GLOBE AND MAIL: It was in 1947 that "Canadian citizen" replaced "British subject" as the legal description of a voting participant in this democratic society. One might think that by now the transition would be complete, the concept of our citizenship mature. It is not. It has not kept up with changes in the world around us. Canadian law on citizenship and immigration is in need of another radical revision.
Most of us are proud to belong to a nation welcoming diverse peoples and accepting many cultures. But present law permits, even encourages, confusion of loyalties and plurality of citizenship. The sense of a Canadian identity is increasingly diluted. It need not be.
In the beginning, in the 1867 escape from colonies to nation, what it meant to be Canadian was plain. It was to be different from American. As the United States emerged from its bloody civil war, and found purpose in the manifest destiny of rolling west and potentially north, determination to have no part of it was equally strong in the British and the French.
The BNA Act was soon supported by the National Policy of tariffs and the railroad. That was not enough, however, to build an economy from sea to sea. Farmers from a cold climate were needed to break the Prairie sod. It was immigration from central Europe that made it possible for Quebec and the old British colonies to grow into a nation state. We remained a dynamic economy. In the mid-twentieth century, particularly, remarkable and diversified growth called for many new workers. At first they came from Britain and Europe, but prosperity there soon diminished those sources. The temper of the 1960s in any case called for openness to all peoples, who have since come especially from south and east Asia.
It is, however, a new imperative that calls for them. Canadians have become much less productive of offspring. Our fertility rate is barely two-thirds of the population replacement level. We are, of course, far from unique in that respect. But our population is already slight in relation to our resources. Smaller numbers would damagingly increase the burden of infrastructure overheads imposed by our geography. They would reduce the economies of scale possible for an economy whose manufacturing and service sectors are already challenged by growth elsewhere. Much as the world as a whole will eventually benefit from lower birth rates, it will be a long time before both economic and social pressures cease to call for migration to Canada, migration substantial in relation to our otherwise declining population. Canada Is Much More Than a Hotel >>> By Tom Kent
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – Canada)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback – Canada)
