Bigger isn’t richer.

Canada’s population has now shrunk for three straight quarters. In the last one, the economy grew 0.8 per cent and GDP per person jumped 1.0, the best stretch in three years, led by exports, household spending and business investment. The finance minister took the victory lap: “our plan is working. The strongest growth in the G7.”

A month later, Mark Carney told the New York Times that GDP is shrinking because of limited population growth, and that the question now is “when do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada?” Two weeks after that, a reporter asked his immigration minister why levels could go up with housing still out of reach. “We do need people,” she said.

Carney ran the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. No prime minister in this country’s history has been better qualified to read that chart. He isn’t confused, and that’s the problem.

So why the hell is he doing this?

First, a look at who already paid for it.

The kids got sold out

In July 2022, youth unemployment was 9 per cent. By September 2025 it was 14.7, the highest since 2010 outside the pandemic. It’s still 13.

Between 2019 and 2023, foreign workers approved for food and retail jobs rose 211 per cent. The till, the fryer, the stockroom. That isn’t a career. It’s where a kid learns to show up on time and gets a first line on a résumé, and Ottawa handed it to employers as a discount program.

And it’s a better discount than the wage. The UN’s special rapporteur on slavery came to Canada in 2023 and called these programs “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery,” because workers on employer-specific permits “cannot report abuses without fear of deportation.” Think about what that does in a staff room. A 17-year-old can quit. A worker who gets sent home if he loses the job can’t, and he isn’t asking for a raise, and neither is anyone standing next to him.

Then the restaurant lobby went looking for more, and cited, in writing, “declining youth participation rates.” Youth unemployment had just hit 14.1 per cent.

They aren’t declining to participate. They’re being outbid by a work permit.

Renters paid for the experiment

Over the last five years, rent rose 30 per cent while prices overall rose 19. Population growth hit a multi-decade high in the spring of 2024, and asking rents peaked at $2,202 at the same moment.

Nobody gets to call that a surprise. In 2022, public servants put it on a slide for the deputy minister: “In Canada, population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units.” Ottawa read the slide and kept going.

Then the tap came down, and rents have fallen year over year for 24 straight months. Renters finally got two years of relief after years of getting robbed.

Carney campaigned on exactly this. In February 2025 he promised to cap immigration until it got back to sustainable, pre-pandemic trendlines, and to double the pace of homebuilding within a decade. Here’s how the second half is going so far: the housing start trend is flat at about 250,000, September’s actual starts were down 11 per cent from a year earlier, and CMHC expects new construction to decline through 2028.

So the homes aren’t coming, and the people are. And a reporter asks about housing, and the answer is “we do need people.”

Everyone else got a coffee

Average hourly wages went from $30.88 to $37.64 in five years. Take out inflation and that’s a raise of 2.5 per cent. Total. Half a per cent a year, before you pay the rent.

This is what a flooded labour market is for. “Businesses have to compete for scarce labour,” Waterloo economist Mikal Skuterud said this fall. “And how do they compete? Well, they’ve got to offer higher wages to compete, or more attractive jobs more generally.”

A labour shortage is what a raise looks like from the employer’s side.

And Ottawa wasn’t importing talent. Carney’s old shop looked at this directly. Bank of Canada researchers found the wage gap between temporary workers and Canadian-born workers more than doubled, to 22.6 per cent, as the people coming in changed. If those wages reflect what the workers produce, they wrote, “the productive capacity of the Canadian economy grew less than it would have” with the newcomers of the past. In English: we filled the bottom of the job market and called it growth.

Here’s the whole model on two lines, from Statistics Canada’s own numbers. From mid-2022 to mid-2024, with the tap wide open, Canada added 2.2 million people and GDP per person fell 1.9 per cent. In the two years since, with the tap turned down, GDP per person rose 1.2.

Tap on, everyone gets poorer. Tap down, they stop.

Nobody had to get better

In March 2024, with population growth near its peak, the Bank of Canada’s senior deputy governor stood up in Halifax and called Canada’s productivity “an emergency.” In her words: “it’s time to break the glass.”

Since 2000, Canadian productivity has grown 0.8 per cent a year, less than half the American pace. Investment per worker fell nearly 20 per cent from 2014 to 2022.

Of course it did. Why buy the machine when there’s always another worker on the way at the old wage, and another customer behind him? Selling more groceries and phone plans to a growing country doesn’t require anyone to get better at anything. Selling to someone in Ohio does. From 2019 to 2024, productivity rose 4.4 per cent in industries that depend on American demand, and 0.5 per cent everywhere else in the business sector.

The best argument for all this is that the country is getting old. It is, and somebody has to pay for it. But Statistics Canada ran the scenarios for the Migration Policy Institute, from near-zero immigration to the highest rate, and the old-age dependency ratio rises even at the top, because “immigrants themselves age and eventually retire alongside their native-born peers.” You can’t import your way out of a birth rate, and you certainly can’t do it with low-wage temporary permits. The only thing that pays for an aging country is each worker producing more, which is the exact thing this model lets everyone skip.

He knows. So why?

Because he has three problems, and a bigger number solves all of them.

The first is the slogan. His government’s core mission, right there in the throne speech, is “to build the strongest economy in the G7.” His immigration minister told you how: “in order to do that, I need to use the levers that I have in my role as immigration minister.” Adding people moves that league table this year. Fixing productivity moves it a decade from now, long after anyone remembers who promised it.

The second is the budget, and nobody says this one out loud. One of his two fiscal anchors is a falling deficit-to-GDP ratio, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer gives it a 7.5 per cent chance of holding. GDP is the denominator. When the PBO scored the first round of immigration cuts, they took $37 billion a year off the tax base. A prime minister whose anchor is giving way wants more denominator, and renters don’t show up in that ratio.

The third is the room. In that same report, turning the tap down raises wages and cuts consumption. Workers get a raise. Retailers lose customers, landlords lose tenants and Ottawa loses revenue. Only one person at that table wants the tap down, and the business lobby doesn’t work for them.

None of that is stupid, which is what makes it so infuriating. A stupid prime minister could be forgiven for believing bigger means richer. Carney knows it doesn’t. In 2021 he wrote a whole book, Value(s), on the gap between what markets price and what societies actually value. Now he runs a government that keeps score on the price, and he’s decided your rent, your raise and your kid’s first job are a fair trade for a better ratio and a nicer spot on the table.

“The nature of Canada,” he called it.

That’s not nature. It’s a slogan, a denominator and a lobby.

We do need people, the minister says.

Now you know who’s we.