Does Canada’s immigration policy reflect Trudeau’s globalist connections?

Does Canada’s immigration policy reflect Trudeau’s globalist connections?

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Who actually sets Canada’s Immigration Policy in Trudeau’s government?

It is not often that the CBC, a booster of high immigration, raises concerns about Canada’s immigration policy. But in a January 4^th article, the CBC questioned the role of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in setting that policy.

The article, titled “The value of one consulting firm’s federal contracts has skyrocketed under the Trudeau government,” says that the Liberals have so far spent 30 times more on McKinsey’s services than Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. Under Harper, McKinsey received a total of $2.2 million in contracts. So far under Trudeau, the CBC reported, it has received $66 million. More recent revelations indicate that federal contracts with McKinsey since Trudeau took power actually exceed $100 million.

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The government department that made the most use of McKinsey’s services was Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). McKinsey got its first contract with IRCC in August 2018, and since then IRCC has paid McKinsey $24.5 million to develop and implement various strategies for its own “transformation.” According to an IRCC spokesperson, McKinsey was tasked with reviewing, developing and implementing digital tools, processes and services. Anonymous sources in the IRCC, who felt that department bureaucrats had been pushed aside, reported that McKinsey’s influence over Canadian immigration policy had grown in recent years without the public’s knowledge. Professor Isabelle Fortier of the École nationale d’administration publique in Quebec said the use of firms such as McKinsey supplants the internal expertise of the civil service and operates as a shadow government without transparency or legitimacy. The CBC article notes that the federal government’s immigration targets announced in November 2022 are very similar to the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which was created by the Liberal government in December 2015 and chaired until 2019 by McKinsey’s then global head Dominic Barton. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum In McKinsey’s own words, it has operated as “a single global partnership” since its foundation in 1926. Perusing its website on January 16, the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s 2023 annual meeting in Davos, one could believe that McKinsey’s primary objective was to implement the WEF’s agenda. On that day, the top banner on the landing page on McKinsey’s website read, “Why Davos matters more than ever,” with the subtitle “Global challenges call for global leadership.” Just below that banner, we were invited to meet the WEF’s Young Global Leaders. The Forum of Young Global Leaders was created by the WEF’s chairman Klaus Schwab in 1993 (originally as Global Leaders of Tomorrow) to promote the WEF’s agenda of globalization.

The headline banner of McKinsey’s landing page, screen-captured on January 16

The World Economic Forum describes its mission in a 24-page Institutional Brochure. Under the section “Our Mission: Entrepreneurship in the global public interest”, we are informed that: The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971, and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is tied to no political, partisan or national interests. (Our italicized emphasis) Under the section “Our Culture: a unique global institution,” the brochure describes WEF’s role as an international organization: An international organization: The Forum makes its contribution to global governance in the informal yet structured spaces that sit at the base of the formal multilateral legal frameworks and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. (Our italicized emphasis) The question that arises is just how active a role the WEF takes in shaping global, regional and industry agendas and contributing to global governance. Does it play a role in developing the national policies of theoretically sovereign countries, for example by setting their immigration policy through globalist consulting firms with close ties to those countries’ governments? As it happens, “transformation” was also a theme at this year’s WEF meeting. The theme for Day 1 was “Welcome to Davos/Transformation Overview.” For Day 3, the theme was “Digital Transformation,” reminiscent of the IRCC’s objective to transform itself with McKinsey’s help in “reviewing, developing and implementing digital tools, processes and services.” Promoting a bigger Canada – a long-term effort led by the Century Initiative The raison d’être of the Century Initiative is to grow Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. It was founded in 2011 by McKinsey’s Dominic Barton and Mark Wiseman, an investment manager who has been working with the world’s largest asset managing company, BlackRock, since 2016. The CI’s founders were evidently not satisfied with Canada’s radically accelerated population growth launched by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s immigration minister Barbara McDougall in 1990 and continued by every government since then. McDougall increased Canada’s intake of immigrants to 250,000 annually, regardless of economic conditions. The sub-heading of the 1990 Globe and Mail article describing McDougall’s policy is shocking in its honesty and would be unlikely to see the light of day in 21st century Canada: “Minister sees new source of voters for Conservatives.” It might perhaps have added, “and a new source of money for powerful financial interests.” The Century Initiative argues that Canada will become irrelevant if it does not grow its population and economy in conjunction with the world’s burgeoning population and ever-growing resource-devouring economy. “We can manage our growth, or accept our decline,” it informs us. While PIC would agree with the CI’s statement that “Our population growth is tied to our quality of life,” it is likely not in the way that the CI understands it. This massive growth in a country whose densely populated southern border is already under severe ecological stress would occur under the banner of sustainability, of course.

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The Century Initiative’s message of the desperate need to grow Canada’s population was unsurprisingly promoted by business interests and the corporate media. In May of 2012, The Globe and Mail published a long article called “Why Canada needs a flood of immigrants,” notwithstanding the fact that this flood had been in progress since 1990 and had yet to bring about an end to “labour shortages.” And now, even after more than 30 years of flooding immigration, the threat of those “labour shortages” to Canada’s future still looms large. In a heroic effort to finally wrestle this monster to the ground, the Trudeau government has opened the floodgates wider yet. It first announced new targets in November 2017, aiming for 340,000 immigrants annually by 2020, a target that was derailed by the advent of Covid-19. This November, it announced an annual target of 500,000 newcomers by 2025 in the immigration category alone (excluding temporary foreign workers, students, and others). Who are the people working so hard to turbocharge Canada’s growth and what are their connections? The Century Initiative’s goal of turning what are now cities into “mega-regions” is truly breathtaking. By 2100, Toronto is to balloon out to 33.5 million, Vancouver to 11.9 million, Montreal to 12.2 million, and the National Capital Region to 4.8 million. Should that goal be reached, those four cities alone would contain over one and a half times Canada’s current population of about 40 million. Apparently, nothing could improve the well-being of Canadians more than forcing the vast majority of them to live in what Norman Borlaug described as “the grotesque concentration of human beings into the poisoned and clangorous environment of pathologically hypertrophied megalopoles.” But, as the saying goes, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” What evidently seemed like poison to Borlaug (and does to PIC) is obviously someone’s meat. Who is feasting on the steak? Both of the Century Initiative’s founders, Dominic Barton and Mark Wiseman are members of the World Economic Forum, whose 2023 Davos meeting was so enthusiastically promoted by McKinsey & Company, where Barton worked for 33 years before leaving the company as a Senior Partner in July 2018, one month before McKinsey got its first contract with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. (Barton was not out of a job for long. In 2019, Trudeau appointed him as Canada’s ambassador to China, a position he held for two years.) Wiseman is a Senior Managing Director of BlackRock where, among other positions, he is Chairman of its Alternative business, which includes investment in private real estate, such as the Canadian housing market that is becoming increasingly unaffordable to Canadians. Separate from Barton the individual, the firm McKinsey & Company also has links to the WEF beyond promoting its annual Davos meetings. Among other things, McKinsey and the WEF work together for “Resilience and globalization in a fragmented world.”

Prime Minister Trudeau embraces Dominic Barton at a 2017 reception (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also a member of the World Economic Forum as is his finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland. Freeland sits on the WEF’s board of trustees along with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock. It was Dominic Barton who in January 2016 personally introduced Justin Trudeau as the newly elected prime minister of Canada to the Davos “in-crowd” at the WEF’s annual meeting. As WEF chairman Klaus Schwab informed the audience at his Malcolm H. Wiener lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics in 2017, the views of Trudeau’s government align closely with those of the WEF. But perhaps Canadians should be concerned that Schwab would boast about his organization “penetrating the cabinets” of Canada and other countries. The global mindset that Schwab endorses seems to have underlain a newly elected Justin Trudeau’s assertion to The New York Times that Canada was the “first postnational state” with “no core identity, no mainstream.” The Advisory Council on Economic Growth calls for…more economic growth! In December 2015, two months after Justin Trudeau was first elected prime minister, his finance minister Bill Morneau announced the creation of an Advisory Council on Economic Growth. In February 2016, Morneau announced that the Council would be chaired by Dominic Barton, who at the time still headed McKinsey, and the names of all fourteen board members, Mark Wiseman among them, were announced in March. On October 31, 2016, Maclean’s magazine reported that the Department of Finance had confirmed that McKinsey consultants were providing the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, whose members were paid $1 annually and which had no budget of its own, with pro bono “research, analysis and administration.” Such altruism! In October 2016, the Advisory Council on Economic Growth produced its first report. Not surprisingly, it advocated for a massive increase in immigration, proposing a target of 450,000 immigrants annually, an over 50% increase of already high immigration levels. Subsequent reports (the third and final one released in December 2017) all promoted similarly high targets. Just over a year after the release of the Advisory Council’s first report, in November 2017, then-immigration minister Ahmed Hussen announced the Trudeau government’s first substantial increase in immigration targets, which were set at 310,000, 330,000 and 340,000 for 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively. And in November 2022, with many Canadians still suffering economically from the Covid disruption and the cost of housing going through the roof, current immigration minister Sean Fraser announced the new targets of 465,000, 485,000 and 500,000 for 2023, 2024, and 2025, respectively. These targets not only meet but exceed the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth. Based on the many inactive links on what looks like its home page, the Advisory Council on Economic Growth appears no longer to be active. Perhaps the fact that its recommendation to massively ramp up immigration is being implemented by the government means that its mission is essentially accomplished. While the Century Initiative is a registered lobby group, the Advisory Council on Economic Growth promoted essentially the same agenda as an official advisory body. Is Canada still a sovereign country? The Century Initiative goes so far as to frame Canada embracing mass immigration as a moral duty. As you scroll along its home page, you are asked, “Which side of history will Canada be on?” It contrasts the “rise in nationalism, populism and anti-immigrant sentiment” globally with Canada’s “openness to immigration” and “culture of multiculturalism and diversity.” The implication is that if Canada does not welcome an ever-accelerating flood of newcomers, it is associating itself with some ugly political ideologies. You will not find anywhere on the Century Initiative’s website any discussion of how certain interest groups (such as speculators, developers, mortgage providers, cheap labour businesses, and politicians seeking the ethnic vote) will reap virtually all the economic and political benefits of Canada’s mass immigration policy while ordinary working Canadians will pay the costs in terms of more congested and polluted cities with less greenspace, increased pressure on already stressed health, education, and social services, as well as on transportation and infrastructure, and increasingly unaffordable housing.

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Canada’s immigration policy aligns fully with the globalist Century Initiative’s objectives of hypergrowth through immigration. Unfortunately, the bigger, bolder Canada promoted by the Century Initiative will not be a better Canada for its current inhabitants, let alone for its environment and biodiversity. Over thirty years of world-beating hyper-immigration has not increased the well-being of the average working Canadian and has massively skewed the distribution of wealth in favour of the wealthy. If Canadians do not begin to demand answers from their policymakers about whose interests they serve, they may soon no longer recognize the country that the Century Initiative and the World Economic Forum is creating for them.

Madeline Weld, Ph.D. President, Population Institute Canada Tel: (613) 833-3668 Email: mail@populationinstitutecanada.ca www.populationinstitutecanada.ca ------------------------------ Source https://populationinstitutecanada.ca/canada-a-country-for-canadians-or-a-cornucopia-for-globalists/