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I also find the economic arguments odd, and not just because if all these immigrants are energetic and honest like Canadians, their homeland should be like Canada already. We’re continually told they’ll bring dazzling growth and endless, wonderful, game-changing innovations we can’t accomplish on our own, which will free us from the shabby confines of the current economy. This would include, I presume, those flying cars that were so popular in the 1950s, so Montreal and Toronto can have 3D traffic jams. Yet our per capita GDP has doubled since 1970.

So if our economy is still a rusty heap of junk, as Finance Minister Bill Moreau implied in announcing a deficit-fuelled lunge into “a new modern economy,” life must have been unendurable in the 1920s, let alone the 1870s. And what hope is there for the future?

If conditions today are almost intolerable because we don’t have, I don’t know, bar codes on fish, holographic smart watches or memory implants, why do you suppose we’ll be happy once we do? Or, rather, once our descendants do. At what point will they say our cities are big and sparkly enough, our nightclubs loud enough, our wilderness sufficiently crowded, our social habits sufficiently chaotic and post-modern?

As Aleksandr Herzen pointedly asked in the 1840s, “If progress is the aim, then for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back, and as consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitude crying, ‘Morituri te saluant,’ can only reply ‘After your death it will be beautiful on earth’? … Progress is infinite. This alone should serve as a warning to people; an aim which is infinitely remote is not an aim but, if you like, a brilliant trick; an aim must be more immediate — it ought to be, at the very least, the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done. Each age, each generation, each life had and has its own fullness.”