Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s twice-weekly roundup of expert insights into the biggest economic stories, political news, and policy developments that Hub readers need to be keeping their eyes on.
Canada can fix its xenophobia by fixing its immigration system
By Alexander Brown, a director with the National Citizens Coalition
Canada’s youth unemployment has surged to record highs, with 22 percent without jobs. This crisis stems from systemic failures in immigration policy enacted during the pandemic, particularly the abuse-ridden Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), foreign-student streams, and asylum and in-land asylum systems.
They have flooded the labour market with cheap, temporary workers, suppressing wages, and blocking entry-level opportunities for Canadian graduates. AI advancements exacerbate this, rerouting career paths young people trained for.
The fallout is profound: delayed adulthood milestones like independence, homeownership, and family formation. Skyrocketing housing costs force many into unaffordable dog-crate apartments or prolonged parental dependence. In an increasingly digital isolated world, this breeds alienation, eroding both confidence and social bonds.
Young men, hit hardest, are turning to radical fringes. Groups like the Dominion Society of Canada push for “remigration” well beyond deporting TFWP abusers or fraudulent claimants, with its supporters veering into blanket calls to expel immigrants. Such rhetoric risks serving as a kind of honeypot for the vulnerable, while potentially derailing legitimate reform.
One can certainly make the case that mass immigration has been the most destructive policy blunder in this country’s history. Historically poor trend lines in jobs, housing affordability, health-care wait-times, and a rise in violent crime all sit downstream from the decision to abandon the sensible. Couple this with spiking the GDP coming out of Canada’s pandemic response, suppressing wages, and experimenting with a country run as a post-national economic zone first, and a distinct society with standards and guard-rails second.
But calls for “remigration,” and saying you are inspired by “The Great Replacement,” is less a dog-whistle than a foghorn; and this group’s brazen call to revoke permanent residency status and naturalized citizenship is worse. We know what they mean when they say “heritage Canadian.” Canada may have been built by European settlers, Anglo and French, but not by them and them alone. Our demographic destiny changed long ago.
History warns us: idle hands, suppressed opportunities, and angry young men do not mix. Yet blame lies squarely with government and exploitative businesses, not with immigrants as a whole. Liberal policies have ballooned temporary residents to an estimated 3 million, prioritizing volume over integration. To stem this, Canada must enforce “temporary” status, deport those excesses, and restore a points-based system emphasizing skills and values.
This is the moment to cut the TFWP down to size, to continue to reform the International Mobility Program, and to return to the prioritization of Canadian workers, particularly those yet to get off the launch pad, to rebuild opportunity and restore the promise of tomorrow. Failure will only invite ugliness: potentially radical coalitions could fracture consensus on sensible changes. Success means launching youth into productive lives, fostering upward mobility for the first time in years.
Ottawa’s EV mandate is the latest Kyoto Protocol charade
By Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large
There’s something notably similar between Ottawa’s current electric vehicle mandate and the Kyoto Protocol.
Some Canadians will remember how the Chrétien government continued to proclaim its support for Kyoto even while doing essentially nothing to implement it. The whole exercise came to have an element of Orwellian theatre. It was as if the audience was even in on the gag. We all knew Canada wouldn’t hit its targets, no matter what the government said.
(As a refresher, we were supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012—or the equivalent of 563 megatonnes by 2012. Instead Canada’s emissions were about 726 megatonnes or roughly 20 percent above 1990 levels instead of 6 percent below.)
The EV mandate has the same feel. There’s simply no way Canada will hit the 2035 target, and one increasingly gets the sense that the government doesn’t really believe it will either.
If Ottawa were actually committed, we’d see a frenetic push to build charging stations, reorganize supply chains, and above all expand electricity generation. The scale of that challenge alone is staggering: analysts estimate that EV adoption could increase national electricity demand by 20 to 30 percent by 2050, or the equivalent of adding several Hydro-Québecs to the grid. Yet we’re seeing nothing of the sort.
Just as with Kyoto, Canadians are being asked to suspend disbelief until the inevitable moment when the government is forced to admit that the whole thing was more performance than policy.
Canada’s private space industry is—(nearly)—ready for launch
By Aiden Muscovitch, The Hub’s assistant editor
Last week, a private Canadian company came within seconds of making space history.
NordSpace, a Canadian company specializing in building rockets, space flight equipment, and launch pads, was poised to launch the country’s first-ever privately funded rocket from its new Atlantic Spaceport Complex near the town of St. Lawrence in Newfoundland and Labrador. The countdown reached its final seconds before an automatic safety system shut down the rocket’s ignition due to a misfire detection mechanism being triggered. The rocket was then placed in an immobile state, and the launch was postponed until an undisclosed date in September.
For the nearly 100,000 people who watched the launch’s livestream, it may have been a moment of immense disappointment. However, it should not be seen as a failure. The mere fact that we’ve come this far represents substantial progress for Canada’s space industry.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, a crew member of the mission to the International Space Station, gestures prior the launch of the Soyuz-FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012. (Dmitry Lovetsky, Pool/AP photo pool)
Space travel has long been an industry marked by disappointing setbacks that precede significant breakthroughs. Even the most successful companies today are not exempt from the punishing nature of space flight. Take SpaceX, for instance, which failed three times in its early launch attempts in the mid-2000s, for various technical reasons including fuel leaks and control losses, before achieving its first orbital success on the fourth try in 2008. The goal was not perfection, it was advancement. Today, SpaceX is a core partner of NASA’s and is worth over a reported $350 billion USD.
NordSpace is attempting something ambitious, something that has never been done in Canadian space history, despite our boasting about the Canadarm so much that it is featured on our five-dollar bill. NordSpace aims to create an end-to-end Canadian launch system, designed and built domestically, that provides low-cost and responsive access to orbit. Most importantly, this end-to-end system would be end-to-end Canadian. It would involve rockets built in Quebec and launched in Newfoundland and Labrador, rather than built in Quebec and launched in Houston. NordSpace has built the rockets and the launch pad. Until now, Canada has relied entirely on foreign rockets and launchpads to send satellites into space.
NordSpace’s work marks the beginning of a new chapter in Canadian history, where our space industry is reliant on itself alone. The company’s next attempt in September could solidify our position as a hub for world-class space scientists, which may be appealing to those disenfranchised at NASA.
