Commentary
Brad West, mayor of Port Coquitlam in British Columbia, made waves on Aug. 15 with a viral post on X in which he called his province’s addiction to high immigration “a Ponzi scheme.”
A Ponzi scheme is when a fraudster promises investors that a fictitious enterprise will yield lucrative returns, and must constantly find new investors to pay the promised returns to the old investors. It inevitably collapses.
This concept does not just apply to B.C.’s economy—it aptly describes the immigration policy of Canada as a whole.
In his post, West argues that B.C.’s economy “has been re-geared to run on relentless mass immigration,” where the main driver of growth has become “building and selling homes to the next wave of newcomers” rather than “value-added manufacturing, technology, innovation, or unshackling our resources.”…