FIRST READING: Is an ‘opaque’ U.S. consultancy behind Canada’s dramatic spike in immigration?

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As Canadian immigration reaches the highest levels seen in its history, a Radio-Canada investigation has publish allegations that the surge may have been heavily influenced by a U.S.-founded consultancy that has collected more than $60 million from the Trudeau government.

McKinsey & Co. — a multi-billion dollar global consultancy firm with five locations in Canada —only scored the occasional contract with the Canadian federal government in the years preceding the 2015 election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

In the seven years since, Radio-Canada investigators uncovered $66 million in mostly sole-sourced McKinsey contracts, including $24.5 million to provide “management advice” to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

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IRCC sources identified by Radio-Canada fingered McKinsey’s influence as a key driver behind the Trudeau government’s decision to dramatically ramp up immigration rates. They also accused McKinsey of “opaque” operations within the federal bureaucracy.

“These people, these firms forget the public interest, they’re not interested in it. They’re not accountable,” said a source. 

Immigration rates were already hovering at historic highs when Trudeau first took power. The number of new Canadians coming in each year had steadily risen throughout the 2000s, ultimately peaking above 250,000 in 2015, the last year of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

But that figure has since expanded considerably, reaching 431,645 new permanent residents in 2022. It’s a quantity of immigrants that surpasses even the meteoric heights seen during the years immediately preceding the First World War, when hundreds of thousands of European immigrants were moved in to homestead the prairies.

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The Trudeau government didn’t campaign on a dramatic rise to immigration rates – and it’s not clear they had any intention of doing so upon taking power.

But according to Radio-Canada’s IRCC sources, it was McKinsey – and particularly its then-global head Dominic Barton – who successfully pitched high immigration as a means to boost economic growth.

Notably, Barton is a co-founder of The Century Initiative, an advocacy group pushing for Canada’s population to surpass 100 million by 2100. “Growing our population to 100 million by 2100 would reduce the burden on government revenues to fund health care, old age security, and other services,” reads part of the initiative’s mission statement.

Barton would eventually serve as the Trudeau government’s ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021, and left amid criticisms that he had been too eager to secure trade ties with Beijing at the expense of national security.

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IN OTHER NEWS

As a sign of just how prevalent birth tourism has become in Vancouver, the city’s first baby of 2023 was born to a birth tourist. Hana Amr Fouad was born just before 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day at Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital, according to a profile in Vancouver Is Awesome. Baby Hana’s parents are both Egyptian nationals who have never previously been to Canada, but they arranged for a Vancouver birth so that the baby would obtain instant Canadian citizenship under the country’s “jus soli” laws. “We chose Canada because the Canadian passport is better,” said Hana’s father Amr Fouad, explaining that it was a choice between Canada or the U.S. Several hundred such births occur in the Vancouver area every year. Richmond Hospital, in particular, has reported that as many as one quarter of its birthing mothers are non-residents looking to secure Canadian citizenship for their baby.

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It is now national policy in Canada that if an elementary school student decides they are a different gender, teachers and staff at their school are instructed to honour the new identity without question – while strenuously keeping all of this a secret from their parents. A feature by the National Post’s Tom Blackwell found that the policy is in practice at school boards across the country – and is even urged as a best practice by the Public Health Agency of Canada. “It’s not a benign act. It’s a psychological intervention — and it’s not a minor psychological intervention — that teachers and counsellors are entering into without any psychological training at all,” said an Ontario mother whose daughter’s decision to transition to male was immediately honoured in full by the district.

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There are increasing signs that Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government is doomed, and that the province may soon be home to Canada’s second NDP provincial government (the first being B.C.). Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson is Canada’s single most unpopular provincial leader; an Angus Reid Institute survey from December found she had an approval rating of just 26 per cent. With the NDP favoured to win an Oct. 3 provincial election, eight Progressive Conservatives thus far have announced their political retirements rather than stay on to fight a potentially losing campaign.

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