Zak Mndebele: Mass immigration cannot save a dying, infertile Canada

Canada faces demographic winter, a shattered immigration consensus, and a choice between decline and pronatal renewal, writes Guest Contributor Zak Mndebele.

Zak Mndebele is a Vancouver-based conservative activist and campaign veteran.

Canada is in crisis.

It has become a country where age is valued over youth; where division is valued over unity; where managed decline is valued over prosperity; where polite dissembling is valued over bold and confident truth-telling, and where the freedom to die is exalted over the courage to live.

The Canadian has gone from the proud and martial Empire Loyalist, to the meek and apologetic globalist peacenik; from the frostbitten pioneer and rum-bitten voyageur, to the sheltered urbanite and the suburban retiree; from the people who dared forge a nation with a railway and a vision, to a people whose representatives dare not affirm its right to exist.

Many have written about the productivity crisis depressing the Canadian economy, the heightened pressures on infrastructure and the cost of living caused by record-high immigration, the disappearance of a shared culture, the loss of faith in the nation’s institutions, our decaying armed forces, and the ominous realisation that a shared interest in a unified Canada cannot be taken for granted. These challenges point to a central problem; Canada has chosen to die. And nowhere is this death wish more apparent than in the biggest crisis of all: demographic winter.

The failure of a population to replace itself has gone by many names over the ages. Race-suicide was one. Fertility collapse is another. But whether one calls it population decline, counter-natality, or the ever-pithy “birth dearth”, one thing is clear: a nation that does not reproduce does not survive. If Canada wishes to secure its future, it must instantiate an aggressive campaign to address the birth crisis, and must do so on both cultural and economic lines.

“But Zak, why does this matter? Should we not go gently into the good night? Are we not consuming too many resources, demanding too many things, filling too many spaces? Is it not better for our planet, our countrymen, and our sanity if we are fewer? Are collectives not imaginary, and individuals alone real? Why should we care about the survival of a phantom atavism, whose hauntings caused terrible madnesses, and caused countless men to slaughter and to die vainly for hued fabrics and imaginary lines?”

Good question. Let’s start with the economics: In the absence of pronatal policy, declining fertility rates mean a declining labour force and shrinking consumer base, risking the Japanification of the Canadian economy, that is, the long-term entrenchment of stagnant GDP growth, structural deflation (only headed off by aggressive, expansionary monetary policy), low productivity growth, massive government debt, large and growing deficits, and weak business investment.

Under these conditions, the average worker will be worked harder, taxed more, and will watch as national budgets are consumed by entitlement spending and debt servicing costs, as inequality is entrenched and precarity becomes the rule, and as their preferences are overridden by a large and powerful gerontocracy desperate to maintain the status quo. And while three decades of stagnation have yet to fall in Japan, Canada is dealing with resurgent regional alienation, accelerating brain drain, rising uncertainty in the legal security of private property, and a very large, very powerful, and very culturally similar neighbour with none of these problems.

Simply put, while underperformance is a manageable disappointment in Japan, failing to reach our potential as a nation might very well prove existential.

“Yeah, but you’ve made a mistake, Canada’s labour pool doesn’t depend on natural increase. We import millions of people each year to avoid this exact problem. Stop fearmongering! If we invite the world’s workers, we need never worry about our failure to produce our own.”

A common view. But, an unwise one.

Although Canada has, for the past few decades, maintained a stable immigration consensus, the unprecedented spike of post-COVID newcomers (call it the Trudeauwave) has shattered it, and likely indefinitely. Alongside the economic challenges listed above, the Trudeauwave has resulted in the worst youth unemployment in years, has provided Canadians with both rumours and direct examples of visa fraud and settlement scams, has seen a wave of false asylum claims generate undue processing backlogs, and has resulted in thousands, perhaps even millions of illegal overstayers and court-ordered deportees slipping through the cracks as the system’s ability to process them is exhausted.

Simply put, these conditions do not suggest that a migrant-tolerant mood is on the horizon; if conditions in the UK, Denmark, France, Sweden, Finland, Germany, and the United States are any guide, Canadians are likely to want the opposite of mass migration in the near future, not more of it. Thus, the political window to continue this method is closing; if the public will not tolerate more migration, then it is imperative to find other ways to replenish Canada’s workforce.

Leaving this aside, however, reliance on immigration to offset population decline comes with other challenges. As mentioned earlier, large immigration waves have resulted in exorbitant housing costs, strained the capacity of Canadian hospitals and schools, and have contributed to Canada’s declining per-capita GDP and weak productivity. By inflating land values, mass immigration has caused investment capital to flow overwhelmingly into the housing market, inflicting a form of Dutch Disease onto the economy as a whole.

All of these factors have contributed to both the rising cost of living and relatively stagnant wage growth; unfortunately, since incomes in Canada are positively correlated with fertility, this has had a suppressive effect on births, with the 2020s seeing the lowest Canadian fertility rate in its 158-year history.

Naturally, neither population ageing nor the dependency ratio is helped by conditions encouraging young workers to leave the country in droves. Since the Canadian economy is stagnant, investment capital is scarce, and skilled professionals are leaving for greener pastures, political leaders face a policy fork: reverse this dynamic through immigration restrictions, substantial fiscal austerity, and an assertive developmental and pronatalist agenda, or tweak the status quo, make noises toward the former, while quietly continuing the same policies in bulk. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which of the two is better for the average Canadian, and which of the two paths we are currently taking.

“Ok, I get the economics here, and I agree that we should do something about this, but what does this have to do with Canada “dying”? It sounds like we’ve made a few bad policy choices and will need to course correct, but that’s hardly an indication of a cultural death-wish; I think you may need to touch grass.”

Maybe I do. But then again, maybe I don’t.

While the global birth decline has been attributed to a range of causes, from urbanisation, to rises in the cost of living, to increases in female workforce participation, to the spread of birth control measures, to declines in religiosity and marriage rates, to climate anxiety and even general mental illness, economists largely agree that the essential causal mechanism is the opportunity cost of childbirth. The logic is simple: as societies become more complex, their members are surrounded by many more options for goods and services, and are generally forced to undergo long periods of training and economic stabilisation in order to access them.

Thus, children must now compete with a far wider array of goods and services, as well as with the parent’s potential to acquire and experience an even wider range of the above; in addition, any child brought into this system now requires enough parental and societal investment to make them market-competitive. Consequently, the absolute cost of the child has risen, its relative value has declined, and urban strivers who may have once settled down in their earlier years are encouraged to maximise their potential and the potential of their future offspring by delaying family formation.

However, it goes deeper than this. Consider the following example:

Israel.

Israel is one of the only advanced economies that maintains a fertility rate well above replacement, even among the non-religious. Israel is particularly instructive because its high fertility rate occurs alongside a thoroughly modern society, contrary to high-fertility stereotypes, Israel is technologically advanced, highly educated, and highly gender-equal.

Most unusually, Israel’s high fertility rate occurs alongside substantial urbanisation, and while its Haredi Jewish population is both unusually numerous and unusually fecund with a 6.1 TFR, even secular Jews have birthrates substantially higher than the average Canadian (TFR 2.2–2.6). Some might argue that this stems from the country’s extremely generous raft of pro-family subsidies; while these likely have some effect, other countries have implemented similar measures with far less dramatic outcomes. Some might also point to Israel’s historically strong economic performance and concentration of high-value, high-productivity tech and service jobs. But again, countries like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea have similar economic profiles and similar family policies, yet, all three nations have among the world’s lowest fertility rates.

No, Israeli fertility rates appear rooted in something more fundamental, something cultural. Whether this is due to the ubiquity of religion, a desire to affirm life in the face of historical tragedy, a firm commitment to the collective survival of the Jewish nation, or a combination of these and other factors, something seems to have made the desire for children qualitatively distinct from the desire for other goods, and qualitatively superior in Israeli preference hierarchies.

Israel has managed to buck the trend because something about Israeli society creates childbirth incentives capable of superseding individual calculation, either by functionally lowering the cost to zero, or by raising the value above the median urban lifestyle. That is, despite living in a modern society with access to modern goods, having a service-dominated, productive economy, and having both a secular democracy and substantial gender equality, counter-natal economics have been completely neutralised by pronatal cultural influences. While this is likely a multivariate effect (social pressure is another, less highlighted factor), all signs point towards a general elevation of communal and collective interests over narrow individualism as the thematic contributor.

Thus, from this example, it becomes clear that a pronatal cultural paradigm implicitly prioritises social cohesion, indeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say it represents an inversion of the postwar liberal consensus.

Postwar liberalism is hyper-individualistic, sceptical of common-good rationales for public policy, implicitly blank-slatist and explicitly anti-nationalistic, and is, by default, suspicious of collective meaning-making enterprises. This creates a tendency toward rootless, atomised, and arguably nihilistic cultural values, which not only enable policies that contribute to communal breakdown and anomie, but which also reproduce apathy and pessimism among the broader populace.

In advancing this pose, it argues by default that consumerism is the highest good, that individual consumption can, of its own accord, produce individual fulfilment, and that intangible, non-commodified sources of meaning are quaint superstitions at best, and dangerous, radicalising forces at worst. This blend between epistemic materialism and political individualism results in most of the cultural ills our editors and contributors have highlighted; from visible urban decay, to the collapse of a shared Canadian culture, to the loss of faith in a common national enterprise, and to the too-prevalent tendency to view the nation as the hostile subject of post-Marxist deconstructive critique, rather than a grounding axis linking the subject to their past, their present, and their future.

Pronatalism, by contrast, implicitly rejects all of the above. In place of hyper-individualism, it substitutes the common good, first, in the form of the family, second, in the form of the community, and third, in the form of the broader society.

In other words, pronatalism reasserts the value of Gemeinschaft against the atomising forces of post-industrial Gesellschaft, recentering the rooted, communally influenced human subject as a counter to the abstract, market-defined individual. In this vision, the child becomes a symbol of humanistic embodiment, converting economised personal relations into vectors of post-material fulfilment. From there, the emphasis shifts from the individual satisfaction of the parent-consumer, to the well-being of the child; since the child is necessarily under the stewardship of the parent, the answers necessarily must address factors the parent cannot resolve alone, meaning, that to secure the well-being of the child, both the well-being of the household and of the wider community must take priority.

It becomes clear, then, that the child’s interest is best secured by providing him with safe and functional communities; with schools aiming to equip him for gainful and meaningful employment; with an economy that presents him with a reasonable chance at equalling or surpassing his parents’ status; with a culture that grants him a sense of place and a connection to a higher purpose; and with a society that remains welcoming, familiar, and navigable as he ages. The market, of course, can enable and enhance all of the above, but as the Israeli example highlights, successful pronatalism would consider market-values secondary and not primary.

“Sounds neat! But this is a lot of high-flown rhetoric, what does this mean for Canada? How does this relate to the average person? How does any of this get implemented?”

Fair questions. Let’s begin.

The most compelling vision for Canada’s pronatalist future is one where the primary barriers to family formation have been eliminated, and the culture’s values have shifted in a manner enabling pride and confidence in the future.

As a political platform, pronatalism addresses nearly all the collective challenges facing the younger generations, more to the point, it entails their solution. When welding a political coalition together, it is most effective to bind and sublimate its common interests within an actionable and compelling vision; pronatalism accomplishes this by tying all the varying issues into a single objective, family formation.

Although some occasionally regard pronatalism with suspicion, both left and right have a common interest in ensuring that the youngest generations have the means to form and provide for their families.

Indeed, this is an issue of generational significance, since those who now form the backbone of the working-age population are those who stand to gain the most from targeted pronatal assistance; this programme entails an urgent collective emphasis on our well-being. Should these efforts succeed, we will ensure the presence of more workers in the economy capable of keeping elder care systems solvent, will reduce intergenerational polarisation, and will ensure a more cohesive culture in our present and our old age.

In the future, it will also ensure that our country remains a source of innovation, dynamism, and youthful energy for many years to come. In short, pronatalism serves as a comprehensive package and legitimising myth enabling further action along all lines most central to the youngest generations.

As far as explicit policy recommendations are concerned, the following themes should be emphasised: first, any pronatal agenda must address major cost of living challenges.

Young people not only require gainful, stable employment, but houses capable of supporting large families. It is especially important to address declines in male incomes and male employment, as rises in each are correlated with greater natality in advanced economies, consequently, jobs and sectors especially likely to employ men should receive special focus (obvious examples: resource jobs, trades, and the military). This, of course, makes the health of the economy a vital concern, not only for pronatal reasons, but also as a means to reverse brain drain and restore competitiveness.

Second, cultural pride and national cohesion should be emphasised, not discouraged. In order to be effective, this cannot limit itself to superficialities, cultural pride must become an expression of both living and historical consciousness, and the future of the collective body must take centre stage in the minds of those who will lead it.

As a rule, culture is produced by the people and at best, is only guided by the elite; the temptation to manufacture and impose culture from above results in hollow, mockable propaganda, not a resonant mythos. Institutions should, therefore, aim to reflect the people’s will rather than mould it, and should encourage the people to understand itself rather than aim to suppress their expression.

Third, because barriers to the above are pervasive and structural, reviving Canada’s collective ethos will require a frank and comprehensive assessment of the political and economic costs and benefits implied in doing so.

Anyone who would contribute to this discussion must be prepared to jettison any lingering pieties or legitimising myths, and instead employ cold reason and realpolitik. We will not resolve problems caused by cultural retreat by employing the logic that created it.

Zak Mndebele is a conservative activist, and a former director of field operations and constituency assistant.