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Well now a group of prominent Canadians known as the Century Initiative has proposed we reach for the same bold target — 100 million — only by the end of this century. One of the group’s founders is Dominic Barton, chairman of the federal government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which has just recommended that immigration be increased from roughly 300,000 per year to 450,000. So the issue is squarely in play.

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At first glance, the number will seem startling: a near tripling of our current population of 36.4 million. On the other hand, 84 years is a very long time. Think of it this way: over the last decade, Canada’s population has grown at an average of 1.1 per cent per year. Were we merely to stay on our current growth trajectory, by 2100 the population would have risen to more than 90 million. So we are mostly talking about maintaining the status quo, higher immigration compensating for declining fertility.

Arguments raised to date against the proposal amount to objecting that 100 million is more than we have now. The reader is invited to believe that the present population of Canada is, by a remarkable coincidence, precisely the ideal number, such that any additions could only make things worse. And yet the same objections could have been used to argue against current population levels in 1945, when our population was a third of what it is today. “Are you ready for a Toronto of 20 million and a Vancouver of 10 million?” asks one particularly overheated correspondent. Gosh, I don’t know: you mean like New York and Paris?