Successful immigration depends on 'shared values,' not ancestry, Trudeau tells Finns

While acknowledging his Liberal government overshot post-pandemic admissions to Canada, Justin Trudeau defended immigration as essential and said successful integration depends not on common ancestry, but “shared values.”

The former prime minister shared his thoughts on immigration during a fireside-style chat with Finnish journalist Jaako Loikanna at the Sumoi Areena, an annual public debate and societal discussion forum in Pori, Finland, last Thursday.

He also expounded on the state of global democracy, Canada’s role in it, and his own political legacy, part of which, Loikanna highlighted, was the federal government under Trudeau having to acknowledge that it allowed immigration to get out of hand in response to the labour shortage that arose from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We didn’t get the balance quite right,” he said in October 2024, after two years of record immigration sent shockwaves into the housing and labour supply.

Given that Finland, like many European countries dealing with more irregular migrants, is debating its own immigration policies, Loikkannen, the head of political and economic affairs for MTV News, asked what lessons they can learn from Canada

“The key on immigration is the capacity to integrate people into your society,” Trudeau began from the stage in a public park in front of a crowd of a few hundred attendees.

“Increasingly, in a very different world, defining what a country is through shared values and not through shared ancestry is the most important thing.”

Canada, he said, had the same debates about irregular immigration ongoing in Europe and concluded that giving people a “stake in the success of the country” is key to integration.

“That is how to make immigration work, and that’s the challenge that we all have to try and do in a very difficult and complicated time,” he said.

But Kevin Vuong, one of his former MPs, said when these same points were shared in Ottawa, Trudeau “implied we were racist.”

“Integration isn’t exclusion. It’s the promise we make to everyone who comes here: this is what we stand for, and you belong in it,” the former Spadina—Fort York MP wrote on X. “Calling that bigotry, as our then PM did, was how he lost the room — and the country.

“It was an excuse to avoid the hard work of nation-building as a personification of his administration: broad values based pronouncements instead of actual leadership and results.”

When we raised exactly these points of the need for integration of immigrants and shared Canadian values at Parliament, @JustinTrudeau implied we were racist.But there was nothing ever racist about expecting newcomers to embrace the values that make this country worth coming… https://t.co/UFhxItFH3m