal bureaucracy, there is a small business lens.
00:24:45.220 And I think in the Trudeau era, there was something like a, some kind of like a feminist lens or something like that. 0.66
00:24:55.320 And there was an office that would oversee this and they would look at all policy that went to cabinet.
00:24:59.040 You know, how does this affect small businesses?
00:25:01.240 I would make a family lens.
00:25:04.400 How does this affect family formation?
00:25:07.060 How does it affect, you know, what effect might it have on birth rates?
00:25:14.700 What effect does it have on the esteem in which parenthood, that kind of thing.
00:25:20.560 That would be the first thing I would do.
00:25:24.220 And, you know, conservatives will condemn me for recommending some new bureaucracy or something, but I think it might help.
00:25:31.600 Well, it's certainly not happening right now and possibly could, if we could focus on family, that could make quite the difference.
00:25:39.660 Is it, Michael, thank you so much for joining my show today.
00:25:42.020 I really appreciate it.
00:25:43.200 Pleasure.
00:25:43.600 Thanks for having me.
00:25:44.700 Thank you.
00:25:45.160 That's it for today.
00:25:47.120 And there you have it.
00:25:48.320 Apparently, we need a ministry of baby bumps and families. 1.00
00:25:51.940 And I'm actually kind of here for it.
00:25:54.340 If you like the episode today, if you thought it was useful or informative, possibly consider liking and subscribing and sharing with some friends.
00:26:03.980 And join us next week for another episode.
00:26:06.160 I'm Melanie Bennett.
00:26:07.140 This is Disrupted.