Marc Miller just finished five years as a federal minister working on Indigenous issues. Now, ironically, he’s minister of immigration, encouraging an influx of new Canadians many Indigenous Canadians think hasn’t served them so well.

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William Watson: In 2023 is it possible to have a reasoned discussion of immigration? Back to video

He’s better off than the person he’s replacing, however, rising Liberal star Sean Fraser. After 21 months at immigration, Fraser is off to housing, infrastructure and communities to work on the big headaches caused for, ahem, housing, infrastructure and communities by the record number of immigrants he let in. It’s just desserts of a sort you don’t often see in politics — even if the prime minister’s recent disavowal of federal responsibility for housing, motivated more by hot-potato politics than respectful regard for the constitutional division of powers, may let Fraser off the sharpest of those three hooks.

Minister Miller says he’ll listen to arguments about whether current immigration targets are correct. The official target has been bumped up to 500,000 a year from 400,000, though in 2022 we hit 1.2 million — the only target Ottawa has bested in recent years.

But the minister will only listen so much. Attack lines are at the ready. As he said shortly after taking his new office: “In every wave of migration that Canada has had, there has been a segment of folks that have blamed immigrants for taking houses, taking jobs, you name it. Those are people that don’t necessarily have the best interest of immigrants at heart and we have to call that out when we see it and we won’t hesitate to do that.” No one who has watched the prime minister drive wedge after wedge into Canadian policy debates over the last eight years has the slightest doubt the Liberals will do that. People who would like to debate the immigration targets may well be anti-immigrant, Miller’s statement suggests, which is but one step of slippery logic away from the R-word: racist.

In this day and age, of course, we never actually discuss a policy issue: we look for the slightest doctrinal misstep in our ideological adversaries’ arguments and pounce, self-righteously claiming the moral high ground while accusing our opponents of having fallen into an ethical ditch.

Immigration seems an area where informed and informative debate will be especially difficult. So kudos to TD Economics for recently issuing a short study of the issue: “Balancing Canada’s pop in population,” by Beata Caranci, James Orlando and Rishi Sondhi. At a time when big banks seem to specialize in serving up politically correct pablum, this piece raises hard questions about how desirable a big boost in immigration is.

Nobody opposes some level of immigration. The question is: how much? In theory, there is an optimal level where the benefits brought by the next new member of our society just offset the costs he or she imposes. In theory, both short-run and long-run costs and benefits can be considered. In theory, they can even be discounted by an appropriate interest rate. Policy should hit that sweet spot and not go beyond it.

In practice, the optimal level is very hard to calculate. People will disagree — perfectly reasonably — on what, and how big, the benefits and costs are, how they may change as more people come, and what the discount rate should be. (Do you know what interest rates will be 10 years from now?) On the whole, I think the TD Economics folks are too optimistic about our ability to discover this right “balance,” but they do us all a great service by describing some of the costs of high rates of immigration.

For instance, if the inflow stays high, we may need 500,000 more housing units (i.e., homes) over the next two years — which seems a task well beyond the capacity of our politico/builders/planners complex. As for health care, the OECD ranked us 31st among 34 member-countries in acute care hospital beds per capita in 2019 — and we’re rapidly raising the number of our capitas without commensurate increases in beds.

There’s also some doubt as to whether immigration is serving the econo-strategic purpose governments have laid out for it, which is to provide young, skilled and therefore high-earning labour that can pay enough taxes to finance the health care and retirement incomes of us older folk. But 40 per cent of people in the rapidly expanding temporary foreign worker program work in agriculture, forestry and fishing, and another 15 per cent in accommodation and food. Those are important jobs which, increasingly, people born here won’t do. But they aren’t the tax bonanzas we locals are looking for.

Immigration may even raise interest rates. Eventually it increases the economy’s capacity but in the short run it boosts demand, which is the last thing we need as we fight inflation. To make sure that doesn’t get out of control, the Bank of Canada may have to keep interest rates 50 basis points higher than if immigration rates were lower. Which hardly helps us build new housing or infrastructure.

Every one of those points is debatable, of course. So let’s have the debate. And don’t anyone use the R-word.