As Canadians marked our 150th year as a nation on July 1, there was much to celebrate.
We appear to have outgrown at least for now our national unity crisis. International opinion surveys frequently indicate that our quality of life, including our education, natural environment, democratic governance and rule of law, the economy, and health and social programs, are among the best in the world.
We regularly appear on surveys as the country to which many residents of other countries would most like to relocate.
Most Canadians are immigrants, refugees or their descendants; national and provincial governments of all political stripes now recognize this reality. This is a reality made all that more obvious by 320,000 immigrants admitted in 2016 alone making us a country with one of the highest per-capita immigration rates in the world.
More than a fifth of us are now foreign-born. Recent opinion surveys indicate that about four-fifths of us view immigration as having a positive economic impact. Our newcomers are assessed as the world’s most successful immigrants.
Since the mid-1960s, non-refugee immigrants have been admitted under policies which favor those who, based on age, education, language ability, job skills and other factors, are likely to build our economy.
The consequence is a foreign-born cohort that is evidently more educated than in any other nation, hard-working, and creators of myriad new business and social enterprises. As Canadians, we should remember that the immigrants that contributed so much to the benefits we enjoy today came to Canada with a dream and made that dream a reality. They were not for the most part uneducated and poor.
