Population Institute Canada

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

Bill C-22 does seem invasive. China should not be our model for surveillance. Maybe if the federal government were a bit more selective about whom it lets into the country (i.e., adopted a saner immigration policy), it wouldn’t have to be so concerned about what each of us are doing and when. If Bill C-22 is passed, some of Canada’s leading entrepreneurs say they will leave the country. But don’t worry – no doubt the federal government will balance the numbers with asylum seekers and temporary workers. instagram.com/reel/DYXFyxTMJ…

It seems to us that if there is an organized ring for stealing meat, things are looking pretty grim in the Metro Vancouver area. It aligns with an unprecedented level of food bank use in Canada. In our opinion, it is government policies that helped get us there by spiking our population and helping to crash the economy. cbc.ca/news/canada/br…

A new poll shows that 57% of Albertans plan to vote yes in Premier Danielle Smith’s upcoming October referendum to the question on giving the province more say in who migrates there. It seems highly likely that Canadians in other provinces would also like more say about immigration. But don’t count on them getting the chance to do so. facebook.com/groups/9140503…

@StubbinsPeter There always seems to be more bad news than good news on the biodiversity front.

Good news for sure, bad news is that Pacific Gray Whale population down to around 14,000 from 24,000 in one season….due to starvation

Thank you for your service. Now go away. While the Liberal government will spend over $1 billion on the healthcare costs of asylum claimants this year (as we mentioned in our post of February 20), it is quietly cutting the funding for a program aimed at helping homeless veterans. The money was transferred discreetly of course, because it is “likely to generate negative stakeholder reactions.” No kidding. And maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Canadian Armed Forces are having trouble recruiting. junonews.com/p/liberals-qui…

Community planner Eben Fodor has been saying it for decades and it’s as true as ever: bigger is not better. This short video from 2010 is as relevant today as it was then. Growth is subsidized, encouraged, and every policy facilitates and induces growth. We hear a constant stream of rhetoric about growth and its benefits: it brings jobs, it brings prosperity, it brings housing, it lowers taxes. And yet the evidence is that none of those things are happening, he says. (And isn’t Canada, after decades of constant growth, exhibit A that this rhetoric is BS: our unemployment is high, our standard of living is falling, we’ve got a housing crisis and our taxes keep going up. And for many of us, our own communities are becoming more dangerous.) “Growth is presented as the solution to problems it has never solved.” When will our leaders start promoting “better” instead of “bigger”? youtube.com/watch?v=uv619N…

Anyone who took the 0.2% decrease in population growth that Canada experienced in 2025 as an indicator that Canada might be coming to its senses about mass immigration should perhaps think again. The woman who will become Canada’s next governor general on June 8, Louise Arbour, was a major architect in developing the UN Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration that was adopted in December 2018 in Marrakesh, Morocco. It is essentially an open-borders document advocating supranational control over national borders. un.org/sg/en/content/…

Some good news about the extremely endangered North Atlantic right whales! As its calving season comes to a close, the tally for 2026 is 23 calves, the highest number since 2009. It seems that conservation efforts in recent years have paid off. These include speed limits for watercraft, some changes to shipping lanes, and developing fishing gear that make escape for entangled whales easier. The right whale is not “out of the woods” but good news is good news. news.mongabay.com/short-article/…

Happy Mother’s Day! We are looking forward to a time when every mother is a willing mother, every child is a wanted child, every population is sustainable, and there is a place for nature.

May 8, 2026. Happy Birthday, Sir David Attenborough! Don’t do anything too crazy – you’re turning 100 after all. Let’s celebrate this PIC patron’s milestone with the BBC, where he started his career seventy-four years ago, in 1952. bbc.com/mediacentre/ar…

The Belgian government has announced that it is planning to buy its nuclear reactors from the French power company Engie in order to secure its energy supplies. Belgium has seven aging nuclear reactors, five of which have been shut down and two of which are still operating. At one point, all seven nuclear reactors had been set to close by 2025. In a joint statement with Engie, the Belgian government indicated that it intended to extend the operations of existing reactors and develop “new nuclear capacity” with the aim of “taking responsibility for Belgium’s long-term energy future, with the objective of building a financially and economically viable activity…” bbc.com/news/articles/…

PIC’s latest article takes a deep dive into the UN’s report on water that was released in January. You might get the bends from reading it. The UN report, with the title Global Water Bankruptcy, presents the separate water crises around the world as “global water bankruptcy” and argues that the world’s “overdrawn accounts” need to be put under new management. That new management would be the UN, of course. The report gives only one fleeting mention to population growth and presents nothing but managerial solutions to what is in reality a biophysical problem. We argue that the UN’s “Global Water Bankruptcy” is really another effort to promote globalization under the auspices of the UN and not about finding solutions. populationinstitutecanada.ca/the-united-nat…

A recently published Angus Reid poll found that 38% of 18- to 24-year-old Canadians identified concern over jobs and unemployment as a top issue, more than double the 18% who did so at the beginning of 2025. Four out of five Canadians looking for a job, or have someone close to them who is, describe the current job market as “bad” or “terrible,” while only 13% gave a positive assessment. Is youth unemployment a growth-inflicted wound? angusreid.org/spring-economi…

Based on data from the UK’s Office of National Statistics released in April 2026, deaths are expected to exceed births among the resident population over the next 25 years, and immigration is projected to be the sole driver of population growth. A projected 2.2 million immigrants would drive the population to 71 million by 2034. Public sentiment is not aligned with this policy, but in Britain, as in much of the West, the financial class is not concerned with the interests of ordinary working people. reuters.com/world/uk/uk-lo…

@kyomizuko Making Canada more postnational is pretty much the only reason we can think of for Bill C-3. All of the "lost Canadians" had been found and their cases processed. There is no good reason extend citizenship of "lost Canadians" beyond the first generation.

@PopulationIC Making Canada *even more* postnational is Bill C-3, the unlimited citizenship by descent legislation that was passed last December. Canadian citizenship has never been this cheap!

Is this what a “postnational” country looks like? Not long after being elected prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau told New York Times reporter Guy Lawson that Canada was the “first postnational state” with “no core identity, no mainstream.” And he implemented that vision by massively increasing already high immigration levels, not only of permanent residents, but especially of temporary workers, international students, and asylum seekers, and lowering requirements for admission. Now these folks, many non-citizens, are being called upon to make up for the shortfall of recruitment to the Canadian Armed Forces. By reducing security screening, lifting restrictions on candidates with certain health and mental health issues, and dropping the old aptitude test, the government was pleased to announce that recruitment is up! Just a few little problems: the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School reports that it is “experiencing significant changes in candidates’ basic capabilities and increasing pressures on staff and instructors.” Things like low fitness levels, lack of language skills, ethnic infighting (e.g., between candidates from Cameroon and the Ivory Coast), and cultural challenges, notably a lack of respect for female officers, among others. Not surprisingly, failure rates have risen. Nevertheless, Dept. of National Defence spokesman Pascal Belhumeur said that the CAF is now recruiting “a representation of Canadian Society” and that the military is “proud to reflect the diversity of Canadian society.” The government frequently touts its objective to “keep Canadians safe,” but, as the author of this article remarks, “lawful civilian gun owners are currently experiencing the largest firearms confiscation the country’s ever seen; at the same time, we’re handing military authority over to people who aren’t even citizens of Canada.” Which raises the question: was there any process to assess the loyalty of these new recruits to the “postnational” country they are purportedly being trained to serve? ca.news.yahoo.com/jamie-sarkonak…

By 2100, Europe’s population is expected to fall by 12%, with 18 EU countries likely to decrease but 12 expected to increase in size. Differences in past and projected migration rates, as well as differences in age structure, drive the variation. The over-65 share of the population will be almost one in three in 2100, compared with one in five today, while those between 31 and 65 years old will decline from 47.8% to 40.5% of the population. euronews.com/health/2026/04…

In 2025, birders and scientists found five “lost” bird species, meaning they hadn’t been seen in 10 years or more. The list is maintained by the Search for Lost Birds project, a partnership of conservation NGOs. All the lost birds found in 2025 are endemic to islands in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Islands are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss and invasive species. It’s not all good news, though, as six new species will join the list in 2026 (unless they’re found by the end of the year). However, with platforms like eBird, iNaturalist and Xeno-Canto, citizen scientists have helped shorten the list by 25% in just five years. The pictured bird is the rufous-breasted blue flycatcher, last seen in 2008, that was photographed in the Philippines in March 2025 (kenny_well on iNaturalist, CC BY-NC 4.0). news.mongabay.com/short-article/…

British Reform Party leader Nigel Farage pledged that he would review all asylum claims made during the last five years if his party were to win the next general election. It would target anyone who was granted asylum, overstayed a visa, or came from a country deemed safe. Keir Starmer’s Labour government has announced a major crackdown on immigration and blames the previous Conservative government for Britain’s immigration mess, with a spokesperson saying that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was taking “decisive action” to stop small boat crossings and “restore control of our borders after the Tories’ failed open borders experiment.” So why are the major parties jumping on Reform’s bandwagon? Are they starting to worry about public anger? bbc.com/news/articles/…

@Megatro07894048 Or is it their Merkel moment? Seems to be a problem throughout the West.

@PopulationIC They are having their Trudeau moment

On April 14, the Spanish government granted an amnesty giving illegal migrants in the country six months to apply for a one-year renewable residence and work permit. Now long queues of migrants, especially of Moroccan, Algerian, Senegalese and Pakistani origin, have formed outside their countries’ embassies in Madrid and consulates in other cities such as Barcelona, Alicante, and Bilboa, to obtain documents needed to apply for “regularization.” It has also led to sub-Saharan migrants from the Sahel and Horn of Africa trying to illegally enter Algeria in the hope of reaching Spanish territory. And of course people-smuggling networks are involved. Official estimates are that this will benefit about 500,000 people, but police estimates suggest the number could be three times as high. The move by the Spanish government occurred while other European countries are trying to tighten immigration policies. Is this a case of the “overpopulation chickens coming home to roost” in unexpected ways? brusselssignal.eu/2026/04/thousa…