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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resigned, a sign of yet more changing of the times as the Prime Minister since 2015 marks the end of an decade of Liberal Party rule of Canada, and possibly yet another political dynasty scalp Donald Trump may claim. While Trudeau's critics and issues go far beyond Trump, the internal-party revolt since the US 2024 election will put another person on the podium right as Donald Trump assumes office, part of a broader realignment in the West as governments including Germany, France, and others have seen falls- several deliberate- to re-roll priorities and mandates in (temporal) alignment with the change in the US presidency. (Canada's 2025 election, much like Germany's, is/was scheduled for October. Canada's parliament is suspended until 24 March where a new PM will (hopefully) be chosen.)
Broadly associated with the more progressive-woke politics, Trudeau's liberals are expected to face a shellacking, though whether that's as part of Canada's experience of the anti-incumbant wave of the last decade, a backlash to progressive politics, or Trudeau's own personal contribution. (Last year, 49% of respondents in a Canadian survey characterized the PM as 'Arrogant,' which is often just the first and more polite words in some lists.)
A (much) longer political obituary can be read here for those who are curious. Regardless of one's views of the man, the sun will continue to rise, the earth rotate, and life will go on.
But we may never get another world leader on camera in blackface.
Canada was the great laboratory of democracy that we needed. Trudeau's political obituary will be written with one word: immigration.
Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.
This has had disastrous and likely permanent consequences. While leftists might have cheered the new, vibrant additions to the nation's food and street culture, even right-leaning Canadians were generally pro-immigration. The consensus was that Canada's points-based admissions system would lead to incredible economic gains if nothing else. We now know that that is false. Canada's economy has been stagnant over the last 10 years while the US economy has soared. In fact, on a per-capita level Canada's economy has been in a recession now for over 6 quarters.
Canada's population has increased by large amounts since 2015. The country now groans under an influx of millions of new immigrants. Since Trudeau took office, Canada's population has increased from less than 36 million to over 41 million. Nearly 100% of the gain has been as a result of immigration. Housing prices have soared, making owning a home an unreachable dream for almost all young people. Rents for apartments have seen similar increases. Wages, on the other hand have stagnated, and remain at levels far below those of the US. Far from the fever dream of immigrants doing useful labor such as building new housing, the new arrivals are competing aggressively for the same sort of high wage sinecures and government benefits that native-born Canadians previously thought they were entitled to. The frog is being boiled much too quickly, and people are noticing.
Mass immigration is now proven a failed policy. It remains to be seen whether it is possible for Canada to recover. I fear it might not be. With the Conservatives in charge, things will get bad less quickly, but it will take years for the consequences of the Trudeau years to be fully felt.
There's a disconnect here no? If you are using a points based admission system to get the best qualified immigrants, they aren't going to be building houses. For that you want low skilled immigration (or work visas). You can't expect to only get the highest quality immigrants AND that they will do construction.
Yes, I know. And yet somehow, "we need immigrants to build houses and take care of all our old people" seems to be the normie pro-immigration stance.
It didn't work for Canada, it didn't work for Australia, Germany, France, the UK, the US, etc... It never works.
In any case, high-skill immigration, like low-skill immigration, is fraught with challenges and is generally negative sum, unless the immigrants are truly elite. I think Musk's "15,000/year" is a pretty good ballpark estimate. But for countries already choking on surplus college educated baristas, adding even more midwit college grads is only going to make everyone poorer.
Considering that the upside of high skill immigration (e.g. Musk, Jensen Huang) is absolutely enormous, I'd be curious to see the math showing high skill immigration to be "negative sum".
Surely these geniuses would be included in the 15,000 year elite carveout. There's a vast difference between Jensen Huang and an H1B working for Cognizant or other low level grind factories.
We can quibble about the 15,000 and I'll admit it's just a number. Maybe double it, maybe triple it. But over 30 years, 15,000 a year amounts to nearly half a million. It's not nothing.
But I do think it's imperative that the system works to identify truly high skill people.
I doubt it. Let's check, as they say, the Early Life.
Huang:
Would you have let Jensen or his dad into the country? Is there anything here that indicates either of them is a top 15k tier talent? If, against all odds, he was able to start NVidia in Taiwan, do you think he would move to the US, or keep running his company in Taiwan, as Morris Chang (who left the US due to frustrations in getting ahead at IBM) did?
Elon Musk:
Again, would you let this guy into the country? A Saskatchewan sawmill operator who overstayed his student visa? Is this what elite human capital looks like?
Okay, I'm stumped then. How do we allow top tier talent without just letting everyone in?
Musk and Huang wouldn't have been admitted under some sort of H1B/points scheme either. So the only way to get them is open borders? That seems like a bad bargain, even for geniuses of that caliber.
What would you do if you were the king of the United States?
Isn't it a fallacy of some sorts? Perhaps NVIDIA or Musk's companies would not exist exactly as they are if the immigration laws had been different and enforced differently. However, it is not like we can observe the counterfactual outcomes. Would not there be GPU companies in the US without the single individual Huang? According to Wikipedia article concerning NVIDIA founding, there were 70 graphics computing start-ups in the US in the 1990's. The market environment would have been similar without NVIDIA.
Musk's enterprises appear more singular and his interests idiosyncratic, so imagining alternative paths is more difficult. Some of the alternative paths could have seen less technological development and slightly more enshittified world today. However, it is not certain the alternatives would have been worse. Perhaps, with overall more stringent US immigration there would have been another innovative tech scene (or several) somewhere else and he would have migrated there. Stronger competition between the SV and other hypothetical scenes would perhaps have produced even greater technological innovation and varied, better outcomes for everyone. Or if there was no alternative to SV, they could have collected the points under the alternative immigration system at another life stage. (Or perhaps the people who would have prospered under a different legislation would have been more stellar and exceptional.)
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