Picture the line at the pharmacy on a Saturday morning. Someone is checking a receipt against what’s left in their account. Someone is doing the math on whether the car repair waits another month. You can’t tell, looking at that line, who was born three blocks away and who landed at the airport eighteen months ago. The worry sits on every face the same way.
That’s not a small thing. It’s almost the whole thing. The story we keep getting handed — newcomers on one side, the rest of us on the other — falls apart the second you ask people what they actually want out of a life. The answers come back nearly identical, no matter where the person started.
The same short list
Ask anyone, from anywhere, what a good life looks like and you tend to get the same plain list. A place to live that doesn’t eat the whole paycheque. Work that’s steady and treats you like a person. A doctor when you’re sick, without waiting in a hallway for it. A street where your kids can walk to school. The sense that the next generation might have it a little easier than you did.
That’s not a Canadian-born list or a newcomer list. It’s a human list. The family that just arrived left everything familiar behind for that exact same short list. They didn’t cross an ocean to take your spot in line — they crossed it for the same reason your own grandparents likely did: the hope of building something steadier than what they left.
What we worry about, in the same order
You don’t have to take that on faith. When the Environics Institute asked Canadians in late 2024 to name, unprompted, the single most important problem facing the country, the top answers were inflation and the cost of living (22%), the economy and unemployment (14%), affordable housing (12%), and health care (11%). Immigration-related issues came in far down the list, named by just 4% (Environics Institute, Focus Canada Fall 2024).
Sit with that for a second. When people speak from the gut about what’s keeping them up at night, they name the price of rent, the price of food, the wait for care. Those worries cross every kitchen table in the country — the long-time resident’s and the newcomer’s alike. We are, overwhelmingly, anxious about the same things.
The dividing line we keep being sold runs between “us” and “them.” The real line runs between everyone trying to make rent and the forces that made rent impossible.
Newcomers aren’t betting against this place
There’s a quieter worry underneath the loud one — not just “they’re competing with me,” but “do they even want what we want? Do they buy into this place at all?” It’s a fair question to ask out loud, and the answer is reassuring.
When Statistics Canada compared how immigrants and Canadian-born people see the country’s shared values, immigrants consistently came out more convinced that Canadians hold those values, not less. Two-thirds of immigrants (67%) said Canadians strongly share a commitment to human rights, compared with 55% of the Canadian-born. On respect for the law it was 62% versus 40%; on gender equality, 50% versus 30% (Statistics Canada).
Read that again, because it cuts against the grain of the scary story. The people who chose this country tend to believe in its better promises more fervently than those of us born into them. They’re not here to take Canada apart — many are quietly more hopeful about it than we are.
The same machine is squeezing all of us
Here’s why this matters beyond feeling good. If we shared a problem but had opposite causes, splitting into camps might make sense. But we don’t. The thing pushing your rent past reason — decades of under-building, homes traded like stock — pushes the newcomer’s rent up the very same way. The thing flattening your raise pushes down on the newcomer at the next station, often harder. The strained clinic keeps you both waiting in the same hallway.
We are not standing on opposite shores. We’re in the same boat, in the same storm, and someone keeps trying to convince us the danger is the person bailing water beside us.
A warmer way to be angry
None of this asks you to stop being frustrated. The frustration is earned, and you should hold onto it — it’s a signal that something genuinely unfair is happening to you. The only question worth asking is where to point it.
Pointed sideways, at the family in the next apartment, it costs you an ally and changes nothing about your rent. Pointed at the forces that actually set these prices, it joins up with the frustration of millions who want the exact same short list you do. That’s not a soft idea — it’s the most practical thing on this whole site: far more of us want an affordable, decent, hopeful life than there are forces standing in the way, but only if we stop mistaking each other for the problem.
We want the same things. That’s not a slogan. It’s the ground we can actually build on.