The Great Unraveling, In Real Time
Nobody is coming to save us. The coming tumult can't be avoided, so what the hell, let's get our boots on.
Nine Years On From Year Zero
The projects that have been taking up all my attention lately and keeping me away from this newsletter (it’s been two weeks!) and from the National Post require attention to what should be a fairly straightforward set of facts. It’s stuff that isn’t even all that relevant to the work I’ve been up to.
The point here is that these simple, basic questions don’t have anything close to readily available, credible answers. Here’s one: Just how many people live in Canada these days?
Officially, the answer is roughly 41 million, up from 35.7 million when Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, but here’s the thing. Nobody really knows. It’s crazy. When you question starting more specific questions - Where did all these people come from? How did they get here? What’s their status here, exactly? - the answer is the same. Who the hell knows?
What the available data does reveal - data-mining in this vein isn’t easy - is pretty shocking. I’ll get into it below, after this brief digression.
A quick note on my whereabouts, and about Taiwan
I’m not in Taiwan. That’s where I’d intended to be this past week but I cancelled (or rather, I expect, postponed) my visit. I’m still buried in those projects I mentioned obliquely in the most recent Real Story editions. Taipei’s diplomatic mission was very gracious in accepting my regrets.
I’m paying attention to the increasingly urgent predicament the Taiwanese are facing, though, which is to say the spectre we’re all facing, so I’ll have more to report on all that later. For now:
Last Friday, Taiwan’s defence ministry observed 29 Chinese military aircraft and eight naval ships around the country in a single 24-hour period, and Seal Team Six is on the case now.
Even the Germans are in play. Two years ago the Germans were being pathetically obsequious, asking Beijing for permission to make a port call on the Chinese coast - Beijing said no - and in deference to Xi Jinping, Germany kept its vessels away from the Taiwan Strait. Last week, for the first time in more than 20 years, two German warships traversed the strait as they made their way from South Korea to the Philippines.
As for Canada, last year, having spent years dithering on the matter of which side it was on, the Trudeau government arranged for the frigate HMCS Ottawa to go on a ride-along through the strait with the USS Ralph Johnson. Now, Ottawa is requesting permission to act in a kind of auxiliary capacity with the Australian, British and American AUKUS initiative that those three powers didn’t trust Ottawa enough to invite to join in the first place.
Notable: Former CSIS director Dick Fadden and several former high-ranking Canadian military, security agency and diplomatic officials headed off to Taiwan last week, and it would have been fun to bump into some of them while I was making my rounds. Oh well.
What has Canada become, exactly?
There are certain “implications” to what we can say we know about the shambles Canada’s immigration system has become even before we dig down into the dirtier details. All these newcomers need roofs over their heads, for instance. Here’s some fairly reliable data: Average rents have risen from $966 to $2185 since 2015. Average home prices have gone from $435,000 to $783,000.
Prime Minister Trudeau and his ministers have been modulating their tone quite a bit in recent weeks, owing mainly to a series of foreign-student scandals and public uproars about the appearance that the whole damn system has fallen apart. It’s a big deal. For starters, it involves the slow-motion collapse of Canada’s multigenerational and multipartisan consensus on immigration.
Despite Liberal caucus retreats with issues-management exercises and workshops in crisis communications, Ottawa’s policy justifications remain more or less the same: Immigration is vitally necessary to ensure economic growth, to deal with our skills shortage and to compensate for Canadians’ low fertility and the country’s aging population. That sort of thing. I don’t buy it because it skews the lines of cause-and-effect and the data doesn’t support it, but nevermind that for now.
Just one side effect beyond the immediately obvious in housing scarcity and youth unemployment (which now exceeds 14 percent): At this rate we’ll have to bulldoze Canada’s cities and build new and comparatively unpleasant cities on top of them. And the construction industry wouldn’t be able to keep up even if our immigration rates were back to “normal.”
What follows is just another of these effects, but because it may seem indelicate to notice it I’ll first point out something that readers who have followed my work and my mischief-making over the years will be familiar with.
I have been, and remain, an unprepentant advocate for Canada as a safe haven for refugees, perhaps especially political refugees and minorities fleeing Islamist and Muslim-majority torture states. It is my conviction that Canada can and should do much more serious work in a “nation-building” exercise of our own along these lines.
The indelicate bit: Canada’s Muslim population has doubled to an estimated 1.8 million people over the past 20 years, and almost all of that growth has come since Trudeau was elected in 2015. We’ll soon be closing in on two million Muslims. Ottawa’s plan to take in some Gaza refugees is a comparatively small matter, and largely the stuff of conjecture. There are already implications, supported by reliable data.