By Maurice Tomlinson
Canada has long been the target of American imperialism, and the fact that we even exist as a country is a testament to Canadian resilience.
However, that resilience is again tested as the US president has launched an unprecedented on-again off-again trade war designed to crush the Canadian economy and make us America’s 51st state, in fact, if not in law. Simply put, [Donald] Trump and his billionaire cronies crave Canada’s bountiful resources as America’s domestic supply is drying up. And the raping of America’s remaining parks and public lands for mining and logging will not satisfy Americans’ insatiable demand for cheap everything. So, [Elon] Musk and Trump (in that order) have fired park rangers who will soon have nothing to protect, even in the face of a climate crisis.
But, as a wise man once said, “Never waste a crisis.” Canada’s best defence against Trump’s insidious plans is not tariffs but an aggressive growth strategy designed to responsibly leverage our own natural resources before Trump can. And that means importing labourers to do just that. Not just highly educated and professionally mobile migrants like Musk who only used Canada as a transit point to the United States. But more importantly, the country desperately needs hardworking “hewers of wood and drawers of water” who can drive the Canadian economy to a true golden age. And that is where the Caribbean and the rest of the Commonwealth come in.
It was recently announced by the Canadian Minister of Immigration that there will be an amnesty for undocumented construction workers in Canada, and it is estimated that, conservatively, Canada needs approximately 83,000 tradesmen to address its housing shortage. This is hardly enough. Two decades ago, while pursuing an MBA at the University of Calgary as a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar from Jamaica, I was caught up in a similar debate. As is happening now, the Americans were then using their economic might to impose harsh trade deals on Canada. America wanted our resources to feed their manufacturing base while relegating us to an economic backwater dependent on imported American goods. I, therefore, decided to research what the size of the Canadian domestic market needed to be to insulate the country against the recurrent shocks of American imperial designs. And with the aid of Canadian statisticians, who are some of the best in the world, I was able to demonstrate that Canada needed at least 100 million people (up from its current 41 million) to have a robust domestic market unaffected by the vagaries of American trade policies.
However, the challenge for many Canadians is that the source of this new migration is not likely to be white Europeans but rather people of colour (POC). So, despite our shared history, language, and traditions as Commonwealth nations, last year a thinly veiled racist rhetoric premised on a fabricated housing crisis was used to force the Canadian government to reverse a highly successful immigration policy which saw many Commonwealth citizens relocating to Canada. That policy made Canada the fastest-growing economy in the G7, with a robust tax base that was needed to sustain essential services like healthcare in the face of an aging population.
Let me be clear: as a former mortgage manager and real estate attorney, I know that housing is expensive in Canada’s big cities because that is where most people choose to live. At the same time, many more affordable small Canadian towns are desperate for labourers. These communities were left bereft by the immigration backtrack. Further, the sudden brake on immigration caused many Canadian colleges and universities, which relied on international fees to subsidise their operations, to cancel countless courses that are crucial to national development. Ironically, these included several construction and other trade courses that are needed to address the housing “crisis” that was used as the pretext to sharply reduce immigration in the first place!
Canada undoubtedly shot itself in the foot when it allowed populist rhetoric largely rooted in a fear of “white replacement” to halt the best defense the country has against American expansionism. This white replacement myth is best exemplified by apartheid Musk, who fled South Africa for Canada before decamping to the US. Now his life’s mission appears to be to singlehandedly make America white again (MAWA) through his multiple breeding of white children whom he barely has time to parent. This hysterical racist rhetoric also caused Musk/Trump to cancel the protected status of POC from some of the most war-torn, impoverished and decimated countries in the world while offering refugee status to Apartheid benefiting whites whose stolen lands are now rightfully being returned to their ancestral owners. Truly, as another wise person said, “For those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
So, Canada now stands at a crossroads. We can accept the help of our Commonwealth sister nations to prevent a creeping American domination by simply allowing in more skilled migrants to beef up our army of workers and consumers. Or the country can surrender to racist tropes and watch Canada remain at the mercy of arbitrary American leaders. Even an economic war needs soldiers. Canada must recruit the best from the Commonwealth or perish in this fight for its financial and political independence.
Kudos to Maurice for penning such an insightful article. His view on the urgency for a dramatic increase in the Canadian population is very much on point. Even so, Maurice’s choice of words seems to echo the sentiments of the imperialists he loathes. His use of the term “labourers” in the particular context evokes a similar type of unease as that caused by words like “alien” and “slaves”. It might have been better for him to say that Canada needs an influx of “immigrants”. Maurice’s legalistic mindset seems to be further borne out by hinting that Canada’s new “arrivals-to-be” should be relegated to being “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. Given that the plight of seasonal workers in Canada is already crying out for attention, the Maurice Doctrine seems to suggest: “You ain’t see nothing yet.” Maurice’s use of the term “people of colour” (POC) is also very bothersome and seems to bolster the kind of mental trap that caters to the “exceptionalism” of “white people”. Like the colour “black”, the colour “white” is [supposedly] not on the color spectrum. And so, it boggles the mind that so many intelligent people are so easily caught up in the fray of making the distinction between “white people” and “people of color”. Such a practice seems to be a cloistered attempt at breathing new life into the troubling term “visible minority. “As a man thinketh, so is he.” And because words or verbal concepts are the fabric with which we think, we must always be on guard against letting our words convey the wrong message. For example, the terms “enslaved Africans” and “African Slaves” or “slaves from Africa” are completely different concepts. Likewise, the terms “enslavers” and “slave masters” could never be used to connote the same idea.