Tony Keller, Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong. Toronto: Sutherland House, 2025. 101 pages.
Tony Keller, editorial writer for the Globe and Mail, has been writing about immigration for decades, largely from an economic perspective. This new book sets out his views on how to get immigration right again in Canada. But beyond this, it gives him the opportunity to approach the issue as a historian – which, he says in his Globe bio, is what he hoped to be when starting out.
The short book provides the basis for a series of lectures he gave under the auspices of McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy. It is most likely to reach his Globe readers as well as students, academics and some on-the-ground actors involved in the field of immigration. The hope is presumably that it will also reach the desks of policymakers and decision-makers, particularly at the federal level. I certainly hope it does reach those desks, but I would add that those decision-makers will need to look at other analyses as well.
The fact is that the immigration system in Canada is incommensurately complex – far more than it should be or needs to be. In his acknowledgements, Keller mentions that his only regret was “that many of the things (he) asked (his team) to research, and which they diligently tracked down, ultimately ended up on the cutting-room floor.” Understandable.
A good reminder of how Canadian immigration evolved
Keller, the historian, sets out to put the current state of Canada’s immigration system into historical context. His fascinating and well presented account reminds us that it took Canada well over a century to get the system “right.” His definition of a successful Canadian immigration system: “Welcome immigrants. Many, but not too many. Mostly educated and skilled. Always legal.”
Two chapters of the book cover the history of immigration to and from and within North America from the 18th to the 20th century and Canadian and American immigration policy since the late 19th century. The story of the movement back and forth over the border through the centuries provides a useful reminder of how tied the two nations are, well beyond trade.
We learn that during the 19th and most of the 20th century, immigration policy north of the border was based on increasing the population for defence, economic and settlement purposes – essentially “claiming” the land. In Keller’s words, “The leaders of pre-1960s Canada generally assumed that the country was underpopulated, and that to catch up to the US economy it needed to catch up to the US level of settlement. Canada wanted immigrants. But Canada also had a long list of people it did not want.” He sums up the policy as: “Encourage immigration. Preferably farmers. Preferably British. Non-whites discouraged.”
In 1962, all reference to ethnicity, nationality or race was finally removed from the selection criteria for economic permanent immigration (called “non-sponsored” at the time, since family-related immigration was much more prominent). The real turning point in modern Canadian immigration policy came in 1966, when Jean Marchand, the first minister of Manpower and Immigration, brought forward a White Paper on Immigration, which established the famous points system for those applying to settle in Canada to work without family ties. The White Paper argued that Canada no longer needed “strong-backed immigrants” but “should prioritize skilled and educated immigrants, while reducing the focus on immigration through family sponsorship, which put the accent on unskilled people.”
Keller affirms that the policy paper “opened with a tip of the hat to the long-standing Big Canada idea, then immediately challenged it” with its stricter selection proposals. In fact, when one digs down into the document, one finds, “The Government’s view is that it is in Canada’s interest to accept, and if need be to encourage, the entry to this country each year of as many immigrants as can be readily absorbed.” The only reference in Keller’s book to absorptive capacity is a quote from Mackenzie King in 1947. Apparently King couldn’t define it then, and there is still no consensual definition today.
The question of volumes
Nevertheless, the 1966 White Paper did come back to the question of volumes: “Beneficial though immigration is, there obviously is an upper limit to the rate at which immigrants can be absorbed and make their maximum contribution. This absorptive capacity is not, however, a statistic. The number of immigrants who can be absorbed depends on the level of their qualifications and how adaptable to Canadian society they are.” So, no measure of absorptive capacity and no ceilings were proposed.
In fact, although it’s not specifically mentioned in the book, in 1976, ten years after the White Paper, the first legislation that established the planning of ceilings for permanent immigration was adopted after public consultations on a 1974 Green Paper on Immigration. While I was not able to access a copy of the Green Paper, a couple of other sources provide some clues to how thinking was evolving around immigration volumes.
Dr. Freda Hawkins, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, was a member of the Department of Manpower and Immigration’s Advisory Board on the Adjustment of Immigrants and a consultant to the Canadian Immigration and Population Study, which was responsible for the Green Paper. In an article published in 1975, she praised the points system adopted in 1967 for linking immigration more effectively to the needs of the Canadian labour market, but explained that its inadequacies lay “mainly in the fact that it provides very limited means to achieve control over the total volume of our annual immigration movement, and no means to ensure a reasonable and equitable regional representation in a world sense.”¹ Moreover, “we have entirely failed to relate it to other policy areas such as education, housing, transportation and urban development, nor have we placed it in the context of population growth and longer-term national objectives.” (This has still to be achieved 50 years later!)
Concerns about population growth were linked to factors such as the low birthrate, which had dipped below the replacement rate for the first time in the 1971 census, hitting 1.9 per cent. Controlling numbers also became important because applications for immigrant status were increasing and creating administrative backlogs. The concentration of immigration in the major urban centres was becoming noticeable, raising the question of regional distribution.
We can see the effects of evolving policy in a chronology from the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) which noted that in 1970 “the number of people applying for immigration status after entering Canada had ‘exceeded expectations’ and led to a backlog. There were about 8,000 applications in 1967, 28,000 in 1969 and 31,000 in 1970.” At the same time, “immigration from Asia and the Caribbean represented over 23% of the total, compared with 10% four years previously.” Then in 1971–72, “large numbers (possibly 30,000–40,000) of draft dodgers and deserters unwilling to fight in Vietnam … found refuge in Canada.” In November 1972, “the right to apply for immigrant status while in Canada was revoked.”
The diversification of immigration noted by the CCR, once discrimination by origin was eliminated from the selection criteria, was also creating some backlash that showed up during the public consultations on the Green Paper. An interesting description is found in Bob Chodos’s book The Caribbean Connection.² The government may have felt that setting up a formal process to control volumes would help restore trust in the management of the immigration system.
Ironically, Hawkins sums up much of the debate raised by the Green Paper with “The vital question is – how big do we want Canada to be and by the end of this century?” No target was set for 2000, 35 years later. In the current century, influential voices have proposed a “Big Canada” target of 100 million Canadians by 2100. It would turn the immigration system on its head.
The breakdown of the system
In his telling of how this system broke down in the mid-2010s, Keller has some interesting new insights, notably about the Justin Trudeau Liberals who came to power at the end of 2015. He describes an initiative in March 2016 by the new immigration minister, John McCallum, who sought the advice of 13 well-known economists. In their report, submitted in May 2016, they praised the points system for selecting highly skilled immigrants with the human capital to contribute quickly to the Canadian economy and recommended against using immigration to bring in undereducated workers to fill low-paid jobs. Their emphasis was on quality, avoiding the question of quantity. The recommendations were almost immediately overtaken by political priorities.
Also in March 2016, Trudeau named his Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which proposed expanding the Canadian population to 100 million by 2100. The primary mechanism for achieving this goal turned out to be the two-step immigration system we have today, with people arriving with temporary permits and applying for permanent residency once they’ve accumulated the diploma and/or work experience required. Keller refers to this system as the “side-door stream.”³
The book sets out the stunning rise in temporary immigration over the years before and after the pandemic, concentrating on the increase in study permits and permits issued through the low-wage stream of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). It documents in detail the scams that unfolded, particularly in Ontario, to use the study permits not only to finance Ontario colleges but also to work while claiming to study, with the goal of obtaining permanent residency.
The author does not specify that the spectacular rise in numbers was possible because there were no ceilings on temporary immigration. He does underline that this lack of planning allowed the climbing numbers to remain unnoticed for so long. The book also details the evolution of asylum claims over this period and the influence of Trump’s policies.
Missing from the book is any mention of the International Mobility Program (IMP), which was split off from the TFWP at the time of Stephen Harper’s reform in 2014. This program grew so quickly that it surpassed study permits by 2023 – by exactly how many it is difficult to say because the federal government does not publish complete numbers for the program. It is a hodgepodge of more than 113 different types of work permits that are not linked to labour market needs, most of which were created by a simple ministerial decree.
In his assessment, Keller sets out the flaws in the Big Canada theory, noting that there is no link between the size of a country’s population and its economic performance or the happiness of its people and taking down the “aging demographic” arguments. He documents the negative economic effects of the excess of largely low-paid temporary immigrants and describes how, when these effects started to be felt, it eroded public confidence in the whole immigration system. This last factor is one of the most critical, in Keller’s opinion, since social cohesion is dependent on Canadians’ trust in the management of the system.
Fixes for the broken system
Having described the evolution of the system, Keller reverts to his editorialist’s role as he describes the current Canadian immigration system as a door with five walls. The first three walls are the three oceans to the west, north and east. The fourth is a land border with a country that, until very recently, has been an ally and the world’s magnet for immigration. The fifth wall is made of paper: bureaucratic barriers such as visas, temporary permits and selection criteria by programs or by points. He makes several proposals to restore control to the system, to “welcome immigrants. Many, but not too many. Mostly educated and skilled. Always legal.”
Linked to the last criterion, “always legal,” I would suggest that there is a sixth wall, seldom mentioned since it raises the taboo issue of deportation or expulsion.
Keller notes that in 2019, Canada didn’t really know how many formerly legal temporary residents had overstayed their visas. This is true. The Auditor General published a scathing report in 2020 on immigration removals, stating “that poor data quality resulted in cases missing from the agency’s removal inventories.” But it is no longer the case. The federal government has been tracking entries and exits for close to four years, long enough to have a pretty good idea how many people with expired permits or visas have not left the country, though it does not make this information public and these people are not counted in the StatsCan quarterly demographic reports. Keller is right to point out that net immigration numbers are not as reliable as they could be.
The solution Keller suggests for overstayers is to make it more difficult for people to work without a valid work permit. This is certainly one of the measures that should be put in place. Others need to be conceived and applied.
The optics of deportation are rarely good. Even in the United States, Trump’s aggressive approach to deportation has increased the proportion of Americans who see immigration as a “good thing” from 64 per cent in 2024 to 79 per cent in July 2025. Canadians are even more repelled by reports of people settled and contributing to their communities being “summarily” kicked out of their homes and sent back to dubious countries. Calls for deportations are drowned out by calls for regularization. Just getting back to almost always legal will not be easy. Staying there will also require administrative change.
Keller’s other proposals for improving the system put the emphasis squarely on economic outcomes and the selection criteria used to achieve them – by, for example, reestablishing the points system to select highly skilled immigrants, aiming for the economic category to comprise two thirds of permanent immigration, and gearing study permits to those who pay the most tuition and will end up with high-paying jobs.
With respect to “many, but not too many,” Keller suggests taking “immigration levels back to where they were when the immigration consensus was strong,” between 2000 and 2015. The average intake over this period was 0.75 per cent of the population. In 2025, that would mean a target of 310,000, much lower than the current target of 395,000. This is a disappointingly arbitrary proposal ignoring “community capacity”: available housing and services, job vacancies, etc.
As for asylum seekers, Keller wants the refugee-determination process speeded up. This goes without saying, but the majority of claims are accepted, so this will, in the short term at least, increase the proportion of people admitted in the humanitarian category, thereby skewing the two thirds objective for the economic category.
Temporary immigration, according to Keller, should be restricted to high-skill, high-wage temporary jobs. No more importing cheap labour.
One can disagree with a few (but not many) of the solutions Tony Keller proposes. Also, the limited format of the text results in missing out on several important aspects of the subject. Nevertheless, this book, well written as it is and partly because of its format, is an important addition to the reading list for those interested in immigration and particularly for decision-makers.
Postscript
The book does leave us with one terrifying prospect that could make all this debate and research and planning and policymaking moot – if Trump pulled out of the Safe Third Country Agreement. While there has been much speculation about this agreement, mostly around whether the United States is a safe country for certain groups, it’s the first time I have been confronted with the prospect of its outright termination. However, it’s clear in Article 10(2) that either party may terminate the agreement with six months’ written notice. These days, that could mean a post on Truth Social!
Notes
¹ Freda Hawkins, “Canada’s Green Paper on Immigration Policy,” International Migration Review, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 1975), pp. 237–50.
² Robert Chodos, The Caribbean Connection: The Double-Edged Canadian Presence in the West Indies (Toronto: Lorimer, 1977), chapter 13.
³ The right to apply for permanent residency while in Canada was reinstated some time between 2000 and 2005.
