By Riley Donovan

It seems like every week another poll is released which shows that public support for mass immigration has slipped even lower. And yet, nothing changes. A major reason for this is the concerted effort of a constellation of immigration lobby groups, perhaps none more influential than the Century Initiative.

Their main goal is clearly laid out on centuryinitiative.ca: increase Canada’s population to “100 million people by 2100” – from 40 million today. This would be accomplished through annual immigration permanently pegged at 1.25% of the population. According to their calculations, this would entail 500,000/ year starting in 2026, 560,000/year in the 2030s, 633,000/year in the 2040s, and eventually an annual immigration rate of 1.14 million in the 2090s.

Founded in 2011 by Mark Wiseman of BlackRock, and Dominic Barton of McKinsey, the Century Initiative has been meeting with politicians, producing videos, publishing lengthy reports, commissioning polls, and orchestrating a social media campaign to promote large-scale immigration.

Dominic Barton led Prime Minister Trudeau’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, with Mark Wiseman serving as a member. In 2016, the council delivered its recommendation: immigration should be raised to 450,000/yr to promote economic growth. A January 2023 report by Radio Canada revealed that the Department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) was told to incorporate this number as foundational policy.

The Trudeau government now projects an immigration rate of 500,000/yr by 2025. I have traced this astronomic figure to page 22 of the Century Initiative’s Fall 2019 report titled For a Bigger, Bolder Canada, which recommends that immigration reach 500,000/yr in 2026.

What will the Century Initiative’s Canada look like in 2100? They project that Vancouver’s population will rise from 3.3 to 11.9 million, Winnipeg’s from 0.8 to 1.7 million, Toronto’s from 8.8 to 33.5 million, and Montreal’s from 4.4 to 12.2 million. This would result in a strain on infrastructure, a dramatic increase in rent and house prices, more congestion, crowded classrooms, longer surgery backlogs, and stagnant or declining wages from labour competition – to scratch the surface.

Regular Canadians, both landed immigrants and native-born, will be greatly worse off in this scenario of endless population growth. The corporate class, however, has a clear vested interest in expanding the population: more consumers, more strip malls, more development, more cheap labour.

The Century Initiative’s partners include CIBC, Scotiabank, BMO, and TD Bank. Five of the eight Century Initiative Board of Directors have ties to the corporate sector:

• Goldy Hyder (CEO of the Business Council of Canada)
• Murad Al-Katib (Saskatchewan’s “prince of pulse crops”)
• Willa Black (Vice-President of Corporate Affairs and CSR for Cisco Canada)
• Tom Milroy (President of TOSA Investments Limited)
• Mark Wiseman (Formerly Senior Managing Director of Blackrock, now Senior Advisor to Boston Consulting Group and Hillhouse Capital)

In Trudeau’s “post-national state with no core identity” (his own words, in a 2015 interview with the New York Times), the population growth schemes of lobbyists are given undue influence over immigration policy. Citizens (including many free-thinking immigrants) who speak out against mass immigration are spuriously labelled racist.

The good news? In our parliamentary democracy, moneyed interests are ultimately powerless against an awakened population. Canadians must be unafraid to press our Members of Parliament for a return to peace, order, and good government in our Dominion – starting with an immigration policy that puts Canadians first.

Riley Donovan is an independent journalist and founder of dominionreview.ca.
You can find him on X: @valdombre