Many years ago I observed that Joe Biden's policies, once elected, could be described as "Hyper-Trumpian" (or, perhaps, as "Hyper-Trumpism") —and we now see a similar pattern amongst the opponents of Donald Trump in Canada. Under several different headings, Canadians are implementing policies that are more Trumpian than Trump himself.
You may well say, "Canada has not yet had dead bodies in the street as a result of immigration raids, as the Americans had in Minneapolis." Indeed, not yet. The removal of "more than one million Indians" from a country the size of Canada could entail many brutal episodes of the Minneapolis sort. Or, instead, there may be no expulsions at all, entailing a different kind of scandal.
How we ended up with the headline number being one million rather than two million, I cannot say: "According to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada or IRCC approximately 1,053,000 work permits expired by the end of 2025 and another 927,000 will do so in 2026." [I am quoting Anirudh Bhattacharyya, as published in the Hindustan Times, Dec 31, 2025.] Perhaps the reasoning behind using one million as a round number is that roughly half of these two million immigrants are migrants from India, specifically?
The actual numbers of people being expelled are rather smaller: 1,712 Indian citizens were deported from Canada in the first three months of 2026, reportedly. This is in the context of an overall decline in the country's population of 55,000 during the same three months, reportedly attributable to both these declining numbers of immigrants and also the inclement contrast between the number of births and the number of deaths this year.
If we set aside the differences in rhetoric and rationalization, what is the difference between current Canadian and American policies on ecology and the environment? On the gas and oil industry? And, finally, on the topic of immigration?
What Canada is now doing under these (Trumpian) headings is made more significant because the results of the policies are immediately palpable: many, many other promises will remain as mere abstractions on a chalkboard for decades —perhaps forever.
Here is the National Post presenting you with a series of salient graphs and statistics: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-data
I am not the sort of imbecile to say, "This is the meaning of the word Liberal, therefore, if your party is called the Liberal Party, this is what your political promises and policies must be." I am a nihilist who sees in words something less than an imperfect tool made to imprecisely express culturally conditioned meanings —less, not more. And, unlike Plato, I cannot imagine anything profound in the gap between the imperfect use of words and our supposedly perfect intended meanings: I find nothing there to be believed in. However, the meaning of the word Liberal has now changed —suddenly— for reasons that nobody is willing to talk about. And, in politics, when men become tired of talking they become dangerous.
