Editorial: No laughing matter

A recent policy call to expand Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100 would normally be considered only ludicrous. Alas, it also contains a distressing degree of duplicitousness.

The farcicality isn’t whether Canada can almost triple its current nose count of 38.2 million. Of course we can, though it will doubtless run roughshod over environmentalist dreams of recovering green Eden when, say, B.C.’s Fraser Valley and Ontario’s Niagara region are covered over with houses, schools and electric car repair shops.

Nor is there reason to jeer at the necessity of immigration fueling human expansion into every habitable nook and cranny of True North territory. Immigrants are us. It will be fascinating, however, to witness reconciliation of the new arrival influx with our now mandatory condemnation of all non-Indigenous people-kind as the offspring of settler colonial land thieves. Perhaps emigration applications will pose the pass-fail question: “Have you or any of your relatives, known and unknown, dating back to homo sapiens emergence from Africa, ever stolen land, water or related sacred space?”

Such are fine details. The laughability of the policy paper advanced last month by three wisemen from Canada’s upper crust clique of investors, corporate apologists and Liberal Party insiders — Mark Wiseman of BlackRock, Goldy Hyder of the Business Council of Canada, and Grit apparatchik Dominic Barton — lies on its surface. It’s in the paradox being floated within Canada’s technocratic hive-mind that an abstraction must become reality by century’s turn.

The century’s turn, for those counting on their fingers at home, is 77 years away. Let those who can cast their minds back 77 years to May, 1946 imagine the reception given to a self-styled clairvoyant who claimed “such-and-such must happen by May, 2023.” In the immortal words of Dennis in the film classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “They’d lock you up.”

To make it concrete, that epitome of political unpredictability, Donald Trump was still a month shy of birth in May, 1946. As he prepared his biggly exit from the womb, would anyone have ventured a bet on what would emerge with him 70-plus years hence? Probability nil. We can’t see that far ahead.

Enter the duplicity. The fearless prophets of necessary and sufficient population growth abjectly refuse to acknowledge the catastrophic harm to Canada’s demography caused by uncircumscribed access to abortion, and the spread of the contraceptive mentality. Run the numbers some time. By reliable estimates, between 1988 and 2006, about 1.9 million Canadian children were aborted. Their number would comprise a major Canadian city.

Holy Mother Church, praise her, has fought tirelessly against the moral infamy of such human obliteration. But from a purely demographic perspective, it is a policy history that goes beyond reckless to wanton disregard for our nation’s well-being. To fail to acknowledge that past while trumpeting “essential” population policy for the future constitutes perpetuating a destructive lie. And that is no laughing matter.