Hon. Andrew Cardozo: Honourable senators, I would like to begin by thanking Senator Loffreda for launching this inquiry into the contribution of immigrants to Canada and also for chairing the Senate Immigration Working Group.
Some 95% of Canadians trace their heritage to immigrants or are immigrants. To keep this discussion contemporary, I will focus primarily on Canadians who are immigrants, having arrived here in their own lifetime.
I will highlight the role of a few individuals and then make some observations about a group of immigrants: people who work in health care and senior care.
[Translation]Yoshua Bengio is a computer scientist who is recognized as one of the three godfathers of artificial intelligence, or AI. Professor Bengio was born in France. His family emigrated to Montreal in the 1960s. He built his academic career in Canada. He received the Turing Award, an honour regarded as the Nobel Prize in computing, as well as the Order of Canada and several others. I had the pleasure of awarding him the King Charles III Coronation Medal last year here in this chamber.
Professor Bengio founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, a world-renowned AI research centre that trains and attracts the top scientists in the field. He has been a strong advocate for more responsible and ethical AI, as well as for AI security.
[English]At a time when many of his peers have gone off to join the big-spending American AI companies, Professor Bengio has been here carrying the torch for Canada, putting us on the map — alongside another godfather of AI and immigrant to Canada, Geoffrey Hinton — when it comes to the forefront of technological advancement.
Next I want to talk about John Menezes, a first-generation immigrant who came to Canada with the same hope shared by many newcomers: to build something meaningful in a country that rewards hard work and perseverance. He founded Stratejm, a cybersecurity company based in Mississauga. He grew it from a start-up into a nationally recognized managed security services firm.
Over the years, the company has employed dozens of highly skilled Canadian professionals and helped protect critical infrastructure, hospitals, enterprises and public sector organizations across the country from cyber threats.
In 2024, Stratejm was acquired by Bell Canada — a powerful example of how an immigrant-founded, homegrown company can scale, create jobs, strengthen national security and ultimately become part of one of Canada’s most established corporations. It reflects not just his business success but also the broader contribution that immigrants make to Canada.
Dr. Theresa Tam — a name that will be familiar to all of us — served as Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer until June 2025. Dr. Tam was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Great Britain, where she trained as a doctor at the University of Nottingham.
In Canada, she undertook further study at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia, where she specialized in pediatric infectious diseases. She held senior positions at the Public Health Agency of Canada before being appointed Chief Public Health Officer in 2017.
In this role, Dr. Tam was instrumental in our pandemic response through which she became a familiar name to many. She was the steady expert voice that calmed a nation through that unprecedented crisis.
Colleagues, I want to tell you about a hard-working middle-class family here in Ottawa. It is a story that is very illustrative and exemplifies the roles that many immigrants in Canada take.
Masuda and Firoze Anwar came to Canada from Bangladesh in the early 1970s. Masuda has spent many years as a public servant at the Canadian International Development Agency, or CIDA, and then at Global Affairs. Firoze built the trendy and popular Zuni Grill in the south end of Ottawa, a restaurant the whole family worked to make successful and popular. Their son, Tariq, is an IT specialist who is also known in the local Ottawa music scene. Their daughter, as her friends will tell you, is passionate about senators: first, with respect to the hockey team, about which she has loud and strong opinions; and, second, with respect to the Senate of Canada, about which she is professional and shares no opinions. She is today one of the most senior public servants in Ottawa. She is, of course, Shaila Anwar, the Clerk of the Senate of Canada.
Hon. Senators: Hear, hear!
Senator Cardozo: My final example concerns Canadians working in the health care industry. It is an observation based on personal experience.
My mother lived in a retirement home in the northeast end of Toronto for some eight years, until 2022. It was a home with about 100 residents. I want you to think about some of these figures: Over the eight years she was there, I would estimate that about 10% to 15% of the residents or clients were immigrants. The staff, on the other hand — from the kitchen staff, to the food servers, to the front desk receptionists, to the senior management — were, at all times, upward of 95% immigrants. Put clearly, if it were not for immigrants, that seniors’ home could not exist and those 100 residents would not have had the retirement residence to live in.
Keep in mind that many of these workers, such as the food servers and personal support workers, for the most part worked part-time and were called to duty when needed. Servers may have had an early morning breakfast shift for three hours and then another shift at lunchtime or even dinnertime. Housing and rent being fairly expensive in Toronto, most were not able to live nearby. Some would pick up shifts at a nearby Tim Hortons to make ends meet, where they would be paid even less. Remember COVID? During that time, senior care workers were not permitted to work anywhere else, and yet they went on serving seniors day in and day out.
They always did their work with strong positive attitudes despite their paltry pay. They took their work seriously. With 100 residents, they took care of 100 particular needs: food, beverages and the things people liked and did not like. They called the residents by their names, but, more often, they called them “dear,” “darling” or “my love.” These personal support workers who were paid a very low wage, who made Canada home, served up food and care. More importantly, they served up love at all times to our seniors.
When people today sometimes say that we can’t have too many immigrants because they will be a drain on our social services, part of me thinks, “Isn’t that ironic?” If it weren’t for these immigrants — these relatively recent ones — there wouldn’t be many of the social services we take for granted.
Immigrants work at all levels of society, from the most senior to the most junior with the lowest wages. When was the last time you saw a non-immigrant taxi or Uber driver? When was the last time you saw a White person deliver food? Uber and DoorDash exist because there are scads of new arrivals, including those legendary international students who are willing to work those insecure and low-paying jobs so we can get an Uber in a hurry, a package delivered by Amazon or even have a hot Starbucks coffee delivered to our front door from a block away.
Perhaps the Amazon arrow logo should have a tag line that reads, “Packaged and delivered to you by a low-paid immigrant worker.”
I have often wondered what would happen if all immigrants went on strike for just one day. Senator Yussuff, I’m sure, will like the idea of a strike. Sometimes, it’s important to withdraw labour to make a point.
My query was answered in part when the federal government reduced immigration levels over the past few years. The drastic reduction in immigrants available to work caused a gaping shortage for many private-sector employers, as it did for colleges and universities in Canada. International students are the backbone of funding for most of the post-secondary system in Canada, which is a big, complex issue. Suffice it to say, without many of them, universities and colleges have had to reorganize themselves significantly.
Colleagues, if I can shift gears slightly, there are more people on the move worldwide than ever before. According to the United Nations, in 2024, the global number of international migrants was 304 million, a figure that has nearly doubled since 1990. Concerningly, immigration is the main issue shifting the political centre of gravity toward the far right across the world, especially in the developed world. For some, immigration is fundamentally changing their society in ways they find acceptable; for others, it is doing so in ways they find unacceptable. The far right gaining ground not only results in pro-immigration ideas losing out but comes with the rolling back of gender equality, human rights and the fight against climate change.
Canada has avoided this fate so far. It has been a bastion of stability compared to the politics of many of our peers, but we should not consider ourselves immune from these trends. While some measures we considered in Bill C-12 tighten immigration and refugee laws, we can see that as part of a broader context. Sometimes, difficult decisions are made.
Colleagues, I want to focus on a few things before I conclude.
Immigration is and will continue to be a net benefit to society. We will continue to welcome immigrants. If we want to continue to enjoy those benefits, we must ensure that immigrants thrive in society by removing barriers they face to making full contributions to Canada. However, we must be conscious of the need to maintain immigration at reasonable levels so as to not upset what has been a fragile consensus for many years.
As an aside, I will say for the record that I have never been in favour of the proposal of the Century Initiative, an organization that has proposed a population of 100 million Canadians by the end of this century.
[Translation]Colleagues, the next time you sign up for training in French, your instructor may be an immigrant from Haiti, Djibouti, Lebanon, France or Morocco.
While some fear that immigrants speak only one official language, if any at all, upon arrival and thus pose a threat to bilingualism, my experience over many years of studying French has shown me that immigrants are, in fact, a key driver of bilingualism. Without immigrant French instructors, our efforts to promote bilingualism would be very much in jeopardy.
[English]The next time you arrive somewhere late at night, chances are that your taxi driver will be an immigrant. When you check into a hotel past midnight, the receptionist may well be an immigrant. The next time you call for food delivery at home, the deliverer may be an immigrant. The next time you go for an X-ray, the lab technician will likely be an immigrant. The next time you go to the drugstore to pick up your prescribed medicine, the pharmacist or maybe the pharmacy owner will likely be an immigrant.
These are the platoons of immigrants spread across this country who are advancing the cause of a strong Canada that has the range of economic and social services with which we thrive and that make our daily lives better.
Some Hon. Senators: Hear, hear.