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Last weekend, I was speaking with a newcomer to Canada — however one chooses to define that increasingly elastic word — when the conversation turned to my own work. They were generous in describing it and, paraphrasing slightly, called me a pioneer.

The word stayed with me.

Every new wave of immigrants eventually discovers that another wave arrived before it. People had already taken the unfamiliar road, entered the closed room, earned the credential, built the business, challenged the institution or made the mistake that later arrivals could avoid.

But that discovery does not make today’s newcomers any less pioneering. In 2026, someone is still the first in their family to attend a Canadian university, lead a company, win public office, buy a home, enter a profession or settle in Calgary. Decades from now, another newcomer may look back at that person and see not an ordinary immigrant trying to establish a life, but a pathfinder.

That recurring cycle is one reason I named the John Ware Institute after Alberta’s celebrated Black pioneer. Ware arrived in the Alberta foothills in 1882, having been born into slavery in the United States, and built a successful ranching career despite racism and the harsh conditions of the frontier. He did more than survive a difficult environment. He enlarged the realm of possibility for those who came after him.

When I moved to Canada in 2000, the country’s population was about 30.7 million. Today, it is more than 41 million. In little more than a generation, Canada has added roughly 10.7 million people. Calgary has changed just as dramatically. When I first visited during the Stampede in 2002, I remember parts of Deerfoot Trail still having traffic lights, and the city had fewer than one million residents. Today, Calgary itself has about 1.6 million people, while the metropolitan region is approaching 1.9 million.

That growth has brought real pressure. Housing, infrastructure and public services have not always kept pace, and Canadians are right to ask whether immigration policy is properly aligned with the country’s capacity. The Bank of Canada has acknowledged both sides of that equation: newcomers strengthen Canada’s labour force and economic potential, but rapid population growth can intensify housing and public-service pressures when supply does not respond.

But a debate conducted only through targets, vacancy rates and intake levels can reduce newcomers to numbers. Immigration is also a succession of human beings arriving with ambition, uncertainty and a need for examples.

In Toronto, one of the examples I encountered was Dr. Isa Odidi. He and his wife, Dr. Amina Odidi, both pharmacists, founded Intellipharmaceutics and eventually took the company public. Isa also contested Nigeria’s 2007 presidential election.

To a young Nigerian who had recently arrived in Canada, meeting someone who had built a senior career, founded a pharmaceutical company and lived in Toronto’s Bridle Path altered my sense of what was possible.

His life did not tell me that success would be easy or inevitable. It told me that it could be achieved. Credentials mattered. Networks mattered. Hard work mattered. So did the confidence to imagine oneself in rooms that still appeared distant.

Years later, through my wife, Chioma, I met another pioneer: her father, Humphrey Ihekwoaba.

He left Nigeria for Britain in 1964 and moved to Canada later that decade, as the Nigerian Civil War made returning home impossible. He studied geology at Laurentian University—which would later become my own alma mater—and built a successful career in Canada. Like many immigrants before and after him, he helped his siblings follow, creating a chain of family migration and settlement that now stretches across the country.

Nigeria, however, remained on his mind. In the late 70s, when the Shagari government encouraged members of the diaspora to return and join the public service, he went back. Like many returnees, he found that patriotism does not insulate anyone from institutional dysfunction.

He brought his family back to Canada in 1996, but the long interruption made it difficult to regain the professional standing he had once held as a senior geologist.

That, too, is part of the pioneer story. We often remember the breakthroughs and omit the reversals. Yet the lost years, stalled careers and sacrifices are frequently the very things that make the road easier for the next generation.

I still laugh when I remember Humphrey, his brother and their friend Max Uwaga describing how, in Sudbury, they once bought a live goat and slaughtered it in the backyard, prompting alarmed neighbours to call the police.

Today, a newcomer can simply buy goat meat from a local supermarket or specialty store. What one generation had to improvise, another can purchase without a second thought.

It is a funny story, but it is also a marker of institutional change. The extraordinary eventually becomes ordinary. That is one measure of belonging.

There is, however, a danger in romanticizing the word pioneer. Immigrants should not have to become chief executives, public figures or historic “firsts” to justify their presence in Canada. Building a family, serving a community and creating a stable life are also contributions.

The pioneer is not only the person whose name appears in the newspaper. It is also the person who shares a job lead, explains a credentialing process, hosts a new arrival, starts a cultural association or tells someone, “I have been where you are.”

The practical lesson is that newcomer success should not depend on discovering pioneers by accident. We should record their stories, connect generations, open networks and build institutions that turn individual breakthroughs into shared infrastructure.

Those who arrived in the 1960s faced a different Canada from those who arrived in 2000. Those arriving in 2026 will face different obstacles again. Yet the common thread remains: each generation enters places where it has limited history, then begins creating history for others.

We all stand on someone’s shoulders. The responsibility of a pioneer is to make those shoulders strong enough for someone else to stand on.