Sharan Kaur wants to reassure Canadians that multiculturalism “built” this country. For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the casual dismissal of 100-plus years of history and concede that maybe it once did.
But this isn’t a debate about multiculturalism. To defend unlimited immigration by pointing to multiculturalism’s historical benefits is to conflate two distinct things: cultural enrichment and policy sustainability.
Today’s immigration system isn’t a symbol of national confidence or pride. It’s a monument to political ineptitude. And that’s the charitable interpretation.
This is not just the view of dog-whistling Conservatives. According to a recent 2025 survey, 56 per cent of Canadians now believe we accept too many immigrants. Concerns focus less on culture or ethnicity and more on tangible pressures: housing, jobs, infrastructure, and the management of social services.
Let’s be blunt: Canada is taking in more people than it can house, treat, or educate. Housing is Exhibit A. When you increase the population faster than you build homes, prices explode. It’s not prejudice. It’s supply and demand. Even the federal government admits that immigration-driven demand has helped push rents and housing prices into the stratosphere. Young Canadians aren’t living in their parents’ basements because of xenophobia.
Health care? Same story. Emergency rooms are jammed, family doctors are scarce, and wait times stretch into months. Yet every few months, Ottawa adds the equivalent of another Kingston or Guelph to the population and tells us everything is fine. No health system on Earth can handle that.
Schools are crowded. Transit is overloaded. Municipalities can’t keep up with the basics. Anyone insisting this is all “misinformation” should try finding a family doctor in Toronto or a two-bedroom apartment under $3,000.
Canada has always welcomed newcomers who build, work, and join our civic culture. But what we’re doing now isn’t “immigration.” It’s unmanaged population growth, driven by a surge of temporary residents, asylum claimants, foreign students, and low-skilled entrants — none of it tied coherently to labour needs or infrastructure.
Defenders of the status quo lean on nostalgic slogans: “We’ve always been a nation of immigrants.” True — but we were never a nation of reckless policymakers. Our grandparents came in waves the country could absorb. A grown-up country matches immigration levels to housing supply, infrastructure capacity, and economic productivity. We’re doing the opposite.
Multiculturalism didn’t fail. Ottawa did.
We need to pump the brakes on immigration, rebuild capacity, and restore sanity to immigration levels.
This isn’t nativism. It’s reality.
Dan Robertson is the co-founder of ORB advocacy and a former Conservative Party of Canada strategist.
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