The Foundations, Limits, and Consequences of Immigration Exceptionalism in Canada

ABSTRACT

Canadian immigration politics and policymaking are striking. Canadian admission targets have steadily increased since the global economic crisis of 2008-2009, regardless of the party in power and despite the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to the less welcoming attitudes of publics in other industrialized democracies, Canadians have enthusiastically supported expansive immigration policies. Elite and popular support for Canada’s official multiculturalism policy also runs counter to trends in other states. The articles in this special issue of the American Review of Canadian Studies explore the factors underlying Canada’s distinctive approach to immigration, pointing out some important limits and attendant tensions in the ‘Canadian model.’ Canadians’ embrace of immigration and multiculturalism is based on important qualifications. Taken together, these qualifications raise questions about the scope and extent of Canadian exceptionalism. They also help us understand what, if anything, other countries can borrow from Canada and the likely trajectory of Canadian immigration policy moving forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• immigration policy
• multiculturalism
• refugees
• exceptionalism

Is Canada exceptional with respect to its immigration policy? Judging by the positive coverage Canada has received in the international press, one could be excused for thinking so. The Economist (2016) exclaimed that in a “depressing [world] of wall-builders, door-slammers and drawbridge-raisers, Canada stands out as a heartening exception” (np). Headlines in The New York Times and The Atlantic echo this point, holding that Canada has resisted “the West’s populist wave” (Taub 2017), escaping “the liberal doom loop” (Thompson 2018). Academics have contributed to this discussion with a growing number of articles, book chapters, and reports (Ambrose and Mudde 2015; Bloemraad 2012; Fleras 2018; Gordon, Jeram, and Van Der Linden 2020; Hiebert 2016; Reitz 2011; Trebilcock 2019). Prior to the sharp reduction of international travel as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in the “Canadian model” of immigration and multiculturalism generated a healthy two-way flow of traffic, with Canadian experts flying to foreign capitals to brief ministers and their staffs and Canadian officials welcoming foreign delegations keen on visiting Toronto, Canada’s principal immigrant destination. In March 2020, Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Marco Mendicino, attended a summit on immigrant integration in Germany, at the invitation of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. In his comments to the press, Mendocino pointed out that “our friends in Germany see Canada as a role model, as a country that has achieved success” (Harris 2020a).

Canadian immigration politics and policymaking are striking. Canadian admission targets have steadily increased since the global economic crisis of 2008–2009, regardless of the party in power. Indeed, the decision by the current Liberal Party government to further increase immigration targets over the next three years, from 401,000 in 2021 to 421,000 in 2023, met with almost no criticism from the opposition Conservatives and New Democratic Party (NDP), despite having been announced in October 2020, in the midst of the “second wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic (Harris 2020b). Rather than castigating the government for throwing open Canada’s doors in a time of crisis, opposition politicians wondered how the Liberals would meet their ambitious targets. While this in itself is noteworthy, the fact that the Canadian public enthusiatically supported the move—maintaining its longstanding embrace of expansive immigration policies—makes it even more striking, given the rather less–welcoming attitudes of publics in other industrialized democracies (Environics 2020; Connor and Krogstad 2018).¹ Elite and popular support for robust immigration levels extends to Canada’s official multiculturalism policy, at a time when multiculturalism has been rejected in other countries (Joppke 2017; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). Whereas critics of multiculturalism abroad claim that it has a corrosive effect on national unity, Canadians embrace it as a marker of their national identity (Bloemraad 2012; Banting and Kymlicka 2010; Uberoi 2008; Vipond in this issue).²

The articles in this special issue of the American Review of Canadian Studies advance our understanding of the factors underlying Canada’s distinctive approach to immigration, while also pointing out some important limits and attendant tensions in the ‘Canadian model’. Canadians’ embrace of immigration and multiculturalism is based on important qualifications. Taken together, these qualifications raise questions about the scope and extent of Canadian exceptionalism. They also help us understand what, if anything, other countries can borrow from Canada and the likely trajectory of Canadian immigration policy in the future.

The remainder of this introduction draws on the articles in this special issue to discuss the foundations of the Canadian model—those factors that lead to distinctive outcomes in Canadian immigration policymaking—as well as the tensions in Canadian approaches. These articles suggest that Canada’s embrace of a robust system of managed migration is premised on the strict control of unselected, unwanted migrants. Canadians’ support for multiculturalism, while real, is also paradoxically marked by ambivalence and, at times, outright hostility to racialized and religious minorities, generally, and Muslims, in particular. While the dynamics of party competition have dampened the allure of populist anti-immigrant politics in Canada, the temptation to mobilize Canadians’ latent suspicion of racialized minority groups has led to periodic experiments with populism (Triadafilopoulos and Rasheed 2020; Kymlicka this volume).

A major question moving forward, then, is whether the elite and popular consensus that has marked Canadian immigration politics since the late 1990s will continue to hold. This question is particularly acute at this moment, as Canada has significantly reduced all forms of cross-border mobility to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. While Canadians have signaled that they support a return to high levels of immigration in the future, their equally striking support of restrictions during the pandemic suggests that they may be open to rethinking their positions. Similarly, strong support for multiculturalism has not prevented an increase in racist discrimination and violence. In short, the Canadian model may be approaching a crossroads.

Foundations

What factors explain Canadian governments' ability to pursue expansive policies, with little organized political opposition and the support of the public? Answers to this question often highlight the interplay of Canada’s geography with its immigration and multiculturalism policies. According to Jeffrey Reitz (2012, 531), Canada’s “geographic isolation … from all countries other than the US has limited illegal immigration and has made legal immigration more attractive. This factor has been important in sustaining the political perception of Canadian immigration as being controlled in the national interest.” Canada’s success in recruiting well-educated, highly skilled immigrants has enabled Canadian governments to argue that immigration is beneficial. According to Daniel Hiebert, “framing immigration in economic terms and presenting it as a solution to the nation’s problems has led to a mutually reinforcing set of outcomes: Canadians expect immigration to be coordinated with economic need and, as a result, they have typically supported immigration mainly when it is aligned with economic concerns” (2016, 5).

Irene Bloemraad maintains that selective immigration policies are buttressed by an official multiculturalism policy entrenched in Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Multiculturalism Act, 1988. Canada’s championing of official multiculturalism has helped shape a national identity “that embraces immigration, diversity, and tolerance” (Bloemraad 2012, 8). Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka similarly claim that multiculturalism policy has enabled Canadians to see immigrants as a “constituent part of the nation that citizens feel pride in; multiculturalism serves as a link for native-born citizens from national identity to solidarity with immigrants” while at the same time providing “a link by which immigrants come to identify with, and feel pride in, Canada” (2010, 60–61).

In his contribution to this special issue, Robert Vipond builds on this line of argument, noting that the imperative of developing a shared heritage to which both immigrants and the members of the host society adhere has been facilitated through the embedding of multiculturalism in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter’s injunction that Canadians “preserve and enhance their specifically multicultural heritage” provides a “comprehensive and compelling normative vision of multicultural liberal nationalism that provides an ideological roadmap to guide the construction of the policies, programs, and norms of behavior consistent with this larger theory” (54). Canada’s cultural heritage, as reflected in the Charter, calls for constant reinterpretation and resists reification. Given the important connection between multiculturalism and immigration, it is reasonable to infer that part of this ongoing process of reinvention and reinterpretation has included the embedding of immigration as a constituent element in Canada’s evolving “heritage story.” As one of the principal sources of the diversity multiculturalism celebrates, immigration has become an important element in Canada’s evolving national identity.

In sum, geography has enabled the development of a selective immigration policy that is understood as working in the interests of Canadians. Multiculturalism policy generates further support for immigration by providing newcomers and citizens with a shared national identity premised on openness and respect for diversity. Canada’s evolving cultural heritage is formally tied to multiculturalism and, by extension, immigration. While support for multiculturalism is not all encompassing (Besco and Tolley 2018), it is significant and helps explain Canadians’ support for relatively expansive immigration policies (Reitz 2011).

As Monica Boyd and Vincent Ly point out in their contribution to this special issue, there is an additional element to the geography/policy interface that deserves our attention. While Canada’s relative remoteness reduces the overall number of asylum seekers and irregular migrants, the Canadian state has always responded quickly and aggressively to plug gaps that emerge in its system of border control (Kelley and Trebilcock 2010; Triadafilopoulos 2012; Anderson 2010; Okafor 2020). Uninvited and unwanted migrants have been subject to entry visas, detention, and ever tighter rules governing asylum, such as the Harper government’s Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act of 2012, a policy that remained in place after Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party formed the government in 2015.

Boyd and Ly argue that this longstanding feature of Canadian immigration policy was on full display in the Trudeau government’s response to spikes in irregular border crossing from 2017 to 2019. A relatively modest increase in irregular migrants heightened public unease, political disagreement among parties, and friction between the federal government and provincial governments in Ontario and Quebec. The federal government quickly responded to this challenge by providing increased funding to Quebec and (to a lesser extent) Ontario to defray the costs of settling asylum seekers, while also introducing amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that further restricted access to irregular migrants. The latter changes were embedded in an omnibus budget bill, which limited public scrutiny and ensured rapid passage of the legislation (Curry and Fine 2019; Wright 2019).

As in the past, Canada’s response to challenges to its system of tightly managed selective migration was to tighten control and further limit access to uninvited migrants. The episode reminds us that drawing too sharp a distinction between immigration and refugee policymaking hinders our ability to see how the two areas are dynamically linked. A system of managed migration that enjoys the support of the public requires ongoing and rigorous suppression of unwanted migration, generally, and irregular flows of asylum seekers, in particular.

Mireille Paquet’s article in this special issue argues that the ability of recent Canadian governments to respond quickly and effectively to challenges to Canada’s immigration system is based in part on the expertise and influence of its national immigration bureaucracy. Paquet notes that Canada’s institutional configuration, which concentrates power in the executive branch and enables significant shifts in policy through changes in regulations (rather than through statutes), “generates opportunities for bureaucratic influence” (65).³ Canada’s immigration bureaucracy is highly attuned to the need to maintain public support for immigration programs. The bureaucracy assists governments in this regard by quickly bringing problems to the attention of decision-makers and developing solutions that draw on its depth of experience and expertise.

Paquet demonstrates convincingly that Canada’s immigration bureaucracy has played a leading role in advancing a system premised on the recruitment of highly skilled economic immigrants. Immigration bureaucrats are well aware that public support for this system depends on governments being able to demonstrate that access to Canada is tightly regulated. The civil servants Paquet interviewed “pointed out repeatedly that they felt it was [their] department’s job and theirs to sell Canada’s immigration program to the public” (69). As such, solutions to both technical and political challenges to Canada’s immigration system, including some that are criticized by immigrant and refugee rights advocates, are not based simply on the preferences of elected politicians, but reflect a commitment on the part of the public service to preserving the political prerequisites for a system of managed migration.

A loud chorus of journalists, commentators, and academics feared that the Trudeau government’s actions to stem the flow of irregular migrants came too late and that public unease over irregular migration would lead to a nasty fight over immigration in the 2019 federal election (Thompson 2019). These fears proved to be unfounded. The People’s Party of Canada, which campaigned on promises to reduce immigration and eliminate multiculturalism programs, won only 1.6% of the popular vote and its leader, Maxime Bernier, lost his seat in the House of Commons (Ling 2019). A longstanding consensus among Canada’s political parties in support of large-scale immigration and official multiculturalism endured.

While the changes introduced by the Trudeau government in its 2019 budget reduced the number of irregular border crossings in the months leading up to the election, Zack Taylor’s article in this volume suggests that the consensus among Canada’s major political parties not to politicize immigration during the campaign can be explained by a more fundamental array of factors. As Taylor points out, most immigrants settle in Canada’s most densely populated urban centers, which are also home to the largest number of competitive (“swing”) ridings. Canada’s winner-takes-all plurality electoral system enhances the importance of new Canadian voters in these ridings, resulting in “an incentive structure under which Canada’s three major political parties compete for electoral advantage” by soliciting the support of immigrant voters and eschewing anti-immigrant positions (19). Taylor argues that “parties’ explicit appeals to specific immigrant and associated cultural communities in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, represents an adaptation to the transformation of Canada’s social geography by immigration-fueled urbanization in recent decades” (35). Given that “Canada’s net population growth occurs almost entirely through … immigration … it is decreasingly possible for parties to ignore the electoral heft of ethno-cultural communities” especially those “concentrated in the Greater Toronto region” (36). Barring a change in Canada’s electoral system or a significant realignment of the support bases of the parties, the durability of cross-party political consensus on immigration policy is likely to endure. This contingent interplay of settlement patterns, rules for apportioning representation, and the electoral system has dampened debate over immigration and helped build elite and popular support for the maintenance and expansion of Canada’s robust immigration program.⁴

Although Canada’s immigration regime is squarely focused on recruiting economic immigrants and limiting the admission of non-selected migrants, particularly asylum seekers, much has been made of its commitment to refugee resettlement (Labman and Cameron 2020; Labman 2019). Indeed, some maintain that Canada’s system of refugee resettlement, mobilized most recently to assist in the admission and integration of more than 50,000 Syrian refugees following the 2015 federal election, is representative of its commitment to humanitarian principles and global justice. Canada’s pioneering role in allowing private groups to sponsor refugees has also drawn widespread attention and admiration. The Government of Canada is a partner in the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative, which aims to “assist and inspire countries around the world to open new pathways for refugee protection … by sharing Canada’s history, experience, and leadership in private sponsorship and by supporting the creation of new programs that countries design to meet their unique needs” (Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative 2021).

In her contribution to this special issue, Patti Lenard explores whether and to what degree Canada is exceptional with respect to meeting the demands of global refugee justice. Lenard finds that Canada does relatively well with respect to resettling refugees and that this success, while imperfect, “is worth defending.” As compared to other countries, the quality of Canada’s resettlement processes is exceptional, as is its Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program, which “permits private Canadian citizens, in groups, to identify specific refugees for resettlement and to take the lead, especially in the first year, in supporting resettlement upon their arrival in Canada” (84). Lenard also finds that Canada’s “stable commitment to admitting refugees over the years” is noteworthy (85).

Lenard notes that Canada’s record is much more ordinary if we consider the size of its resettlement program and the degree to which it addresses the overall needs of global refugee justice. “In any one year, the UNHCR designates approximately one million refugees in urgent need of resettlement (of the roughly 22 million refugees in the world); each year, only about 100,000 refugees from this list are resettled. If this is all that exceptionality means—doing better than others when, collectively, a very bad job is being done—then Canada’s exceptionality is a very weak claim” (86). Lenard maintains that Canada “ought … to deploy its comparative advantage in resettlement to offer more resettlement spots with a commitment to at least sustaining, if not improving, the quality of its resettlement efforts” (90).

Here it is worth noting that the proportion of Canada’s overall immigration system dedicated to meeting the humanitarian needs of the world’s dispossessed has not grown nearly as much as that set aside for economic immigrants. Even when they are selected, refugees rank relatively low in Canada’s hierarchy of immigration priorities. This may be because support for an expanded refugee resettlement system is limited to a relatively narrow subsection of the Canadian population with strong humanitarian convictions. Most Canadians are not keen on extending Canada’s humanitarian obligations to refugees. This is reflected in Canada’s decision to scale back its resettlement program to previous levels after meeting (and exceeding) the Liberal Party’s 2015 campaign promise to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees. Whereas Canada resettled a total of 46,700 refugees in 2016, fewer than 30,000 were admitted in 2019 (UNHCR 2017; Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada 2020). Canada’s current status as the world’s leader in refugee resettlement is as much a reflection of the stinginess of other countries as of its generosity.

Tensions and Limitations

Randy Besco’s contribution to this volume reminds us that Canadians’ embrace of immigration and multiculturalism is recent. From the 1970s to the late 1990s, a substantial majority of Canadians thought there was too much immigration. The Reform Party of Canada enjoyed a significant measure of success in the late 1980s and early 1990s by campaigning against official multiculturalism and prevailing immigration policies (Marwah, Triadafilopoulos, and White 2013). Public opinion began to shift in the late 1990s and by 2005 a new, pro-immigration position had crystallized (Banting and Soroka 2020). This stable pro-immigration position has since intensified, reaching historically high levels in 2020, despite the significant disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (Parkin and Neuman 2020).

In the press release announcing the publication of its annual Focus Canada survey on Canadians’ attitudes toward immigration and refugee issues, Keith Neuman of the Environics Institute for Survey Research highlighted the durability and surprising resilience of pro-immigration attitudes in Canada, despite the challenges raised by the pandemic:

Over the past year, the Canadian public has become more accepting and supportive of immigrants and refugees, continuing a trend dating back several years but to levels not recorded in more than four decades of Focus Canada surveys. Strong and increasing majorities of Canadians express comfort with current immigration levels, see immigrants as good for the Canadian economy and not threats to other people’s jobs, and believe that immigration is essential to building the country’s population. And for the first time in the Focus research dating back four decades, a plurality of Canadians rejects the ideas that too many refugees are not legitimate, and that too many immigrants are not adopting Canadian values. By a five-to-one margin, the public believes immigration makes Canada a better country, not a worse one, and they are most likely to say this is because it makes for a more diverse multicultural place to live (Neuman 2020).

Besco’s investigation complicates this view. While public opinion has grown steadily more positive over time, this trend masks important shifts under the surface that have potentially worrisome political implications:

[T]his apparent post-2005 stability is only at the aggregate level, and masks polarization below the surface. Change did not stop in 2005, rather the supporters of various parties began to diverge. Previously, the positions of supporters of various parties had been similar for decades, but in recent years Liberal and NDP supporters have become increasingly pro-immigration, while Conservatives hold essentially the same position as they did in 1975. The result is that a wide gap has emerged between the attitudes of supporters of different parties. (144)

The upshot of this trend is that “the Conservative Party faces conflicting forces: while it has generally avoided anti-immigration positions for electoral reasons, it is also tempted to move in that direction” (159). As discussed below, the promise of mobilizing conservative voters who oppose immigration and multiculturalism led the party to experiment with anti-Muslim tactics in the 2015 federal election. Besco rightly notes that Conservative leaders will have to determine whether they will continue to respond to the anti-immigration wishes of their traditional base or return to competing more aggressively against the Liberals and NDP for the votes of new Canadians in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, and urban Canada more generally. Whether the party returns to the early Harper-era priority of expanding its base of support by winning the support of new Canadian voters with conservative social and economic preferences remains one of the important, unanswered questions of Canadian politics.

Michael Donnelly’s article in this special issue presents evidence that even Canadians who support multiculturalism often hold discriminatory views concerning immigrants and racialized minorities. Donnelly’s findings go beyond the well-established point that Canadians are, at heart, supporters of strong integration measures, notwithstanding their positive views on multiculturalism and purported preference for a cultural mosaic over an assimilationist melting pot (Hansen 2017; Soroka and Roberton 2010). According to Donnelly,

multicultural and non-discrimination norms have not been absorbed among the general public in a deep way. About half of [all Canadians] support explicit discrimination against Muslims or in favor of Whites … Canadians discriminate against Sudanese immigrants by about the same amounts as Americans, while discriminating only a little less against migrants from India or China. In other words, the Canadian public is not exceptionally accepting. Canadian exceptionalism, to the extent that it exists, is an elite institutional phenomenon, not a mass attitude one (182).

Like Besco, Donnelly points usefully to how these findings relate to Canadian politics, arguing specifically that there is a significant “market” for discriminatory immigration policies in Canada. In his estimation, the failure of the People’s Party of Canada in the 2019 federal election should not be taken as proof of the futility of anti-immigrant politics. The existence of a large minority of the public that supports such policies suggests that the right politician “could come along and capture enough votes to play a major role in politics” (183).

The 2015 federal election stands out as an important case in point. In his contribution to this special issue, Will Kymlicka argues that the 2015 election marked a “near-death experience” for multiculturalism in Canada. Kymlicka notes that after falling behind in the polls, the Conservatives seized on a long-simmering debate over whether Muslim women should be able to wear a full-face veil (niqab) while taking the loyalty oath at citizenship ceremonies. A regulation demanding that Zunera Ishaq take off her niqab while swearing the oath was decisively struck down by the Federal Court in February 2015. The Harper government appealed the decision to the Federal Court of Appeals, which scheduled its hearing on the case for September 15, 2015. The Appeals Court issued a ruling from the bench on that day “instructing the government to allow [Ishaq] to naturalize quickly so that she could vote in the forthcoming election” (128).

The Conservatives denounced the Appeals Court’s ruling and used the defeat as an opportunity to rally their base. Their strategy included appealing the case to the Supreme Court of Canada and seeking a stay of the Court of Appeal’s ruling, to avoid allowing Ishaq to naturalize on the grounds that failing to do so would cause “irreparable harm” to the public interest (129). The Conservatives also released the results of a poll taken in March of 2015 showing that 82% of Canadians favored their proposed ban, including 93% of Quebecers.

Kymlicka notes that the Conservatives’ decision to politicize the niqab ruling helped them climb from third place in the polls, behind the Liberals and NDP on September 15, to first place by October 2. The party’s decision to violate one of the central principles of multiculturalism, “the premise that becoming Canadian does not require rejecting or hiding one’s religious commitments, since these can be mutually complementary identities,” (130) proved to be hugely popular with voters. Not satisfied with their lead in the polls, the Conservatives doubled down on this strategy on October 2, promising to introduce a tip line for reporting “barbaric cultural practices” and a ban on the wearing of the niqab in the workplace for members of the civil service. This decision turned out to be a strategic error: “Far from strengthening the Conservative vote, these additional proposals were widely ridiculed, and created a powerful backlash … The niqab issue, which had been a ‘godsend’ on October 2, became an albatross by October 14, trapping the Conservatives in a rhetoric of division, distrust, and negativity that alienated many Canadians” (130). Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau rode this discontent into office, campaigning as a sunny defender of the lauded Canadian values of tolerance and accommodation.

Kymlicka surveys several potential explanations for this abrupt turn in the Conservative Party’s fortunes, ranging from Canadians’ “notorious politeness” and preference for consensual politics, to an argument holding that the addition of the tip line and ban against the wearing of the niqab by civil servants, as well as a promise to strip citizenship from dual nationals accused of engaging in terrorist activities, raised concerns among a broader range of new Canadian voters:

What began as a very localized and group-specific issue – Muslim women wearing a niqab at the moment of naturalization – spiralled into a more general hostility toward multicultural accommodation. Non-Muslim groups, who might have gone along with repressive policies towards Muslims, started to feel that their own rights and belonging were at risk. (132)

Kymlicka provides an additional argument worth touching on. In essence, he maintains that Canadians’ positive response to the Conservatives’ initial positions against the wearing of the niqab during citizenship ceremonies speaks to the importance that Canadians place in shared values and customs. “Viewed in this way, the imposing of special rules for citizenship ceremonies could be seen as a good-faith attempt to affirm the importance of visible reciprocity in an ethics of membership” (133). The Conservatives’ decision to extend the ban to members of the civil service did not cohere to any “plausible account of the ethics of membership.” Instead, the promise of a broader niqab ban pointed to a general claim that Muslims, regardless of their commitment to Canada, did not belong simply because they were Muslim. “Viewed this way, the proposals of October 2 could be seen not just as a change in degree, but also a change in kind. And Canadians may have reacted to this moral difference” (134).

Kymlicka concludes his article by noting that the events of 2015 demonstrate both the “thin and selective” support for multiculturalism among Canadians, and the degree to which it is “now intertwined with how many Canadians understand themselves and their country.” While the Conservatives proved that tapping into Canadians’ latent anti-Muslim views could yield significant political benefits, the case also demonstrated that the “repudiation of the very idea of multicultural nationalism … was a bridge too far for most voters” (134).

Conclusion: Whither the Canadian Model?

In light of the analyses and findings presented in the articles in this special issue, where does the Canadian model of immigration and multiculturalism stand? On the one hand, Canadian policymakers have the advantage of contingent factors that limit irregular, unselected immigration and create incentives for political parties to compete for the support of naturalized voters and their children. In this sense, Canada’s ability to maintain a system of expansive immigration, with relatively little opposition and significant cross-party political consensus, is based on a happy confluence of forces—other countries cannot “borrow” Canada’s geography or reverse engineer the contingent interplay of factors that together encourage parties to embrace immigrants as crucial sources of electoral support. Conversely, while policies can be studied and even copied, the forces that make them effective also need to be acknowledged. A preference for well-educated and highly skilled economic immigrants means that governments must also employ draconian means of limiting unwanted migration in order to successfully convince democratic publics that immigration is in the national interest. A modestly sized refugee resettlement program that enables private sponsorhip may work well in a country that receives relatively few uninvited asylum seekers, but might not be as appealing to leaders of states subject to more expansive flows of irregular migrants. And multiculturalism may encourage the development of a national identity that embraces immigration symbolically, but it does not eliminate discriminatory attitudes—indeed, wildly divergent positions can be held simultaneously. At best, Canada’s entrenchment of multiculturalism in its constitution and laws may place limits on how far parties are able to go in chasing voters whose support for immigration and multiculturalism is weak. So far, it has also encouraged continuing trust in Canadian instituions on the part of groups who have been subject to discrimination (McCoy 2018, 215).

This ambivalence in Canadians’ attitudes and policies toward immigration and multiculturalism has been evident through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and will likely play an important role in shaping Canada’s approach to immigration once the world returns to “normal.” As noted, the Liberal government pledged to increase annual immigration levels in October 2020, just as the “second wave” of COVID infections was picking up. Public opinion appears to be in favor of this move, despite challenges raised by the pandemic. Some have interpreted the public’s support for an expanded immigration program as “a counter-intuitive response to the pandemic itself: rather than focusing inward, Canadians are expressing a greater sense of social solidarity, recognizing that, in the face of the crisis, ‘we are all in this together’” (Parkin and Neuman 2020).

Whether or not one agrees with this interpretation, it is important to recognize that efforts to contain the pandemic have led to noteworthy changes in Canada’s migration strategies.⁵ Despite the federal government’s announcement of ambitious immigration targets, actual admissions shrank by 64% in the second quarter of 2020 (Hagen 2020). The admission of resettled refugees and protected persons declined by 83% (Keung 2020). Trips to Canada by residents of countries other than the United States fell by almost 96% from September 2019 to September 2020 (Statistics Canada 2021).

A majority of Canadians support strict border controls. A Nanos Research poll revealed that 81% of Canadians believe that “the Canada-U.S. border should remain closed to non-essential travellers for the foreseeable future” (Dickson 2020). The President of the Association for Canadian Studies, Jack Jedwab, reported that 52% of Canadians polled in October 2020 would prefer to maintain currently low levels of immigration over the next 12 months. Only 24% supported “gradually [increasing] immigration levels” over the same period (Jedwab 2020).

The pandemic has also generated a spike in xenophobia and racism. A July 2020 poll by IPSOS Global Public Affairs revealed that nearly 30% of Canadians reported that they had “personally been a victim of racism, up five points since [2019]” (Ipsos 2020). A survey by the Angus Reid Institute noted that 50% of 500 respondents of Chinese descent had been “called names or insulted as a direct result of the COVID-19 outbreak … [A] plurality (43%) further say they [had] been threatened or intimidated” (Angus Reid 2020). A Statistics Canada report drawing on responses submitted from “more than 43,000 Canadians … to a crowdsourcing data collection [research project] on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadian’s perceptions of safety” found that

The proportion of visible minority participants (18%) who perceived an increase in the frequency of harassment or attacks based on race, ethnicity or skin colour was three times larger than the proportion among the rest of the population (6%) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This difference was most pronounced among Chinese (30%), Korean (27%), and Southeast Asian (19%) participants (Statistics Canada 2020).

Research by Weiguo Zhang, Xiaolin Wei, Peter Wang, and Lixia Yang revealed a steep increase in anti-Asian discrimination a year into the pandemic “with more than 35 per cent of respondents indicating they had experienced an incident of discrimination” (Eligh 2021).

As this brief summary demonstrates, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a situation marked by extraordinary closure, popular support for strict controls on cross-border movement, and increased racism. The pandemic has intensified the ambivalent features of the Canadian model explored in this special issue: support for large-scale economic immigration depends on the strict policing of borders, and popular support for multiculturalism sits uncomfortably alongside worrying manifestations of racist discrimination and violence. Canadian policymakers will need to acknowledge these inconsistencies and arrive at suitable responses if they are to successfully manage the transition from relative closure to renewed openness. Whatever their merits, claims of Canadian exceptionalism in immigration policy are not sufficient to meet the looming political challenges of the post-pandemic order. The articles in this special issue of the American Review of Canadian Studies provide insights for better understanding the scope of these challenges and, potentially, meeting them effectively.

Acknowledgments

Excepting Robert Vipond’s contribution, the articles in this special issue were first presented at a workshop on “Canadian Exceptionalism in Immigration Politics and Policy” at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in November 2019. I thank Professor Peter Loewen for supporting and attending the workshop, and Lawrence Zhang for his assistance in organizing and staging the event. I am grateful for the efforts of all the contributors to this special issue – if only every group of scholars could combine such intellectual heft and professionalism! I thank the editors of ARCS, Andrew Holman and Brian Payne, for brilliantly shepherding the papers through the review process and providing much needed support to me at every step of the project. I could not have asked for better partners. I am very grateful for helpful comments from Keith Banting and Andrew Holman.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos

Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Notes

1. As I point out in this piece, support for an expansive migration policy sits alongside concomitant support for maintaining strict restrictions on cross-border movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this and other ways, Canadians express a schizophrenia, which the articles in the special issue lay bare and explore.

2. As Michael Donnelly points out in his contribution to this volume, Canadians’ embrace of multiculturalism on a symbolic level has not coincided with their acceptance of its norms.

3. Antje Ellermann (2021, 244–262) also highlights the role of Canada’s immigration bureaucracy in policy development, particularly under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party governments (2006–2015). Victor Satzewich (2016) demonstrates the crucial role played by civil servants in implementing Canada’s system of immigration preferences.

4. Elsewhere, Taylor and I have also noted that Canada’s exceptionally efficient citizenship regime transforms most immigrants into naturalized Canadian citizens and voters (Triadafilopoulos and Taylor 2022; also see Marwah, Triadafilopoulos, and White 2013; Triadafilopoulos 2012).

5. These comments build on Triadafilopoulos (2021).