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Paul St. Pierre Plamondon, Quebec’s new premier-designate, is about to shake up Canada’s immigration debate. Like most Quebec politicians, PSPP, as he is known, doesn’t buy into the accepted wisdom of Canada’s Laurentian elite that ever-expanding immigration numbers are good for the country.

For the most part, Quebec politicians, at the provincial level anyway, tend to favour a more restrictive approach to immigration. This is part of the province’s overarching ethos of protecting its unique culture.

As federal Liberal governments have pushed immigration numbers higher, Quebec has pushed back. In older comments in English that recently resurfaced after the election, PSPP explains that he believes the Liberals were wrong to do what they did and even ties them to the Century Initiative.

The Century Initiative is a not-for-profit group, mostly made up of big business types, that believes Canada should increase its population to 100 million by the year 2100 to become a stronger country economically.

The Liberals in Ottawa have long denied that they are implementing the Century Initiative, but there are serious ties between the two. That would include the two co-founders, Dominic Barton and Mark Wiseman.

Mark Carney appointed Barton chair of Investment Canada, while he appointed Wiseman, a longtime friend, as Canada’s ambassador to Washington. So, while the Liberals deny ties, the connections are obvious. As St. Pierre Plamondon points out, the Liberals went well beyond the Century Initiative’s immigration targets.

Even the Century Initiative wasn’t enough

“On the permanent immigration, we are more or less in the targets of the Century Initiative,” St. Pierre Plamondon said.

“They went way further than the Century Initiative. Then they went further than their target, and so when they reduce it, if you take the average, we are within the Century Initiative.”

On that front, PSPP is absolutely right.

The Century Initiative called for Canada to boost its permanent resident numbers to 500,000 by 2026. Instead, Canada came just under that number by 2024, with 483,640 permanent residents entering that year, but more than two million newcomers arriving through all immigration streams.

The Carney government has said it has reduced immigration overall and may start to ramp it back up soon, but looking at historical norms shows that the 2025 total immigration numbers are still 45% higher than in 2015 and need to be reduced further.

PSPP clearly isn’t a believer in the idea that higher immigration is needed for economic growth.

“That Century Initiative is wrong. It’s based on the very stupid assumption that growing the GDP makes you richer. But like even a CGP student understands that growing the size of your economy has nothing to do with wealth,” he said.

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GDP up, people fall behind

Over the years that Canada had the highest growth in its immigration rate, Canada’s GDP did increase slightly, about 2% per year in 2023 and 2024, but GDP per capita declined during that time. As we added 2.2 million new people in 2023 and two million in 2024, we had very modest economic growth, but GDP per capita slipped from $61,020 in late 2022 to $59,543 in late 2023.

That’s a fairly sharp decline of 2.4%, and we have yet to recover to 2022 levels.

PSPP also disputes the idea that immigration will solve the worker shortage problem. We can see from abuses of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program that it’s not always the answer.

That said, without immigration, Canada would have a declining population.

Statistics Canada places the national fertility rate at 1.26 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. If we don’t have some level of immigration, we will end up with a shrinking population and potentially a shrinking economy.

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The debate Ottawa fears

We don’t have proper debates about immigration in Canada. For the most part, in polite society, you accept that numbers should always go higher or you get called anti-immigrant or racist.

It shouldn’t be that way because there is a wide spectrum of views on the topic, and the debate needs to be had to land at the right level. Clearly, the past several years have been too high, something the government itself acknowledges.

I would argue, as would many others, that the current levels are still too high and need to be curbed.

The appearance of PSPP on the national political scene, with his ability to clearly articulate his viewpoint, will certainly change the debate going forward.