OP-ED: A Conservative approach to fixing Canada’s immigration crisis
Patrick Keeney writes, "Politically, immigration remains a nearly-taboo subject, reflecting a broader elite consensus that regards immigration as an unquestionable good."
By Patrick Keeney
Canada is undergoing one of the most far-reaching demographic experiments in the Western world. In 2023 we admitted 1.25 million newcomers – a historic high – pushing our population past 40 million. Immigration now accounts for 98 per cent of national population growth, driven by deliberate Liberal policy under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Despite growing public concern, the much-touted “cutbacks” Trudeau announced just before his departure in January set a target of 395,000 new permanent residents for 2025 – plus an astounding 673,000 temporary foreign workers, seasonal workers and international students. Pledges to “stabilize” population growth have done almost nothing, widening the gap between policy and public sentiment.
The consequences are severe. Housing affordability has deteriorated further in cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, where average home prices exceed $700,000 and one-bedroom rents surpass $2,500. Public services – including healthcare, transit and education – are overwhelmed. Wait times for healthcare are increasing, infrastructure is under pressure and the quality of life is declining.
Canada is under worsening economic pressure, with growth largely an illusion. While GDP rises, GDP per capita is falling, which means Canadians are getting poorer. Productivity stagnates, capital investment declines, inflation eats away at everything and low-wage migration intensifies the problem.
Yet politically, immigration remains a nearly-taboo subject, reflecting a broader elite consensus that regards immigration as an unquestionable good. The “progressive” left brands any dissent as xenophobia or racism, while the corporate sector promotes immigration as an economic driver, downplaying its social costs.
Even conservatives, eager to defend the working class, are hesitant to challenge the idea that openness to the world equates to moral superiority. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre campaigned vigorously on housing and inflation in the recent federal election but steered clear of immigration.
This silence exposes a moral and philosophical tension rooted in competing visions of human belonging: liberal universalism versus conservative particularism.
The Liberal Universalist Vision
The dominant worldview among Canada’s elites – government, universities, media, NGOs and most corporations – is liberal universalism (which can also be described as cosmopolitanism or globalism). In this perspective, individuals are viewed as rights-bearing abstractions, essentially interchangeable with one another, unmoored from history, culture or place. Nations are mere legal constructs, and loyalty to one’s own is regarded not as a virtue but as a form of chauvinism to be overcome.
This outlook – predominant across most of the Western world – underpins the Liberals’ immigration policy, in which Canada is viewed, as Trudeau famously put it, as a “post-national state” with a duty to welcome vast numbers of newcomers.
To implement this moral vision, universalism’s followers construct intricate legal and bureaucratic systems – human rights commissions, diversity protocols, equity audits – aimed not merely at protecting individuals but at reshaping them. In the process, universalism disconnects moral reasoning from the lived inheritance of tradition, custom and personal experience.
Under universalism, loyalty to family, community or nation is redefined as bias, and belonging recast as exclusion, inverting what for nearly two millennia was viewed as the natural “order of love” (ordo amoris). Liberalism – initially a promise of freedom – coupled with universalism risks leaving the individual orphaned in a world where compassion is borderless yet impersonal. As Patrick Deneen observes in Why Liberalism Failed, this has fostered “an order of atomized individualism ultimately hostile to the ties that bind human beings to one another.”
The Conservative Counterpoint
In contrast, the conservative tradition views human beings not as abstract agents but as embodied and rooted, shaped by the specific loyalties cultivated in family, community and nation. From this perspective, love of one’s own is the essential foundation of social cohesion, and moral obligation radiates outward from the near to the far.
The late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton articulated this view through his concept of oikophilia – the love of home. For Scruton, the nation transcends a mere contractual arrangement or administrative convenience; it is a moral community unified by shared history, culture and mutual obligation. “The nation-state is a home,” Scruton wrote, “the source of our sense of belonging.” He cautioned that the abstract rights promoted by universalist ideologies are a poor substitute for the tangible duties of citizenship.
The distinguished philosopher Bernard Williams – no conservative, but a deeply humane thinker – also recognized the limits of abstract moral universalism. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Williams rejected moral theories that ignore the situated nature of human life, writing, “We are located beings, and our obligations are shaped by that fact.”
This sensibility has long been intuited in literature. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens satirized the dislocation of moral concern through the character of Mrs. Jellyby, whose “telescopic philanthropy” was focused earnestly on distant Africans while her own children languished in squalor. G.K. Chesterton, with characteristic wit, captured the same irony in verse:
The chapels and the villas where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow man
And hate my next-door neighbour.
Today, this tradition finds political expression in U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance who, in his recent speech at the Munich Security Conference, argued that “a country that does not prioritize its own citizens is a failed country.” In this view, to love rightly is not to love indiscriminately, but to honour the hierarchy of moral obligation grounded in nearness, kinship and civic belonging.
Canada’s Crisis of Meaning
Canada’s immigration crisis is, at heart, a philosophical reckoning. Liberal universalism envisions a borderless world of rights-bearing individuals, each equally entitled to any land. But real nations are not abstractions – they are moral communities, held together by shared affections, memory and obligation.
Globalist elites dismiss public unease as xenophobia, yet this unrest is better read as a plea for rootedness, a desire to restore a moral order that prizes kinship, culture and civic loyalty over the disembodied ideals of universalism.
Canada now stands at a crossroads: it can abandon its inherited identity, shaped by generations of civic loyalty, cultural tradition and ordered liberty, for a borderless, “post-national” ideal, or it can renew the bonds that have long sustained a just and compassionate society, restoring the ordo amoris – the rightful ordering of love.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Patrick Keeney is a Canadian writer who divides his time between Kelowna, B.C. and Thailand.
It causes me to ponder the policies of indigenous ownership of basically much of Canada, our requirement to thank them continuously in speech yet push inclusion of every immigrant no matter what and deny whiteness.
I once knew an immigrant from Yugoslavia whose suggestion for ending the bitter military and paramilitary fighting going on in the ex-Yugoslavia was to air-deliver boxes of the most powerful rifles and let all the residents tto the bitter end. Given our ability if, perhaps, not desire, to invite those who are from war-torn countries but are missing all the action, we should reserve a piece of land, say, near Churchill, where all those who want to fight their old enemies here in Canada, be free to annihilate one another, since in the absence of police is what they would be doing anyway. My friends in the polar bear community are all for it.