Alexander Brown: 'Maximum Canada' failed miserably, it's time for less

As disloyal business lobbies and a Laurentian consensus attempt to fight the tide of public and private opinion on immigration reform, Canadians must stand firm.

(A job fair at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, 2024.)

Were you aware that the shattering of Canada’s long-held immigration consensus was first dreamed up behind closed French doors amongst senior Liberals at former McKinsey head Dominic Barton’s lavish Lake of Bays cottage over a weekend in 2011?

It sounds stranger than fiction, too Bond-villain-y to be true, but it indeed happened.

They called themselves the “Century Initiative”, an organisation still around today and working in partnership with the Globe and Mail. Barton, a founder and lamentable stooge for the People’s Republic of China, has since left the project, but his legacy as a backroom technocrat lives on: the reorienting of our governments towards unelected consultocracy and that now infamous pejorative known as the “McKinsey model”.

Without public consultation, that seed that was first planted in Muskoka began to take root in the time between 2011 and the “opportunity for a reset” that was Canada’s pandemic response. Following Trudeau’s anointment in 2015, Canada’s net international migration surged from 2015 to 2019, but within the realm of those numbers being unsustainable yet largely invisible to the undiscerning eye.

As we’re all well aware, a different kind of curve in need of flattening was about to make itself known, and become one of the pocketbook issues of our time: mass immigration. At present, pollster David Coletto has it as the fourth biggest issue animating young voters and sixth nationwide. If we’re honest with ourselves about the private conversations we share with friends and family, it’s a lot closer to first than it is sixth.

As Canada’s interminable lockdowns lifted and our summers fell to insufferable cosplay routines of American social grievances, with moments of self-reflection needlessly extorted into social panic and imagined genocide, the immigration balance quite immediately felt off.

A year like 2023 saw an influx of 1.2 million, so destructive that even economists at the Bank of Canada declared that Canada was now in a “population” trap born of the infrastructure and capital required for new arrivals, the business market’s sudden bottomless appetite for cheap, exploitable TFWs and fake foreign students, and the rising unemployment and housing pressures it was inflicting upon Canada’s young and working-aged. That’s all without expanding on the disastrous second-order effects on health care.

Where that’s gotten us now is entirely predictable.

“In 2025, more than half of Canadians (56%) believe the country accepts too many immigrants . . . down 2 percentage points following a dramatic increase over the two previous years.

“The new sentiment continues to reflect the majority view across most parts of the country, with some shifts over the past year. In central Canada, belief in too much immigration has increased in Quebec, while declining in Ontario; in the Prairies, this sentiment is now much less evident than a year ago in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while rising in Alberta (where two-thirds now agree there is too much immigration).”

Disloyal business lobbies and the Laurentian consensus can begrudge this failure all they like; they can attempt to fight the tide of public unrest, but it reveals the selfishness and punitive nature of their position.

In Doug Saunders’ ludicrous book, MAXIMUM CANADA: Toward a Country of 100 Million, released in 2019, the Globe columnist and mass migration maximalist, who previously authored The Myth of the Muslim Tide, attempts to argue that the benefits of a “Maximum Canada” are multifaceted.