As I said before—and I'll try to break this down—economic growth is just a combination of two things: how big your labour force is and how productive labour is. It's just about labour force and productivity. Put those two things together and you get economic growth.
Taking that down a level, the bigger your labour force is and the more people you have—the bigger your domestic market—the more demand there is for products and services. That creates growth opportunities for businesses. They hire people. That creates more jobs. More jobs create a virtuous circle of more consumption, more investment, more jobs. That's how it works.
But in the idea people perceive, and it's around a lot—you can certainly see it in the current circumstances politically in the United States, and you can certainly see it in western Europe, and I'm sure that to some degree it's true here in Canada—that if someone comes in, a job is being taken from someone, what they don't see is that the person coming in creates a demand for things, which contributes to a positive cycle of growth. It creates opportunities.
That's a view that we very strongly hold in this council.
The other part of this that's really important from an immigration point of view—and this is a statement of the painfully obvious—is that the world is just filled with smart people, and the more of them we have in Canada, the better off we are, particularly in a future in which competition is going to be about knowledge and less and less about physical force and more and more about intellectual force.
I spend a lot of time in India. We do a lot of business there. I spend a lot of time in China. These countries are just filled with talented people, literally filled with talented people. And they're not just there: there are many other countries around the world in which the same thing is true.
Our view, therefore, is that if Canada can get its share or more than its share of top talent that comes from other countries, that's going to contribute to the kind of work that Ilse does. It's going to contribute to innovation, it's going to create more managerial talent, it's going to help companies scale, it's going to help create new ideas, create new businesses.
It's an old phrase that was coined a long time ago: we're in a war for talent. Immigration is a source of talent, and the more of it we have—and the more disproportionate the share we have as Canadians—the better off our economy is going to be. It's going to create opportunities for everybody.