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This is part of an ongoing series on why Canada's conversations about multiculturalism keep producing the same unsatisfying answers.
Over the last year or so, the dominant language used to frame immigration by its most fervent critics has been something around it being a volume problem. And the word you’ll hear used most times is “broken” in its different forms; the system is broken, we have too many people, the doors were thrown wide open, services are flooded, communities are overwhelmed.
I think this frames immigration as a malignant force acting on Canada, something that happens to the country rather than something the country does. And once you accept that framing, the only logical responses are restriction, reduction, and control. So you start to hear about capping the numbers, tightening eligibility, running a referendum to ask voters whether to limit who gets access to healthcare and education.
For example, look at the language that was used to frame the Alberta immigration referendum announcement. Classrooms are “flooded,” emergency rooms are strained by “far too many people, far too quickly.” You could literally use that same language to describe the damage caused by water pipes as massive as the Bearspaw South feeder main. And when you describe a flood, most people don’t stop to ask whether you should have built better drainage systems. They just want the water out of their homes.
In my yet-to-be released The Newcomers Podcast episode with Jonathan Oldman, the CEO of the Immigrant Services Society of BC, he talks about how broken implies something that can't be fixed, only replaced. But our immigration system isn't broken, he says. It's under strain. And the question should be how do you alleviate the pressure?
Oldman then went on to share a great analogy. If you've got an overcrowded bus route, the solution isn't to ban passengers. It's to increase the capacity of your transit system so people can get to their jobs, their schools, their communities. And to be fair, Canada brought in more people than its infrastructure was built to absorb. But Oldman’s analogy points to a question we don’t seem to be asking, which is:
Why aren't we building the infrastructure to match the immigration our demographics demand?
It's a question that produces a completely different set of policies. Ask how many immigrants our infrastructure can support and you get caps, restrictions, division. Ask why we aren't building to match demand and you get construction, credential harmonization, settlement investment.
Two hundred years ago, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham mapped out what he called the springs of action; the hidden forces that drive human behavior. His most useful observation, however, wasn't about the forces themselves but the words we use to describe them. In his 1817 pamphlet, A Table of the Springs of Action, Bentham noticed that for nearly every human motive, our language gives us three options: a praise word, a plain word, and a blame word. Someone who is careful with money is ‘prudent’ to their allies and ‘cheap’ to their critics. Someone who takes risks is 'courageous' to supporters and 'reckless' to opponents. The underlying behavior is the same in each case. The only difference is the word used to describe it.
Immigration language works the same way. A province that adds 600,000 people in five years is ‘booming’ in the economic development brochure and ‘flooded’ in the referendum announcement. And once you pick words from the blame-column, the only solutions that seem reasonable are the ones that respond to a crisis.
Finally, there’s the language that reduces immigrants to a single dimension. We are either economic inputs (contributors, workers, taxpayers) or economic burdens (service users, competitors for housing, drains on the system). Both ends of the framing strip out everything that makes us human.
For example, when immigration advocates say “immigrants are essential,” I’m sure they mean essential to their families and communities. But when filtered through the two ends of the economic utility narrative, audiences probably hear “essential workers,” which just reinforces the idea that immigrants’ value is their labor.
The language we use keeps circling back to utility.
What would a better language look like?
From “broken” to “under strain” or “underfunded.” Emergency rooms services aren't collapsing just because too many people walked through the hospital doors. They’re collapsing because they were never funded to handle the population governments planned for.
From “too many people” to “too little infrastructure.” The frustration people feel about ER wait times and classroom sizes is legitimate. The question is whether that frustration points toward the people in the waiting room or toward the government that didn't build enough rooms. We can have both conversations at the same time.
The entire public debate is organized around how many people arrive. Almost none of it is organized around what happens to them after they get here. RBC estimates the immigrant wage gap costs Canada $50 billion in GDP annually. Plus, only 38% of university-educated immigrants work in jobs matching their degree. Those numbers mean we need to stop counting arrivals and measuring outcomes. We need to have hard conversations about credential recognition, mentorship programs, and employer engagement.
And there’s the question of agency. Canada has one of the most sophisticated immigration selection systems in the world. Express Entry scores applicants on education, language ability, work experience, and adaptability. The country chooses who comes here for specific reasons. And then it doesn't follow through on those reasons. Like the father of Shamira Madhany, Managing Director and Deputy Executive Director at World Education Services (WES), who arrived with a British-system education and entrepreneurial experience but ended up picking up towels at a golf club. The language of "they come here" hides the fact that “we bring most of them here.” And if we bring them here, we owe them the systems that make that decision worthwhile.
Better language needs to also hold governments accountable for the gap between what they planned and what they built, instead of letting them redirect that accountability toward the people who showed up as invited.
One of my best takeaways from Bentham’s book is that neutral words are the rarest in any language, especially because of what he calls interest-begotten prejudice, which is when our stake in an outcome steers us towards the word that serves us. It almost seems you can’t have a decent conversation about immigration in Canada without the words pulling you towards either condemnation or defence.
We need more neutral words to describe what needs to be fixed, adjusted, or changed. A conversation built on these words could lead to a different set of investments: credential harmonization across provinces, settlement funding tied to intake targets, housing construction benchmarked against demographic projections. Because when we change the words, we change what people can imagine doing about the problem.
And if the words are where mediocre conversations start, they're also where better ones begin.
P.S. Seth Godin used Claude to create a great summary of Jeremy Bentham’s pamphlet, if you wanna go deeper.
