In 2017, when our fresh-faced prime minister was still under the mistaken impression that incessant virtue-signalling was a reasonable way to run a country, Justin Trudeau issued a proclamation to the world’s huddled masses: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” Canada, in other words, was instituting an open-door immigration policy, in contrast to the United States, where president Donald Trump had just signed an executive order intended to curb Muslim immigration.
In the years that followed, the Liberals continually hiked their immigration targets, first to 400,000 permanent residents per year, then 500,000. It was only after Canadians’ historic consensus around the benefits of immigration started to fracture that the government pulled back, announcing on Thursday that the number of permanent residents admitted in 2025 will fall to 395,000, from the previous target of 485,000. That’s a pretty dramatic cut, but still well above the number of newcomers that were being admitted when the Liberals first took office a decade earlier.
Yet that’s not the impression Toronto Star readers got. The lede in a story published on its website on Thursday claimed that, “Canada is relinquishing its welcome mat to newcomers, ending more than three decades of open-door policy that has earned it the reputation of being the world’s most pro-immigration country.”
That’s the sort of opening paragraph that would make sense in the opinion pages, where clubbing a politician over the head for what the author believes is a foolhardy policy comes with the territory (see how this screed began, for example). But even if Star immigration reporter Nicholas Keung’s piece (which was subsequently rewritten) had been an opinion column, it wouldn’t have held much water, as the Liberals’ new 2027 immigration target of 365,000 is still 40 per cent higher than the 260,404 permanent residents that were admitted in 2014, the last full year that the Conservatives were in power — hardly a sign that Canada is “relinquishing its welcome mat.”
The bigger problem is that Keung’s story ran in the news section, where reporters have traditionally been expected to provide unbiased accounts of the day’s events. Although Keung is a veteran of the Star’s newsroom, the issue of reporters blurring the line between news and opinion is becoming increasingly common — particularly among young journalists fresh out of university, where many professors now see it as their duty to train activists, rather than extol the virtues of objective journalism.
This influx of woke young journalists has fundamentally changed the culture of many newsrooms, even ones as storied as the New York Times, as its former opinion editor, James Bennet, lamented in a lengthy feature published in The Economist last December. Bennet noted that when he began working at the paper as a reporter in 1991, he started from the bottom and was taught to aspire to “journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness.” In 2006, he left to become editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, where he started to “see some effects of the new campus politics.”
When he returned to the Times a decade later, he could barely recognize it. It had been inundated with new hires who moved straight into senior roles. Many had come from digital upstarts that did not have the same journalistic standards, and they were far less willing to entertain a diversity of views.
“There has been a sea change over the past 10 years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense,” but the old guard has now largely been replaced by “illiberal journalists,” writes Bennet. “The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative — whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears — has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.”
As a result of this shift toward illiberal journalism, the line between commentary and news began to fade, according to Bennet, “and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases.” It’s little wonder that trust in the media has eroded so dearly. While I do think, perhaps naively, that most reporters still believe in the value of giving their readers an unvarnished account of contemporary events so that people can make up their own minds on the issues, it’s clear that far too many either can’t help allowing their personal biases to seep into their work, or believe they actually have a duty to spin the narrative.
In a polarized media environment, in which news organizations have staked out their own ideological niches, it’s easy to see how the Star’s editors let something like this slip. But consumers of news should demand better, because anyone left with the impression that Trudeau’s new immigration targets actually represent a massive deviation from historic norms, rather than merely a return to pre-pandemic levels, will have an inaccurate picture of what is taking place in their country. And that is fundamentally bad for democracy.
National Post
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