A not worthwhile Canadian initiative

Canada's population has been steadily growing due to immigration. It's now up to 34 million from 27 million in 1988. Immigrants have, not surprisingly, stayed away from Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while crowding into Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. 

Canadian Liberal Party senior statesman Robert Kaplan enthusiastically explains in the Toronto Globe & Mail that tripling the population of Canada would be terrific for Canada's ruling caste.

Fulfilling Laurier's vision: A Canada of 100 million 

We don’t have enough people. The Liberals should stand today for a strategic immigration policy of reaching 100 million by 2100. 

If we become a nation of this size: 

1. Our culture would be less strained to survive. Our arts, books, magazines, newspapers, movies and music, electronic media, with more than triple the producers and consumers would become self-sustaining. They might even become better. Our comedians could be funnier. Our elusive search for definition as Canadians could be realized.

A Canadian = A random foreigner. 

The thinking behind this is that if the population of Canada were 100,000,000, then there would be lots of cool media jobs for funny Canadian Scotsmen and Jews, whose media products would be purchased (mandatorily, under the Canadian Content Quota laws) by the teeming new masses of unfunny Muslim immigrants.

He's a man with a plan!

2. Canadians could better take up our vast opportunities. Domestic markets that justify branch plant operations today could attract Canadian entrepreneurs from the start. We would be a serious stand-alone market. Truncation could be reversed. Foreign capital coming in would be more challenged by growing Canadian domestic capital. We could still welcome foreign investors, but we would give them more of a run for their money, and see our economy benefit.

It's hard to get a billion dollars in Canada, which peeves Canadians with merely a hundred million dollars.

3. On the world stage, our skills at exercising soft power by finding project partners and leading by example could be supplemented by some “hard” power. We could address and solve problems single handedly if we wanted. Our military could be comfortably triple its present size, as could our aid programmes.

Kaplan's view of existing Canadians is kind of like Gen. Douglas Haig's as he was planning the First Battle of the Somme in 1916: Canadians are okay, I guess, but they'd be better if they could provide more cannon  fodder.

Under Kaplan's plan, Canadian political leaders could, just like American leaders, decide, off the top of their heads, to invade or bomb countries they don't like. What's the fun of being a national leader if you don't get to shoot cruise missiles at  countries that annoy you?

4. We Canadians believe we stand for something good in the world, that we have some values and some institutions worth promoting in the interests of international social harmony, peace and prosperity. At 100 million, the world audience might be more alert.

Nobody ever pays attention to America Jr. 

Kaplan then explains that while global warming is all so sad for, say, Bangladeshis, Canada  should do all it in its power to speed it up. It's damn cold in Canada.

Before turning to some conditions of the strategic plank I recommend, two points need to be made. Firstly, Canada’s ecology is changing. We oppose global warming for good reasons and should continue to do so, but we can see it coming, and it brings certain advantages to Canada. We will have much more arable land and a much broader range of foods that we will be able to grow – foods that the world needs. This is already happening. More farmers are needed. Also Northern opportunity is becoming, and has become, viable. Northern waterways are now accessible eight months a year, a window that is increasing. We need cities up there, and people for them.

How's that working out in Siberia, anyway? Is Magnitogorsk a hot real estate market? A commenter responds:

So much for all our empty talk about sustainability and the environment.

Let's bring a bunch of people over from relatively low energy consumption countries and settle them in the frigid Great White North . . . with its need for central heating, long distances, and our addiction to energy consumpton - that ought to be great for that carbon footprint that the Liberals are so concerned about. I guess that greenhouse gases are only bad when its us Albertans who are generating them - everyone else is exempt - especially if they vote Liberal. 

How exactly does this fit with the supposedly "green" side of the Liberal party's platform?

Kaplan continues:

Secondly we should not ignore the growing world population and the growing number of refugees worldwide. It is not inconceivable that world organizations may begin telling us to increase what we now consider to be a generous immigration policy. Today’s limits are stingy for us. We could get ahead of this and gain world respect for doing so. ...

We would also probably need to direct some immigrants and commit them to stay somewhere for periods of as much as 10 years. We would do this to hold support for the policy in our “crowded” cities, to satisfy some provinces as to their proportionate place in Confederation and to prepare for the optimum population distribution for our long-term opportunities. The natural preference some immigrants might have to be, for example, near their existing ethnic community in Canada might need to be challenged. Are there potential immigrants willing to accept such conditions? The fact is that there are hundreds of millions of them. Permission to come to Canada could be the greatest event for their family in its history, as it was for most of us. Such immigrants would not be subjected to the isolation of many of our foreparents, where a young couple could be completely alone on the Prairies, miles from other humans for months at a time. With the Internet, Skype, radio and television, there would be a lot to compensate for accepting conditions.

So, the idea is to round up all the new Bangladeshi immigrants each time they sneak back to their cousins' neighborhood in Toronto and send them back to their Gulag encampments in Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat. Yeah, I can see that working out. A commenter responds:

He may envisage forcibly filling Saskatchewan or Inuvik with immigrants, but it would be immediately challenged to the Supreme Court, probably successfully. Thereafter, Toronto's borders and traffic jams, already the continent's worst, would continue to grow. 

Another commenter writes:

Oh Bob, dear Bob,  

Do you really think it's possible to increase the amount of arable land by merely raising the temperature of the air? Ah, if only it were so simple. Vast tracts of the country are covered by the boreal forest, which for the most part sits on a thin layer of acidic soil, which in turn rests on bedrock. Canadian Shield that is, Bob. Good luck getting your plough to penetrate solid granite. Good luck getting wheat or corn to germinate in acidic soil. And even if by some miracle you solve those problems, what happens if climate change makes Canada's climate drier? Ask any Canadian farmer, in the middle of this heat wave, if he'd prefer drier conditions. Anyone for drought, Bob? 

And I see that you also want to build big cities way up north? On permafrost? [They'd sink.] Bob, that's where I stopped reading. That's where I decided that your article is nothing more than a very late April Fools' joke. 

The 321 comments are pretty funny.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer