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On the morning of June 8, 2018, camera crews were counting down the minutes to welcome the arrival of Air Canada Rouge flight AC1928, at Bucharest’s Henri Coanda International Airport. There was tremendous excitement in the air and on the tarmac. I vividly remember the elated voice of a journalist celebrating the launch of Romania’s first transatlantic service to Montreal.

The following morning, another Rouge Boeing 767-300 landed in Romania’s capital, this time departing Toronto’s Pearson Airport. One day apart, two curved arcs stretching from the lush Carpathians to the snow-covered Labrador Peninsula were reconnecting people and places, stories and destinies, caught in-between the past and the future of two nations. 

About seven weeks later, on a hot Friday afternoon, I boarded the Montreal-bound AC1929. I got on the plane, mentally paused for a second to fully contemplate this life-defining decision. It wasn’t simple or straightforward, but I embraced it with a profound sense of optimism and a thirst for a new beginning. I settled in my seat, quietly looked through the window, torn between the known and the unknown, and said to myself: let’s go.

Air Canada Rouge’s grand in-flight entertainment, comprising a total of 3 movies and 2 songs, streaming on my cell at speeds previously unfamiliar to humanity, didn’t quite feel like a true Canadian success story. However, there was a positive side to this experience. As I would later discover, it made mainline Air Canada’s chicken and rice entrée, consumed in abundance over the next few years on long-haul journeys, taste like a Michelin experience.

The Bucharest-Montreal flight on July 27, 2018, was completely full. But it did have plenty of space for the smiles and dreams of grandparents flying to Canada to visit their grand-children, young couples travelling to explore Canada’s cities and natural beauty, and people like me, who were simply coming to stay. My seven-year-old son was ecstatic to be riding on a new airline, just like his dad.

Unbeknownst to him was how quickly he’d become a Canadian - As Canada’s Prime-Minister, let me welcome you, as a new Canadian, to the greatest country in the world – read a letter from Prime-Minister Trudeau just a few years later. Formal integration was completed, but the journey of belonging continues. It echoes in friendships and skilled immigrant journeys that struggle in the Canadian labor market. 

In a world of polarization and self-interest, decaying institutional trust and spreading populism, we remain a nation anchored in openness, social solidarity and community.

Canada is not perfect, but it is a good country. It can be better if we manage to muster our laws, institutions and society to view Canadian belonging, rather than pure immigration numbers, as the final outcome. True belonging in immigrant populations drives ambition and challenges complacency, it catalyzes regular renewal and questions the status quo. 

Canadian belonging starts in the workplace, where there’s frequently a failure to recognize newcomers’ out-of-country experiences. When the “Canadian experience” phrase is tactfully used to limit hiring, newcomers lose as individuals and we lose as a nation. When Canadian credentials proliferate unemployment and underemployment, in sectors that are vital to our public service delivery, we fail to fully grasp the impact of these decisions on the quality of our healthcare, infrastructure and competitiveness: long-term immigrant retention suffers, families return to their homelands, and particularly skilled immigrants move on to succeed in other places.

One in five skilled immigrants leaves Canada within 25 years, undoing life-changing educational, investment and housing decisions made in Canada. That rate is over 30 percent among people with a PhD or Master’s degree, according to the Leaky Bucket report, published by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. Chemists, physicists and healthcare workers – the backbone of a more innovative, competitive and healthier Canada – leave at rates ranging from 25-57 percent. By failing to retain individual talent, we fail to fully capitalize on our collective potential as a country.

To reverse this trend, we need to reimagine how we view and perceive immigration. 

Firstly, there is a strong need for a holistic overview of our immigration policy, one that displaces ad-hoc, pothole-fixing, number-centric tactics with an integrated, pragmatic, cross-sectoral strategy that can weave in immigration objectives into Canada’s broader economic and social priorities. Secondly, awareness raising and policy incentives are central to encouraging employers to recruit skilled immigrants. Thirdly, Canada needs to strengthen employment-related services and standards, including the development of a national retention framework for skilled immigrants, to fully unlock various professional pathways for newcomers, and ensure greater transparency and fairness in hiring practices.

Finally, to fully maximize the benefits of skilled immigration, we need political ambition and a continued policy commitment to a more global Canada. That means fully opening the front doors to ideas and knowledge, and the back doors to greater economic productivity and performance.