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Blair Hyslop is the Co-Owner and Co-CEO of Mrs. Dunster’s Bakery. He and his wife, Rosalyn Hyslop, have grown our family-owned business into Atlantic Canada’s largest fresh bakery, achieving an impressive 20% annual compounded growth rate for the past decade. Their products are now available across Quebec, Ontario, and coast-to-coast in Canada, in addition to serving the Maritimes and Maine.
Beyond business, Blair is also deeply committed to strengthening Canada's entrepreneurial ecosystem. He has hosted over 50 fireside chats with leading business and political figures, facilitating meaningful conversations on leadership, resilience, and economic transformation.
He’s a five-time recipient of Atlantic Business Magazine’s Top 50 CEO Award and a Top 50 CEO Hall of Fame inductee (2021).
What’s your newcomer archetype?
Heritage Guardian? Starter? Community Anchor? No idea what those even MEAN? ( And yes, you can be more than one, cmon, we’re immigrants)
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Takeaways
Blair estimates that most people would say Canada needs immigration. But because the minority who disagree are the loudest and control the public voice, everyone stays silent. Add that the individual cost of speaking back is immediate and personal (hate mail, internet backlash, or customer blowback), while the collective cost of silence is distributed across society and delayed (bad policy, lost workers, and a shrinking labour pool). And so we end up with a classic collective action problem.
Blair's proposed compromise is the simplest version of a national policy I have heard anyone offer: let the people who are here stay. They already have housing; they've got kids in school, and they are tax-paying workers. Even someone who is skeptical of immigration should be able to see that sending home a trained, employed, tax-paying worker who is already housed and already in the healthcare system is a worse outcome than keeping them. Whether that compromise can survive an election cycle is a different question, but the logic is hard to argue with.
Nobody in Canada gets paid to hire a newcomer. No employer is receiving government subsidies to choose an immigrant over a Canadian-born applicant. In fact, it costs money, flights, temporary housing, and training from zero. The myth that there's some financial incentive driving employers to hire newcomers, which shapes some of the anti-immigrant narrative, is false and needs to be tackled.
Links
Where to find Blair:
Blair Hyslop; LinkedIn
A box of yummy food right to your doorstep; Mrs Dunster’s
The Newcomers resources
Newsletter writer: Dozie Anyaegbunam
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