Geoff Russ: Don’t compare today’s immigrants to the Loyalists of early Canada

“Our Loyalist ancestors were immigrants,” wrote journalist Stephen Maher on X earlier this week. He was defending the possibility of ramping up immigration into Canada, imploring his counterparts to understand that Canada’s standard of living will suffer without a drastic increase in the population.

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Considering that the decline in Canadians’ standard of living has been commensurate with creeping mass immigration, his proposition invites suspicion.

But is that what the Loyalists are only good for now — publicity for immensely flawed 21st-century immigration policies?

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As a defence of the Liberal party’s ongoing migration regime, it is extraordinary in the worst way.

The same defence could have been made of the Trudeauwave, the historic expansion of the number of people living in Canada under the former prime minister. During that tsunami that lasted from 2016 to 2024, 1.4 million people entered Canada annually on a temporary or permanent basis, with enormous consequences. For one, 500,000 or more are currently in the country illegally; most of whom entered legally.

Also, consider that in April 2022, the federal government announced that many employers could double their permitted share of low-wage temporary foreign workers from 10 to 20 per cent. Seven sectors, including accommodation and food services, were permitted to employ up to 30 per cent.

Due to recruitment difficulties during the early pandemic, employers began complaining that they were being forced to raise wages and train Canadian-born workers. Rather than siding with young and working people, Ottawa caved immediately to the corporate sector and flung open the doors to foreign labour. It was unfair and outright dishonourable. To shoehorn that policy in alongside the bravery of the United Empire Loyalists could be a bad joke, at best.

Canada’s modern policy of human quantitative easing is aimed at keeping labour plentiful and cheap, juicing the coffers of suspect, mediocre colleges, and driving up rent by overrunning the housing supply with people. It is good for the financial reports of McDonald’s, Conestoga College and slumlords. It also makes GDP look better on paper while making everything else about Canada worse. International students and temporary workers are treated as cash factories and little else.

Loyalists, on the other hand, hardly need an introduction. They were British colonists forced to leave their homes in the old Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution, suffering violence and persecution for staying loyal to the King. Their haven was, unsurprisingly, another British colony under the same King, with the same language and churches and shillings for their currency. It cannot even be called immigration in the same sense as today, any more than it is immigration for a Torontonian to move to Calgary.

The Loyalists formed one of the first major communities of Anglo-Canada through their settlements in Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritimes. With them came the predominance of English in what became Ontario, along with the political, social and cultural habits of Britain and, most importantly, their loyalties.

It is to the federal government’s discredit that its own account of the Loyalists is outclassed, ironically, by that of its counterparts in the United States.

The best the Government of Canada’s website can produce is: “Loyalists came from various ethnic backgrounds and supported the British for different reasons.… Some white Loyalists brought enslaved people with them when they settled in what is now Canada.”

Grossly, the stubborn quest to artificially shoehorn American antebellum slavery into our national narrative has had great success.

Compare that with the American National Park Service, which sympathetically describes the Loyalists as people who were “Forced from their homes and persecuted at the end of the American Revolution, United Empire Loyalists sought refuge in British Canada. When war broke out in 1812, Loyalist families committed themselves to defending the British Crown and their lands for a second time.

“The Americans’ failure to conquer Canada evoked a powerful sense of vindication for many Loyalists who managed to survive both conflicts. Those survivors came to form their own brand of postwar identity — one based on resistance, unity, and loyalty to empire,” reads a National Park Service explainer.

Night and day.

It smacks of dishonesty and bad faith to invoke the Loyalists to justify overpopulating Canada one day and then, on another, treat them as afterthoughts or colonial relics in an attempt to culturally re-engineer the country. Everything included in the National Park Service’s tribute to the first Anglo-Canadians is an affront to the Liberal project of turning Canada into a pure “nation of values” that can serve as a laboratory for policy experiments.

But, for a moment, let us consider “values.”

The fealty and determination of the Loyalists are qualities that should guide and inspire Canadians today. Questions of allegiance, ethics and obligation will not go away in a country that has undergone such radical social, political and demographic transformation in the past decade.

In March of this year, it was revealed that there were 152,000 cases of potential non-compliance among international students who had entered Canada. Fewer than 5,000 investigations had been launched in 2023 and 2024. If people will not respect Canadian law, can they be expected to have basic respect for Canada, especially when they face little or no repercussions?

Many newcomers have shown themselves to reject the very premise and legitimacy of Canada, with one man in Toronto filmed saying that there were “no real Canadians” and using expletives to describe them. Others have adopted radical left narratives about the country, commonly found on university and college campuses, decrying its colonial origins as if they were shameful.

Even worse, the ongoing surge of migration in this era has resulted in the infiltration of Canada by terrorists and international criminal networks. One of these is the India-linked Bishnoi gang, which has been terrorizing South Asian business owners across the country and using international students as enforcers and money mules.

Again, in what world do the Loyalists justify this status quo? A Loyalist was nothing like a member of the Bishnoi gang. Loyalists were settlers. They did not seek to wiggle their way into permanent residency through shady consultancy firms and the gaming of their visas.

We must reject the soppy sentiment of Canada as a pure “nation of immigrants.” We have millions of immigrants in Canada, millions more of their children, and millions more Canadians whose families have been rooted here far too long to be classified as newcomers. There are very good and very bad citizens in all three groups, the former including military and sporting heroes from an immigrant background.

If we want to fix immigration, a good start would be to stop distorting our own history and producing false apologia for bad policy.

National Post

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