“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people." — Naturalist, Broadcaster and Honorary PIC Patron Sir David Attenborough populationinstitutecanada.ca…

Does this reflect a demoralized workforce? In September, the labour force participation rate – the number of Canadians 15 years and older who are employed or actively looking for work – fell to 64.8% of the population, the lowest level in 29 years, excluding the pandemic. Canada’s economy lost nearly 68,000 jobs that month, more than the 42,000 lost in August, for a total of 110,000 lost jobs over 2 months. The national unemployment rate rose slightly to 6.5% in September. The StatsCan data shown indicates that the unemployment rate for youth (15 to 24) remains especially high, 13% in September. reuters.com/world/americas/c…

“They can’t be that stupid,” is what then PQ leader, now premier designate of Quebec, Paul St.-Pierre Plamondon (PSPP) said on October 29, 2024, referring to the federal Liberals’ immigration policy, which he said matched and even exceeded the target of the Century Initiative, whose raison d’être is a Canadian population of 100 million by 2100. In other words, the reasons for Canada’s policy of mass immigration are all bogus. PSPP said the Century Initiative is based on “a very stupid assumption that growing the GDP makes you richer…but growing the size of your economy has nothing to do with wealth.” We’re not separatists, but he’s singing our song! In an article published on our website on October 30, 2025 (How Canada Was Destroyed Gradually and Then Suddenly), we suggest that Canada’s immigration disaster is a feature, not a bug. (And we’ve criticized the Century Initiative in plenty of other articles as well.) They knew that immigration would not solve any economic problems, PPSP says. “It’s impossible that they’re that stupid.” We agree. So, what’s the agenda? We suggested it was to turn Canada from a country into a “postnational state” to use then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own words. And we fear that Mark Carney, who was Trudeau’s economic advisor, is in lockstep with that agenda, even as he tells us that immigration is now under control. He appointed the Century Initiative’s two cofounders, Domnic Barton and Mark Wiseman, to important posts and spoke at the Century Initiative’s 2024 webinar. Should we trust him on immigration? xitter.cf/valdombre/status/18511…

Canada slid down nine places, to number 18, on the Fraser Institute’s most recently published global economic freedom index. It used data from 2024, the last year for which data for 165 countries was available. Of the five major areas that comprise the index, Canada did especially poorly, ranking in 101st place, in Size of Government. It ranked in 53rd and 50th place, respectively, in Sound Money and Freedom to Trade Internationally. It did best in Legal System and Property Rights (12th place) and Regulation (13th place). More economic freedom was associated with a higher standard of living. In the 25 economically freest countries, average incomes were 6.9 times greater than those of the least free and the incomes of the bottom 10 percent were 7.1 times greater. People in the economically freest countries also lived 14 years longer on average. Economic freedom fell globally during the Covid pandemic and has not yet fully returned to pre-pandemic levels for the average country. fraserinstitute.org/sites/de…

Should we be shocked that there was an organized “pipeline” behind the massive number of foreign students entering Canada, especially during the past decade? Juno News dug up the fact that a gentleman called Gurinder Bhatti who cofounded the Opulence Education Group that owns three Academy of Learning campuses in Ontario also directed Express Student Services in Punjab, India, that recruits students for those campuses. Last week evidence emerged that some Academy of Learning students couldn’t name the program they were enrolled in, while third parties were hired to complete student coursework, among other irregularities. Yet about 14,800 students at the Academy of Learning campuses received more than $219 million in Ontario Student Assistance Program grants in 2024-25, out of a total of $385 million, meaning they got 57% of the total. The Opulence Education Group has also been buying private career colleges in Ontario, BC, Alberta and Quebec. Serious deficiencies were also found at Granville College in Vancouver, which has a staggering dropout rate. In total, 24% of the students in the hospitality program withdrew, while less than 1% graduated(!). In the supply chain program, 72% left or failed to graduate. Is it likely that Gurinder Bhatti is not the only one involved in international student pipelines? The question arises how such “student mills” could be operating right under the noses of provincial and federal governments. If the people in charge of vetting didn’t notice, they were astonishingly incompetent. To our suspicious minds, what at face value looks like incompetence could be the federal government’s own “back door” pipeline to bring people to Canada to drive the population growth that the Century Initiative promotes. The Grok-generated graph below shows the number of international students in Canada rising from ~123,000 in 2000 to a peak of 1.04 million in 2023 and declining (red bars) to just under 600,000 by July 2026 after the government slammed on the brakes in 2024 in response to public anger. junonews.com/p/canadian-coll…

We think this is a pretty good question and we really wish we had the answer. Our advice is that a first step is to stop the pursuit of growth but we don’t seem to have the ear of the powers that be. geekculture.com/joyoftech/jo…

California is set to relaunch its “Wildlife Coexistence Program” – aimed at reducing conflicts between wild animals and people and for which funding ran out in 2024 – as California’s gray wolves gave birth to a record number of pups this year – at least 42. Wolves were extirpated in the state in the 1920s and only began to naturally recolonize it 15 years ago. A lot of ranchers aren’t too delighted about the wolf population rebound but the program offers compensation for loss of livestock as well as non-lethal wolf deterrents. A major underlying cause of conflict, of course, is that the human population has ballooned – it’s just short of 40 million, not much less than Canada’s. yahoo.com/news/science/artic…

Jane O’Sullivan and Sandra Knack explain how it can be that half the pregnancies in the world today are unintended and that the number of women with an unmet need for contraception has increased from 236 million in 2000 to 260 million in 2025. The reason is that family planning programs were deprioritized in the 1990s. And that’s because (as the discussion paper they link to in the article describes) at the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in September 1994, population concerns were totally sidelined and the focus was exclusively on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Aid for family planning, which was over 50% of “population assistance” in 1995, fell to 5% in 2008. The abandonment of population programs occurred due to pressure from feminists, progressives, and other “social justice” advocates ideologically inspired by Marxism. But since population programs also promoted shifting cultural norms in what were often very conservative and patriarchal societies, these norms tended to shift back to traditional pronatalism when the programs were ended. The ensuing population growth, which could have been much less, led to resource scarcity, violent conflicts and outmigration. And women and girls are often the primary victims of the injustices that the social justice advocates indirectly inflicted by defunding and even denouncing population programs. overpopulation-project.com/r…

Tomorrow is World Migratory Bird Day. What better way to support migratory birds than to not destroy their habitat – whether it be their breeding grounds, wintering grounds or fueling stations on the way? We can also take measures to keep them from slamming into our windows, where they mistake the reflections of vegetation and sky for the real thing. That kills over one billion birds annually in the United States. Home measures include adhesive products for the outside of windows and “parachute cords” hung on the outside of windows. Happy birdwatching to those who do it. (Picture shows snow geese in migration by mesijo-tnetenba on iNaturalist) migratorybirdday.org/

This article addresses the sad situation of child malnutrition in Africa. “More than 25% of children under five were reported to be stunted in many African countries. Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Liberia and the Central African Republic were some of them,” it says. Not one word about population growth, of course. We’re disappointed, but not surprised, even though population growth presents challenges not only for child nutrition but for EVERYTHING. Just in the last 25 years, sub-Saharan Africa’s population grew from 681 million in 2000 to 1.32 billion in 2025 (~94% increase) and is still growing at a rate of 2.4% annually. theconversation.com/child-ma…

Where do all the asylum seekers flooding into Canada come from? We published an article about that question in February 2025 (Canada’s Asylum and Immigration Policies: A Threat to National Security?). Even the municipalities that are expected to accommodate the influx were kept in the dark, according to a recently disclosed WhatsApp group chat of Ontario’s “Big City Mayors” following three separate freedom of information requests. The chat group spans 18 months starting on July 15, 2023, when representatives from Guelph asked other cities and their mayors whether they were also experiencing overwhelmed social services and a surge in refugees entering their cities. Mayors and other city representatives wrote about how demand greatly exceeded their city’s capacity for shelter and services, as well as about homeless encampments, addictions and public disorder. “Ottawa broke the housing market with an unsustainable and unpredicted and unprepared for increase in demand from their massive increase in immigration,” Oakville Mayor Rob Burton said in 2024. Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe complained that municipalities were not consulted before the government set immigration and refugee targets. All of which raises the question: What is the federal government’s agenda? But whatever it is, Mark Carney seems to want to continue with Trudeau’s trajectory, having recently signaled that he will raise immigration levels again. (The picture shows a protest in the Barrhaven area of Ottawa against a “sprung structure” intended to house migrants, mostly single males, that was to be set up at that location, held on November 3, 2024.) thecountersignal.com/p/feds-…

Last week we were scratching our heads about Britain’s asylum policy (Oct 1). But it seems their criteria for granting bail are a bit puzzling as well. Five men were arrested on suspicion of terrorism for skulking around Royal Air Force base at Fairford, which serves as a US air base, causing the evacuation of about 85 homes. They were all released on bail. But a guy (Danny Tommo) who slashed a rubber dinghy that had brought a load of illegal migrants to the UK after all the illegals had already disembarked, gets no bail, because he caused “reckless endangerment.” Does anyone else find that odd? cbc.ca/news/world/uk-raf-fai…

Oh no, it looks like largely peaceful demonstrations that somehow got off the rails again. We’re not quite clear on what happened in France last week when protests against the state of education descended into chaos and violence in several major cities. Students were allegedly protesting conditions in lycées (high schools), including staff shortages, overcrowded classes, rundown buildings and poor facilities. One sign said “Gen Z en colère” (Gen Z is angry.) And with good reason, but does setting fires and burning buildings help? Nor does left-wing mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko telling protesters that violence can be legitimate. Government and intelligence services blame the hard-left party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). They could be right. There are a couple of communist flags in one of the pictures. Another one of those events that makes one wonder if things are unravelling. dailymail.com/news/article-1…

So it looks like Canadians are once again being subjected to bovine fertilizer on mass immigration (as if the barrage ever really stopped). In our post on January 30, we warned: “PIC recognizes that Prime Minister Carney has slightly lifted his foot off the accelerator of Canada’s population growth but fears that he will push it down again when the various crises that Justin Trudeau’s mass immigration unleashed have abated a bit.” And that is exactly what seems to be happening now as Carney floats a “controlled increase” in Canada’s population (which the latest StatsCan updates indicate never actually stopped increasing). How remarkably similar Carney’s proposal is to the Century Initiative’s advocacy of using “responsible population growth” to reach a target of 100 million Canadians. We saw how that worked out – housing crisis, food bank crisis, homelessness crisis, affordability crisis, inflation, and maybe it even has something to do with the rising crime rate. ca.news.yahoo.com/carney-sug…

In PIC’s latest newsletter, we look at the phenomenon of mass immigration to the West and some of its political consequences, the impact that population growth on water resources, and more. mailchi.mp/e1695a1d162f/mzq6…

Is it just us, or does one have to wonder where the British government’s head is at? Britain granted asylum and citizenship to a former bodyguard of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh who was later arrested over an alleged plot targeting Jews across Europe. Meanwhile, Britain has denied entry to foreign journalists on several occasions because it deems their presence not conducive to the public good. Presumably, the British government had no such problem with “Mr. X,” who enjoys a British court anonymity order. However, piecing together various bits of information, the media have identified him as Mohammed Naim, son of Hamas politburo member Basem Naim. timesofisrael.com/hamas-chie…

A recent article about US President Donald Trump slashing over $800 million in government funding earmarked for illegal immigrants prompted us to ask Grok how much the Canadian government is spending on average on each unprocessed asylum seeker per year. We know that many claimants are “irregular border crossers” (i.e., entered illegally) or have weak claims. (For example, over 113,000 arrived through the decommissioned Roxham Road, shown from the Canadian side with Google Maps image, between 2017 and March 2023.) Under former Prime Minister Trudeau, the number of unprocessed asylum claimants in a given year rose from about 23,000 in 2016 to nearly 200,000 at its peak in 2024. Grok explained that there was no single official average annual cost per unprocessed asylum seeker, given the split across health coverage, housing assistance, processing and legal aid, and whether someone is in a hotel with all meals provided on down, using health services or supporting themselves. In addition, provincial and municipal costs, such as shelters, social assistance, and education, are not included in the federal figures. The total Interim Federal Health Program funding for all eligible groups (consisting primarily of ~440,000 asylum claimants) was “roughly $822-897 million” for the fiscal year 2024-2025. Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has spent about $1.2 billion on hotels since 2020, while the Interim Housing Assistance Program (IHAP) has shelled out about $1.8 billion to provinces and municipalities to help them with their programs since 2017. Then there are processing costs and other federal supports. Overall, “Federal departments have been spending well over $2 billion a year in aggregate on asylum-related support and processing in recent years; that total excludes most provincial/municipal outlays.” In other words, federal plus provincial plus municipal costs would be even more than the “well over $2 billion” federal expenses. Grok concluded by saying, “No official source publishes a single blended “unprocessed asylum seeker” average that includes every order of government.” So, all that money is being spent at different levels and no one is really tallying up what the grand total is. In fact, information on how much is being spent on asylum seekers is hard to track down. Is that by design? xitter.cf/i/grok?conversation=21…

Prime Minister Mark Carney calls it removing barriers to growth and development but to us Bill C-39, Building Canada Strong, introduced on September 21, seems like a power grab at the expense of the environment, labour rights, and parliamentary procedure. Environmentalists say it will gut regulations and union groups say it is an attack on the right to strike. And is it really a good idea that just Cabinet, not Parliament, gets to decide if it’s in the public interest to weaken the conditions-of-approval for a project? And does Canada even really need more growth and development? The Century Initiative thinks so, both of its cofounders, Dominic Barton and Mark Wiseman, are on Mark Carney’s “Team Canada.” thestar.com/politics/federal…

What’s this? Canada’s population didn’t really decline? There was much media hype in December 2025 and March 2026, when Statistics Canada announced a slight decline in Canada’s population in the third (July-Sept) and fourth (Oct-Dec) quarters of 2025, respectively. This was estimated to have led to an overall population decline for 2025 of about 102,000 people and was reported as the first annual decline since Confederation. These figures were called preliminary and came with a caution that they could be revised. Then, in June StatsCan reported a further decline for Q1 (Jan-March) of 2026. But, alas, that earlier caution was well-advised! On September 23, 2026, StatsCan issued revisions that showed no population contractions, just slower growth with only a brief dip instead of a sustained decline. The actual April 1, 2026 (i.e., end of Q1) population was 301,008 higher than the preliminary Q1 estimate, four-fifths of that (240,087) being non-permanent residents (temporary workers, international students, asylum claimants) and their families. Given the insane amount of construction all over Canada and the continuing rapid growth of cities, we’re just a wee bit leery of taking anything the government tells us at its word. On January 30 this year we warned that Mark Carney was just slightly lifting his foot off the accelerator of Canada’s population growth but would push it down again when the crises unleashed by Justin Trudeau’s out-of-control immigration had abated a bit. We fear that we were right. We get the impression that the Century Initiative’s agenda of driving the population to 100,000,000 by 2100 is still at play, although being arrived at through a slightly more circuitous (and possibly deceptive?) route. In case you’re wondering, on July 1, 2026, Canada’s population is now reported to have been 41,798,407. opendatacanada.ca/articles/c…

A new species of cat has been discovered. It lives in the Bolivian cloud forest and is smaller than a housecat. The cat belongs to the genus “Leopardus,” commonly called “tiger cats,” whose five species are native to South and Central America. While the cat is new to science, some of Bolivia’s forest-dwellers were familiar with it and called it “tilcayo.” The newly discovered cat now bears the scientific name “Leopardus tilcayo.” All five species of Leopardus are threatened due to habitat destruction. nbcnews.com/science/environm…