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

It’s getting pretty much impossible to believe that the chaos in France is about students not being happy with their classrooms. It may have started that way, but clearly the current conflagrations across many cities, destroying historical buildings and cultural institutions, are driven by radical elements who hijacked the protest inflamed it into riots. Based on the flags, slogans and other evidence, it seems like a manifestation of the “red-green alliance” between communists and Islamists. Did anyone see this coming? About 1000 French military people did, including 20 retired generals, all of whom signed an open letter in April 2021, warning of a “deadly civil war” in France due to those sowing division under the guise of anti-racism and “Islamism and suburban hordes.” "France is in peril… the hour is grave," the signatories said. French government ministers promptly and righteously condemned the message and threatened those who signed it with penalties. We in Canada may not be at that stage yet, but there are indicators that we should be paying more attention to what is happening on our streets and subways, and to attacks on our institutions and fellow citizens. However, our government remains more focused on keeping the immigration train chugging at high speed to grow Canada’s population than on integration, maintaining Canada’s historic culture, or the well-being of its citizens. Google Translate will translate the letter: valeursactuelles.com/politiq…

Japan’s population is declining at an accelerating rate. Japan conducts a census every five years and first saw a drop in population in 2015. By the 2020 census, it had fallen a further 0.7%. The 2025 census showed a 2.5% decline, to 122,972,528 people, 3.2 million fewer than in 2020. And yet, Japan seems to be doing better economically and in terms of providing social services and maintaining social harmony than countries like Canada that use mass immigration to grow their economy. There might be a lesson in there somewhere. nippon.com/en/japan-data/h02…

Oh boy, isn’t this great news for Canada? Makes you wonder if Prime Minister Mark Carney and India’s High Commissioner are in cahoots to flood Canada with newcomers. After Monday’s Alberta referendum, where Albertans voted YES to each of the five questions on immigration to slow it down and give their province more control, Mark Carney said, “I just want to underscore we will not budge from overall levels that are sustainable. We’re getting them to that level now.” Talk about listening to the people! And you have to wonder how he defines “sustainable.” Meanwhile, Indian High Commissioner Dinesh Patnaik, who in March said Canada should take in 60 million Indians, now says that Carney’s proposed investment plans will create a huge demand for workers, 15 million in fact. And what better place to get a good whack of them than from India? Carney briefly lifted his foot off the accelerator of population growth that former PM Justin Trudeau had pushed to the floor, but he has not got immigration under control. Nor does he intend to. He’s still implementing the Century Initiative plan to drive our population to 100 million by 2100, just a wee bit more slowly. youtube.com/watch?v=QHK03lF2…

We’re very happy that more than three-quarters of Albertans who voted in Monday’s referendum chose to stay in Canada. But the question about separation was number 10 in a 10-question referendum. The first five questions pertained to immigration, and on every one of them a clear majority of Albertans voted for greater restrictions. Albertans voted for more provincial control over immigration for the purpose of decreasing it to more sustainable levels, and to give Albertans first priority on employment opportunities. They voted to restrict provincially funded public services to Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and individuals with Alberta-approved immigration status. They voted for a 12-month waiting period before legal temporary residents could qualify for provincially funded social support programs. They voted to require legal temporary residents to pay a fee for health care and education. And they voted for proof of citizenship to vote in an Alberta election. The results of the Alberta referendum suggest strong dissatisfaction with federal immigration policies. And we’re pretty sure this dissatisfaction is not limited to Alberta. results.elections.ab.ca/8400

Does this reflect a demoralized workforce? In September, the labour force participation rate – the number of Canadians 15 years and older who are employed or actively looking for work – fell to 64.8% of the population, the lowest level in 29 years, excluding the pandemic. Canada’s economy lost nearly 68,000 jobs that month, more than the 42,000 lost in August, for a total of 110,000 lost jobs over 2 months. The national unemployment rate rose slightly to 6.5% in September. The StatsCan data shown indicates that the unemployment rate for youth (15 to 24) remains especially high, 13% in September. reuters.com/world/americas/c…

“They can’t be that stupid,” is what then PQ leader, now premier designate of Quebec, Paul St.-Pierre Plamondon (PSPP) said on October 29, 2024, referring to the federal Liberals’ immigration policy, which he said matched and even exceeded the target of the Century Initiative, whose raison d’être is a Canadian population of 100 million by 2100. In other words, the reasons for Canada’s policy of mass immigration are all bogus. PSPP said the Century Initiative is based on “a very stupid assumption that growing the GDP makes you richer…but growing the size of your economy has nothing to do with wealth.” We’re not separatists, but he’s singing our song! In an article published on our website on October 30, 2025 (How Canada Was Destroyed Gradually and Then Suddenly), we suggest that Canada’s immigration disaster is a feature, not a bug. (And we’ve criticized the Century Initiative in plenty of other articles as well.) They knew that immigration would not solve any economic problems, PPSP says. “It’s impossible that they’re that stupid.” We agree. So, what’s the agenda? We suggested it was to turn Canada from a country into a “postnational state” to use then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own words. And we fear that Mark Carney, who was Trudeau’s economic advisor, is in lockstep with that agenda, even as he tells us that immigration is now under control. He appointed the Century Initiative’s two cofounders, Domnic Barton and Mark Wiseman, to important posts and spoke at the Century Initiative’s 2024 webinar. Should we trust him on immigration? xitter.cf/valdombre/status/18511…

Canada slid down nine places, to number 18, on the Fraser Institute’s most recently published global economic freedom index. It used data from 2024, the last year for which data for 165 countries was available. Of the five major areas that comprise the index, Canada did especially poorly, ranking in 101st place, in Size of Government. It ranked in 53rd and 50th place, respectively, in Sound Money and Freedom to Trade Internationally. It did best in Legal System and Property Rights (12th place) and Regulation (13th place). More economic freedom was associated with a higher standard of living. In the 25 economically freest countries, average incomes were 6.9 times greater than those of the least free and the incomes of the bottom 10 percent were 7.1 times greater. People in the economically freest countries also lived 14 years longer on average. Economic freedom fell globally during the Covid pandemic and has not yet fully returned to pre-pandemic levels for the average country. fraserinstitute.org/sites/de…

Should we be shocked that there was an organized “pipeline” behind the massive number of foreign students entering Canada, especially during the past decade? Juno News dug up the fact that a gentleman called Gurinder Bhatti who cofounded the Opulence Education Group that owns three Academy of Learning campuses in Ontario also directed Express Student Services in Punjab, India, that recruits students for those campuses. Last week evidence emerged that some Academy of Learning students couldn’t name the program they were enrolled in, while third parties were hired to complete student coursework, among other irregularities. Yet about 14,800 students at the Academy of Learning campuses received more than $219 million in Ontario Student Assistance Program grants in 2024-25, out of a total of $385 million, meaning they got 57% of the total. The Opulence Education Group has also been buying private career colleges in Ontario, BC, Alberta and Quebec. Serious deficiencies were also found at Granville College in Vancouver, which has a staggering dropout rate. In total, 24% of the students in the hospitality program withdrew, while less than 1% graduated(!). In the supply chain program, 72% left or failed to graduate. Is it likely that Gurinder Bhatti is not the only one involved in international student pipelines? The question arises how such “student mills” could be operating right under the noses of provincial and federal governments. If the people in charge of vetting didn’t notice, they were astonishingly incompetent. To our suspicious minds, what at face value looks like incompetence could be the federal government’s own “back door” pipeline to bring people to Canada to drive the population growth that the Century Initiative promotes. The Grok-generated graph below shows the number of international students in Canada rising from ~123,000 in 2000 to a peak of 1.04 million in 2023 and declining (red bars) to just under 600,000 by July 2026 after the government slammed on the brakes in 2024 in response to public anger. junonews.com/p/canadian-coll…

We think this is a pretty good question and we really wish we had the answer. Our advice is that a first step is to stop the pursuit of growth but we don’t seem to have the ear of the powers that be. geekculture.com/joyoftech/jo…

California is set to relaunch its “Wildlife Coexistence Program” – aimed at reducing conflicts between wild animals and people and for which funding ran out in 2024 – as California’s gray wolves gave birth to a record number of pups this year – at least 42. Wolves were extirpated in the state in the 1920s and only began to naturally recolonize it 15 years ago. A lot of ranchers aren’t too delighted about the wolf population rebound but the program offers compensation for loss of livestock as well as non-lethal wolf deterrents. A major underlying cause of conflict, of course, is that the human population has ballooned – it’s just short of 40 million, not much less than Canada’s. yahoo.com/news/science/artic…

Jane O’Sullivan and Sandra Knack explain how it can be that half the pregnancies in the world today are unintended and that the number of women with an unmet need for contraception has increased from 236 million in 2000 to 260 million in 2025. The reason is that family planning programs were deprioritized in the 1990s. And that’s because (as the discussion paper they link to in the article describes) at the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in September 1994, population concerns were totally sidelined and the focus was exclusively on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Aid for family planning, which was over 50% of “population assistance” in 1995, fell to 5% in 2008. The abandonment of population programs occurred due to pressure from feminists, progressives, and other “social justice” advocates ideologically inspired by Marxism. But since population programs also promoted shifting cultural norms in what were often very conservative and patriarchal societies, these norms tended to shift back to traditional pronatalism when the programs were ended. The ensuing population growth, which could have been much less, led to resource scarcity, violent conflicts and outmigration. And women and girls are often the primary victims of the injustices that the social justice advocates indirectly inflicted by defunding and even denouncing population programs. overpopulation-project.com/r…

Tomorrow is World Migratory Bird Day. What better way to support migratory birds than to not destroy their habitat – whether it be their breeding grounds, wintering grounds or fueling stations on the way? We can also take measures to keep them from slamming into our windows, where they mistake the reflections of vegetation and sky for the real thing. That kills over one billion birds annually in the United States. Home measures include adhesive products for the outside of windows and “parachute cords” hung on the outside of windows. Happy birdwatching to those who do it. (Picture shows snow geese in migration by mesijo-tnetenba on iNaturalist) migratorybirdday.org/

This article addresses the sad situation of child malnutrition in Africa. “More than 25% of children under five were reported to be stunted in many African countries. Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Liberia and the Central African Republic were some of them,” it says. Not one word about population growth, of course. We’re disappointed, but not surprised, even though population growth presents challenges not only for child nutrition but for EVERYTHING. Just in the last 25 years, sub-Saharan Africa’s population grew from 681 million in 2000 to 1.32 billion in 2025 (~94% increase) and is still growing at a rate of 2.4% annually. theconversation.com/child-ma…

Where do all the asylum seekers flooding into Canada come from? We published an article about that question in February 2025 (Canada’s Asylum and Immigration Policies: A Threat to National Security?). Even the municipalities that are expected to accommodate the influx were kept in the dark, according to a recently disclosed WhatsApp group chat of Ontario’s “Big City Mayors” following three separate freedom of information requests. The chat group spans 18 months starting on July 15, 2023, when representatives from Guelph asked other cities and their mayors whether they were also experiencing overwhelmed social services and a surge in refugees entering their cities. Mayors and other city representatives wrote about how demand greatly exceeded their city’s capacity for shelter and services, as well as about homeless encampments, addictions and public disorder. “Ottawa broke the housing market with an unsustainable and unpredicted and unprepared for increase in demand from their massive increase in immigration,” Oakville Mayor Rob Burton said in 2024. Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe complained that municipalities were not consulted before the government set immigration and refugee targets. All of which raises the question: What is the federal government’s agenda? But whatever it is, Mark Carney seems to want to continue with Trudeau’s trajectory, having recently signaled that he will raise immigration levels again. (The picture shows a protest in the Barrhaven area of Ottawa against a “sprung structure” intended to house migrants, mostly single males, that was to be set up at that location, held on November 3, 2024.) thecountersignal.com/p/feds-…

Last week we were scratching our heads about Britain’s asylum policy (Oct 1). But it seems their criteria for granting bail are a bit puzzling as well. Five men were arrested on suspicion of terrorism for skulking around Royal Air Force base at Fairford, which serves as a US air base, causing the evacuation of about 85 homes. They were all released on bail. But a guy (Danny Tommo) who slashed a rubber dinghy that had brought a load of illegal migrants to the UK after all the illegals had already disembarked, gets no bail, because he caused “reckless endangerment.” Does anyone else find that odd? cbc.ca/news/world/uk-raf-fai…

Oh no, it looks like largely peaceful demonstrations that somehow got off the rails again. We’re not quite clear on what happened in France last week when protests against the state of education descended into chaos and violence in several major cities. Students were allegedly protesting conditions in lycées (high schools), including staff shortages, overcrowded classes, rundown buildings and poor facilities. One sign said “Gen Z en colère” (Gen Z is angry.) And with good reason, but does setting fires and burning buildings help? Nor does left-wing mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko telling protesters that violence can be legitimate. Government and intelligence services blame the hard-left party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). They could be right. There are a couple of communist flags in one of the pictures. Another one of those events that makes one wonder if things are unravelling. dailymail.com/news/article-1…

So it looks like Canadians are once again being subjected to bovine fertilizer on mass immigration (as if the barrage ever really stopped). In our post on January 30, we warned: “PIC recognizes that Prime Minister Carney has slightly lifted his foot off the accelerator of Canada’s population growth but fears that he will push it down again when the various crises that Justin Trudeau’s mass immigration unleashed have abated a bit.” And that is exactly what seems to be happening now as Carney floats a “controlled increase” in Canada’s population (which the latest StatsCan updates indicate never actually stopped increasing). How remarkably similar Carney’s proposal is to the Century Initiative’s advocacy of using “responsible population growth” to reach a target of 100 million Canadians. We saw how that worked out – housing crisis, food bank crisis, homelessness crisis, affordability crisis, inflation, and maybe it even has something to do with the rising crime rate. ca.news.yahoo.com/carney-sug…

In PIC’s latest newsletter, we look at the phenomenon of mass immigration to the West and some of its political consequences, the impact that population growth on water resources, and more. mailchi.mp/e1695a1d162f/mzq6…

Is it just us, or does one have to wonder where the British government’s head is at? Britain granted asylum and citizenship to a former bodyguard of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh who was later arrested over an alleged plot targeting Jews across Europe. Meanwhile, Britain has denied entry to foreign journalists on several occasions because it deems their presence not conducive to the public good. Presumably, the British government had no such problem with “Mr. X,” who enjoys a British court anonymity order. However, piecing together various bits of information, the media have identified him as Mohammed Naim, son of Hamas politburo member Basem Naim. timesofisrael.com/hamas-chie…