Canada’s immigration system was once the envy of the world. Based on the notion that those who get into the country are those who determine its future, the system chose people best able to contribute. Then the Trudeau Liberals blew it up, opening the gates to just about anyone – including literal terrorists – wreaking economic havoc and breaking Canadians’ faith in the value of citizenship. John Weissenberger, who served as chief of staff to the federal immigration minister in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, has watched it happen with growing dismay, and argues for a return to sanity – centred on the sensible “points” system that served Canada so well for decades.

Germany was postwar Europe’s most successful nation – until it was seized by an arrogant leftist ideology that led it down a ruinous path. Its government abandoned safe, zero-emission nuclear power for inefficient wind and solar plus natural gas from Vladmir Putin. It threw open its borders to millions of asylum-seekers with barely a thought to the enormous costs or the difficulties of social integration. Today, at the 11th hour, Germany is at last struggling to turn around its decade of economic decline and social disintegration. In this cautionary tale, Gwyn Morgan sees a profound warning for Canada.

The global decline in fertility rates has grown so severe that some demographers now talk about “peak humanity” – a looming maximum from which the world’s population will begin to rapidly decline. And though the doomsayers who preach about the dangers of overpopulation may think that’s a good thing, it is in fact an existential threat. Canada has not escaped the decline: birth rates have fallen steadily since 1959, during which time we built a massive welfare state without the manpower to sustain it – and immigration has proved no solution to either problem. In this deeply-researched analysis, Michael Bonner looks at the root causes of our looming demographic disaster and explains the first steps that are essential to fixing it.

Prime Minster Mark Carney came into office promising to move fast to rebuild a Canadian economy suffering from 10-years of mismanagement. He vowed a more clear-eyed, businesslike approach. But since his election victory, his public statements have often been hedged and shrouded in ambiguity. In this incisive analysis, economist and veteran policy advisor Robert Lyman and C2C Editor-in-Chief George Koch look at the choices Carney faces on the big economic issues of the day and lay out the sensible decision in each case. Carney says he has the determination to turn the ship of state around. But does he have the courage to soften and even ditch the ideology that increasingly gripped the Liberal Party during the Justin Trudeau era?

For decades, Canada’s elites saw immigration as a kind of secular virtue, and any criticism of it as racist or xenophobic. But as Patrick Keeney writes in this provocative essay, that belief misunderstands what a nation truly is. The liberal globalist vision that drives blind faith in immigration sees people as bearers of rights and consumers of things, detached from place, history or culture. The conservative-communitarian tradition, Keeney explains, counters that love and obligation flow outward, and that a nation is a moral community bound by shared history, culture and mutual obligations. To love one’s own is not a moral failing, Keeney argues, but a legitimate reflection of human affairs, one that Canada must rediscover if it is to regain its cohesion and build a future.

The Justin Trudeau government’s decade-long determination to drive immigration numbers ever-higher – a policy that public outcry now has it scrambling away from – has obscured a rather important and discouraging phenomenon: more and more people are choosing to leave Canada. Emigration is the flipside of the immigration issue – a side that has been largely ignored. With the best and brightest among us increasingly leaving for better opportunity elsewhere, this growing trend reveals Canada is no longer the promised land it once was. Using the most recently released data and analysis, Scott Inniss uncovers why so many are voting with their feet.

It is arguably forgivable for a government long in office to allow one problem to deteriorate into a crisis. Waving off two or three crises at once would require a voter of rare goodwill – or perhaps naïveté or indifference. But four? Especially after said government ignored ample warning signs, years of deteriorating numbers and no shortage of sound external policy advice. That is where Canada finds itself today, governed by a party fixated on riding out the political fallout while Canadians endure the economic hardship and at-times literally deadly effects. Gwyn Morgan examines the entwined crises in housing affordability, health care, immigration and economic productivity, a vicious cycle that the Justin Trudeau government shows few signs of understanding and none at all of resolving.

Few Canadians know the story: thousands of black slaves taken west of the Mississippi by their Indigenous masters – who themselves were forced there on the Trail of Tears expulsion – faced continuing persecution when Oklahoma became a state. So a thousand of them pulled up stakes and headed to Canada, “where every man was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed,” as one of them put it. In telling their inspiring story, Tom Flanagan recounts how they faced resistance both from some white settlers and, notably, from Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government, which banned black immigration. In an era when Conservative historical figures are decried as racist oppressors, it’s worth knowing the truth. It’s even more important to celebrate the determination and ultimate success of a freedom-loving people who came north.

Academics, politicians and the media have reduced Canadian history to a series of regrettable events requiring abject apology and compensation. In doing so they downplay, ignore or deny the many admirable aspects of our past that remain worthy of celebration and respect. But what of those events that truly are lamentable today? Greg Piasetzki looks at Canada’s Chinese head tax and the role played by Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, commonly considered the racist villain of this policy. Piasetzki’s careful scholarship reveals in full what Macdonald actually said and did on this issue, and recounts his efforts to protect minority rights in Canada a century before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Do you love Canada? The answer ought to be axiomatic. How could anyone not love a country with such a long democratic tradition, born of a spirit of accommodation and committed to the betterment of all who live within its borders. Yet expressing such an emotion today seems utterly obsolete, as our national narrative has become obsessed with shame and regret over our colonial past and racist present. If even native-born residents can’t find a reason to show any ardour for their homeland, why should we be surprised when new arrivals act likewise? Peter Shawn Taylor examines the recent decline in citizenship rates among immigrants to Canada and wonders if it says more about us than about them.