A Hundred Million Canadians? - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy ...

An interesting call for increased immigration to Canada by Doug Saunders, who thinks that 100 million is the right population for Canada.

He points out something that most people hardly ever take into account. The US has a huge population. In fact, it has the third largest population in the world, after China and India. It has 330 or so million; the next largest country (Indonesia?) is only two-thirds its size. (Next is Brazil, I think, with fewer than 200 million.) And that is what makes it so alive. (I guess it may also be what makes it so dead.)

Saunders' argument is partially economic, but largely cultural:

It would turn our major cities into places of intense and world-leading culture

Canadians cannot build the institutions of nationhood and the tools of global participation using the skills, markets and tax revenues of somewhere between 21 and 24 million English speakers and eight million francophones scattered more or less sparsely over a area of land encompassing five time zones, several geographic and cultural regions, a dozen political jurisdictions and the second largest land mass on Earth.

Anyone who has tried to do culture, scholarship, public thought, entertainment or political thinking on the national level will recognize the brick wall of underpopulation. There isn?t a large enough audience, or market, to support such institutions at a minimal level of quality or scope. That?s why all of Canada?s major publishing houses are branches of foreign firms. . .

Our institutions of public thought are badly constrained. Canada could never have small magazines, such as The New Republic (54,000 subscribers) or the Weekly Standard (81,000) or Britain?s Prospect (40,000)

So: massive immigration along the lines of the early twentieth century? And where would that leave us culturally? A lot less in the image of our British and French founders, I bet.

(Incidentally, Canada's current intake of immigrants is almost twice that of the UK, a country with twice the population.)

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