It's funny the things you notice when you come back to a place after having not been there for a while.
It's been 11 years since I decamped for Britain, and every time I come back to Canada, whether that's to Ottawa or the West Coast, where I'll be next week, what I notice are the … parking lots.
There are parking lots everywhere in Canada. Little pocket lots in the downtown core. Bigger ones under some of the office buildings. And acres upon acres of them alongside the strip malls of suburbia.
Canada is a nation that grew and matured during the automobile age. London, where I live now, is a rail city, with its roads stretching back to horse and cart, if not Roman times. There's no point driving in London when the train or tube can get you there quicker. Hence the lack of parking lots.
More to the point, even if you wanted to make London a car city you would struggle to do it. Its form is now baked into its current shape, cluttered, as it is, with a lot of old stone and jagged roads. Canada has far more room to manoeuvre.
At least, it did.
Many of Canada's major urban centres are now groaning under the demands being placed on them. One way of reading this week's shock byelection result in downtown Toronto is as a response to the Trudeau government's somewhat intermittent concern with Canada's Jewish citizens, many of whom live in Toronto-St. Paul's. Another way to read it, however, is as an urban cri-de-coeur against liberal drug policies, expensive housing, and high immigration. Let's hope the post-election tea leaves are being forensically examined.
All my life, Canada has, thankfully, been a welcoming place, a beacon for immigrants from around the world. A place where immigrant families could give their children a better life. The post-war Canada that welcomed them was a place with an identity; it wasn't viewed as a hotel for the world, or some kind of post-national state. Everyone came to be a part of something.
I should say the Canada of my youth was a place of identities, plural. Sure, there is the persistent (but diminishing) need for Canadians to not be American. But the fundamental political tension in the country was between French and English. Now we barely mention it, with the tension coming from things like Chinese or Indian interference in our elections, such are the size of the Chinese and Indian diasporas. Ask a young adult in downtown Toronto what they think about Quebec and they're likely to not have thought of it at all.
To say these arrivals and the diminution of separatism have been a boon to Canada is an understatement. But it's not a one-way ratchet toward progress. Things can still become unstuck. Growing by more than a million people in a year, as Canada did in 2023, with 96 per cent of that coming from immigration, presents different challenges from the time when Sault Ste. Marie offered as much opportunity as downtown Toronto. There needs to be a different plan, because we're not the same country our immigration system was modelled on.
As a result, the public's support for immigration is falling. I can think of no bigger failure for a Canadian government than to lose the cross-party consensus on immigration. To preserve it, we're going to need frank and respectful conversations, which is a big ask in the age of polarizing social media.
Justin Trudeau senses the malaise, which is why his government plans on reducing the number of temporary residents it accepts. But his government needs to push on and figure out a new model for integration and assimilation into our urban cores, one that involves a lot of building. Simply being Canada isn't good enough any more. The times have changed. People will go elsewhere if they think they'll get stuck, opportunity-wise, upon arrival.
It does no good to pave a paradise like Canada, if all you're going to do is put up a parking lot.
Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
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