The Canadian Returnee Podcast

Canadian Returnee
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Passionate writer and observer navigating life in Canada, exploring topics like culture, politics, and personal growth, after living abroad for years. Sharing honest insights and sparking thoughtful conversations. canadianreturnee.substack.com

  1. 5d ago

    Canada's Immigration Backlog Could Take 50 Years to Clear

    Ottawa’s Immigration Backlog Due to Staffing Right now, newcomers from Hong Kong, Ukraine and Sudan all sit in the same queue: the Humanitarian and Compassionate program, or H&C, the category for people who don’t fit Canada’s normal immigration streams but have a strong enough case to stay. As of January 2026, those three groups made up 48% of the entire H&C waitlist. The 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan sets crisis-response admissions at 5,800 for 2026, dropping to 4,000 for both 2027 and 2028. Internal estimates say some applicants could wait up to 50 years for a decision. Look at the programs, and it gets bleaker. The Hong Kong Lifeboat pathway closed on August 31, 2026, after roughly 30,315 applications covering about 48,560 people, most of whom won’t get a decision until after 2027. Around 300,000 Ukrainians arrived under CUAET (the Canada-Ukraine Authorisation for Emergency Travel, a temporary status, not permanent residence) before 2024, and most are still renewing work permits over and over just to stay legal. Sudan’s pathway opened on February 27, 2024, capped at 3,250 applications, and closed within months because demand blew past that cap. IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the department that actually processes these files) doesn’t have the people to keep up. At the same time, anger over housing and jobs is landing on the wrong target. Hate crimes against South Asian Canadians rose more than 200% between 2019 and 2023. Anti-South Asian slurs online jumped 1,350% between 2023 and 2024. That’s what happens when a government expands the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program and international student visas without building the oversight to match, then leaves the public to blame immigrants. By 2024, Ottawa itself admitted temporary immigration had outgrown the country’s capacity to absorb it. Housing demand does go up with immigration. However, researchers point to decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning and land-use rules, piled up under Harper and Trudeau governments alike. There’s a quieter bias running through all of this too. Some people call it polite racism: a racialised professional gets praised for their English or watches their idea get ignored until a white colleague repeats it minutes later. Returnees and dual citizens get a version of it too, treated as less Canadian for having lived somewhere else for a while. That links to something bigger: Canadian Exceptionalism, the assumption that Canada is just naturally more tolerant than America. It’s also why Mi’kmaq fishers in Nova Scotia still get arrested for exercising treaty rights the Supreme Court confirmed back in 1999, because Ottawa never wrote the regulations to enforce them. It’s why, until the 2023 Bjorkquist ruling and Bill C-3 in 2025, a second-generation cutoff buried in the Citizenship Act stopped Canadians born abroad from passing citizenship to their own kids. People call them Lost Canadians, and the name fits. There’s foreign interference too. A public inquiry led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue named the People’s Republic of China as Canada’s most active foreign interference actor, often working through local consulates to downplay what Hong Kong arrivals are actually going through. That’s transnational repression: a state reaching past its own borders to pressure or discredit its own diaspora abroad. Fixing any of this means hiring more IRCC officers, closing the gaps in workplace policy, and actually enforcing court rulings on Indigenous rights, instead of announcing another program for the headline. If this hit a nerve, hit like, send it to someone who needs the real numbers instead of the press release, and subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Paid annual subscriptions are discounted right now, and they’re what keep us ad-free and independent. Can’t swing a subscription? A one-time coffee on Buy Me a Coffee helps just as much. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Canada's Immigration Backlog Could Take 50 Years to Clear

  2. Sep 20

    RBC, BMO sell Moneris to US firm for $2 billion

    RBC and BMO are selling Moneris, the payment processing company they’ve jointly owned for 25 years, to Francisco Partners. That’s an American private equity firm based out of San Francisco. The price tag: $2 billion cash. Split evenly, so $1 billion each. RBC says it’ll book an after-tax gain of about $475 million on the deal. Moneris handles one in three business transactions in Canada. Over 5 billion transactions a year, across more than 325,000 merchant locations. Almost 2,000 employees work there in Toronto, Sackville, Montreal, Calgary, and Burnaby. TD already handed off merchant contracts to Fiserv. Scotiabank teamed up with Chase Payment Solutions. CIBC went with Global Payments. Now RBC and BMO are the last of the Big Five to step back from owning their own payment processor outright. The banks say Moneris keeps its Canadian head office and tech infrastructure. RBC and BMO also signed exclusive referral deals to keep sending business clients its way. Jeff Sloan, the former CEO of Global Payments, is coming on as Moneris’s new Chairman. Three American companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) already control 85% of Canada’s public cloud market. Now add payments infrastructure to the list of things flowing south. Economist Moshe Lander at Concordia put it plainly: Canadian firms scaling up big infrastructure tend to need access to U.S. capital and the U.S. market to make it work. Why’d the banks do it? Payments tech needs constant, expensive upgrades to keep pace with global fintech. RBC and BMO would rather spend that money on core banking and let a specialist handle the payments side. The deal still needs sign-off under the Competition Act and the Retail Payment Activities Act. Expected to close by the end of Q1 fiscal 2027. If you liked this breakdown, give it a like, share it, and hit subscribe. Want to help keep this independent and ad-free? A paid subscription or a coffee goes a long way. Thanks for listening. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    RBC, BMO sell Moneris to US firm for $2 billion

  3. Sep 13

    Are Screens Making Gen Z Dumber?

    For nearly a century, every generation has scored a little better on IQ tests and school assessments than the one before it. Scientists call it the Flynn Effect, and it’s been one of those reliable facts about human progress. Well, Gen Z is the first generation where that trend has flipped. Researchers out of Norway and Denmark tracked hundreds of thousands of military conscripts and found IQ scores peaking decades ago and sliding since. The OECD noted reading and math scores dropped noticeably between 2018 and 2022, roughly three-quarters of a school year’s worth of learning lost. Same story in the US with the latest “Nation’s Report Card.” The timing lines up closely with when screens really took over classrooms and daily life, starting around 2010. Neuroscientists studying this say the average attention span now clocks in around eight seconds. The theory is that constant scrolling and swiping trains the brain to skim for bullet points instead of actually reading. Add in leaning on AI for essays and homework, and you get a generation that can pass a test without understanding what they wrote. There’s a great line from one researcher in the piece: information isn’t the same as wisdom. You can read a hundred tweets and still miss what’s actually true. There are behavioural shifts where workplaces are noticing more sensitivity to feedback, less eye contact. So what’s being done about it? Denmark’s leading the charge here, pulling phones and laptops out of classrooms entirely this school year and bringing back physical textbooks and handwriting. If you enjoyed this one, give it a like, share it, and hit subscribe. If you want to help keep this content free and independent, consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee; every bit helps keep the lights on. Thanks! This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Are Screens Making Gen Z Dumber?

  4. Sep 6

    Racism in Canada: The Numbers Behind the Talk

    One in four Canadians says they’ve faced racial or ethnic discrimination, regularly or from time to time. Black and Indigenous folks are getting hit hardest, with two-thirds of Black Canadians saying they’ve been treated like they’re “not smart” or viewed with suspicion just for existing. There’s “edugration” where international students get treated like cash cows by universities, paying triple the tuition, then getting blamed by politicians and everyone else for the housing crisis. There’s environmental racism, where toxic sites just happen to keep ending up next to racialised communities. Moreover, there’s a nasty wave of online hate targeting racialised women and 2SLGBTQIAP+ folks especially that’s leaving people quitting social media to protect their mental health. Ottawa’s got a new plan, the Anti-Racism Strategy 2024-2028, aiming to actually change systems. Still, critics including the CCLA say the new advisory council set up doesn’t even have Black leadership at the table, and doesn’t name anti-Black racism directly. Despite all this, Black Canadians are actually the most optimistic group in the country right now about the future. So even with how deep this stuff runs, there’s hope that naming these problems is the first step to actually fixing them. If this kind of breakdown is your thing, hit that like button, share it, and subscribe. If you want to help keep this content free for everyone, consider grabbing a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. Every bit helps keep the lights on. #CanadianNews #RacialEquity #SystemicRacism This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Racism in Canada: The Numbers Behind the Talk

  5. Aug 30

    Canada's Hong Kong Pledge Tested as Backlog Grows

    In August 2026, activist Zhang Xinyan touches down at Vancouver airport, and it’s a huge relief. She’s a Falun Gong practitioner who fled China back in 2014, ended up as a UN-recognized refugee in Thailand, and then Hong Kong police slapped a HK$200,000 bounty on her head over “subversion” charges tied to her activism. Then Thai authorities scoop her up in May 2026 for an alleged visa overstay, and she spends three months in detention, dodging deportation back to China multiple times. It took serious pressure from the UN and human rights groups to get her here safely. Why’s this happening? Hong Kong’s been cracking down hard since Beijing’s 2020 national security law, and then Article 23 landed in 2024, expanding what counts as a crime: treason, sedition, “external interference”, with penalties up to life in prison. Rights groups are calling it vague and regressive, and it’s hard to argue otherwise. Canada’s been trying to respond by suspending the extradition treaty back in 2020, tightening up export controls, updated travel advisories. Right now, over 300,000 Canadian passport holders are living in Hong Kong right now, and around 35,000 people are stuck in an immigration backlog trying to use the “Hong Kong Pathway” to get here. That’s led to protests in Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto, with people saying Canada made a promise it’s not keeping. If you’re into stories like this, hit that like button, share it, and subscribe. If you want to help keep this content free and independent, consider grabbing a paid subscription or buying me a coffee; every bit helps. Thanks for tuning in. #HongKong #Canada #Immigration This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Canada's Hong Kong Pledge Tested as Backlog Grows

  6. Aug 23

    Hong Kong's New Security Law Hits Canada Hard

    Hong Kong just tightened the screws even further with new national security rules that came into effect this year. We’re talking warrantless searches, cops demanding your passwords and encryption keys, and if you say no? You’re looking at fines and jail time. This isn’t just a “Hong Kong problem” despite popular stereotypes; it’s hitting Canadian banks and businesses operating there too. Seven Canadian financial institutions have offices in Hong Kong, and now their employees are stuck between a rock and a hard place: break Canadian privacy law, or risk prison in Hong Kong. Then there’s the human side of this story. A Falun Gong activist named Zhang Xinyan, who had UN refugee status and was literally cleared to fly to Vancouver with Canada’s help, got blocked from boarding her flight in Thailand. Human Rights Watch is calling it transnational repression. Meanwhile, Canada’s special PR pathway for Hong Kongers has seen over 26,500 applications, but the backlog means new applicants might not hear back until after 2027. A lot of newcomers say they’re facing a weird “double standard” because Hong Kong doesn’t look like a warzone; some Canadians don’t take the danger seriously, even though it’s very real. This all ties into a much larger debate about Canada’s role on the world stage: whether we lean harder into partnerships with allies like the EU, or keep following Washington’s lead. If this kind of content is your thing, smash that like button, share it, and hit subscribe. If you want to help keep this independent and ad-free, consider grabbing a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. Thanks for listening. #HongKong #Canada #Immigration This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Hong Kong's New Security Law Hits Canada Hard

  7. Aug 16

    Canada Steps Up Ukraine Support with $900M+ Package

    Since the war started back in 2022, Canada’s contributed over $25.5 billion in total assistance and $8.5 billion in military aid. PM Mark Carney just announced a fresh $900 million package at the NATO Summit in Ankara; we’re talking ammo, armoured vehicles, and air defence systems that President Zelenskyy says have already landed. Canada’s not just writing cheques anymore. A Hamilton, Ontario company teamed up with a Ukrainian drone maker to produce combat drones right here at home. There’s also a wild new anti-drone missile in the works that can hit speeds over 1,000 km/h. It’s not all military hardware, though. Canada’s also throwing $51 million at humanitarian healthcare, election readiness, support for veterans, even grain storage bags to protect Ukraine’s harvest from Russian attacks on ports. Canada’s leading the charge to bring home Ukrainian kids who were taken by Russia, and became the first non-European country to join an international body that lets people file claims for war damages. Russia’s been throwing around threats, calling Canada a “warmonger,” and some Canadians are asking whether we should be spending this much abroad when we’ve got our own housing and healthcare pressures at home. If you’re into stories like this the ones connecting Canadian politics to what’s happening on the world stage hit that like button, share this, and subscribe. If you want to help keep this independent and ad-free, consider grabbing a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. Every bit helps keep the lights on. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Canada Steps Up Ukraine Support with $900M+ Package

  8. Aug 9

    Hong Kong's Crackdown Hits Home for Canada

    Hong Kong rolled out some seriously sweeping new security laws. As of July 1st, there’s a new law pushing Communist Party ideology into schools, and it’s written broadly enough that human rights groups say it could be used to go after people and organizations anywhere in the world. Not exactly reassuring if you’ve got family or friends who’ve left Hong Kong for Canada. New rules mean police can now demand access to your phone, your laptop, your office no warrant needed. Say no, and you’re looking at jail time and a hefty fine. For Canadian banks and businesses operating there, this means comply with Hong Kong and break Canadian privacy law, or protect your data and risk having an employee thrown in jail. A 55-year-old activist with official UN refugee status was literally hours from boarding a flight to resettle in Canada when Thai authorities detained her under pressure from Beijing. Hong Kong police have also put bounties on 19 activists living overseas, some as high as a million Hong Kong dollars. This is what’s called transnational repression, and it’s happening in real time. Meanwhile, big names like Jimmy Lai and Joshua Wong remain behind bars, alongside teenagers and vulnerable people caught up in increasingly broad definitions of “dissent.” The Hong Kong Pathway, Canada’s special immigration lane meant to be a lifeline for people fleeing this, is buried. Over 33,000 applications are stuck in limbo, wait times have ballooned to over 10 years, and the whole program is set to expire August 31, 2026. Advocates are calling it a broken promise. If this one got you thinking we’d love for you to hit like, share, and subscribe. Consider grabbing a paid subscription or buying us a coffee, and we genuinely couldn’t do it without you. Thanks for listening. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Hong Kong's Crackdown Hits Home for Canada
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Passionate writer and observer navigating life in Canada, exploring topics like culture, politics, and personal growth, after living abroad for years. Sharing honest insights and sparking thoughtful conversations. canadianreturnee.substack.com

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