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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Immigration has been another interesting change with Carney in power; most of the pathways that were vulnerable to fraud have been (quietly) shut down. It's been a strange phenomenon where you end up seeing the article about how x or y immigration scheme has been closed from an Indian newspaper, because the Canadian government has not commented on it all. Since Carney has taken over, Canada's population has started to shrink for the first time in a long time (not including COVID years). The vast bulk of this is due to expiring visas of temporary residents.

Obviously it won't be enough for a lot of people, but the people who were claiming that Carney was going to press down the accelerator and flood the country were obviously wrong. I think more importantly for Canadians the more obviously fraudulent elements are being restricted, namely the international student streams, while popular capital I immigration (that is to say, permanent residency offered to non-Canadian residents) stays the same.

The other really troublesome issue is the stream of asylum seekers which exploded again at the end of Trudeau's reign; Canada got some 170k in 2024 and another 110k in 2025. The Carney government is cutting a bunch of funding to refugees and asylum seekers (again, quietly), and there's been more recent debate in Parliament about going further.

I think the Liberals have managed to somewhat skillfully defuse immigration as the bomb around their neck, at least for the present, by simultaneously addressing the most negative elements of the system they had set up (while also not telling anyone they are doing so, as to avoid blame).

I think the Liberals have managed to somewhat skillfully defuse immigration as the bomb around their neck, at least for the present, by simultaneously addressing the most negative elements of the system they had set up (while also not telling anyone they are doing so, as to avoid blame).

The big question is going to be how they deal with the bubble of post-COVID migrants as their visas start to expire. Canada does not have the law enforcement capacity or legal infrastructure to carry out a deportation program at any meaningful scale. If people simply overstay and refuse to leave until they have exhausted all possible remedies including bogus refugee claims, it will create a decade-plus backlog of appeals in a system that is already not fit for purpose. An illustrative example of this is the Indian migrant who killed 16 members of a hockey team in one of Canada's largest mass casualty incidents. He pled guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison, which should have triggered automatic deportation after his release. Now years later, he is still in Canada filing appeals, and using the anchor baby he has post-conviction to argue for humanitarian relief. What's even more insane is that legacy Canadian media appears to be supporting this push for his deportation to be waived. If they can't manage to deport this particularly heinous criminal, do they really expect to be able to process 100k+ deportations per year?

it will create a decade-plus backlog of appeals in a system that is already not fit for purpose.

Nonsense, this is the system working as intended. Who's going to hold it to account? Clearly, voting doesn't matter- whatever party rep you selected is just going to go LPC anyway becuase fuck you, that's why.

What's even more insane is that legacy Canadian media appears to be supporting this push for his deportation to be waived.

Media system working exactly as it's intended to.

the Liberals have managed to somewhat skillfully defuse immigration as the bomb around their neck

Immigration was never a bomb around the LPC's neck, though: it helps exclusively their voters, and that's the only Canadian that matters.

See, LPC voters care about two things, and two things only: the price of their house, and flapping their jowls at the US (and any liberal reforms in that direction; the LPC is a Conservative party, not a classically liberal one). Carney is objectively the best candidate for those things, and that's clearly good enough for a dictatorship.

Labour in the UK are trying surprisingly hard as well, from what I can see. Not doing that well but definitely much more than I was expecting - and more than the Tories for that matter.