While Westminster condemns them as thugs, the men who blockaded Dover and Portsmouth achieved more in one weekend than fifteen years of failed border policy.
It has been an agonisingly long wait, but the English lion-heart has finally woken from its slumber. In the face of at least a decade’s worth of broken Uniparty promises to reduce legal and illegal immigration, a “Dad’s Army” of the white working class has mobilised to do what the authorities patently refuse to: to patrol the south coast of England, and to prevent illegal migrants from entering the country full stop. The Frank Reportpredicted this exact eventuality only last week, noting the utter contempt shown to our national flag and the English heritage with which it is imbued. As I wrote then:
“The time has passed for short measures on illegal immigration. Deal with the small boats now, or the public will do it for you – establishing our own ‘Border Force’ if necessary.”
On Saturday, just such a prediction came to pass. The venue, with a defensive nod to history, was a stone’s throw from the White Cliffs of Dover. In the early hours of the morning, hundreds of balaclava-clad men showed up in a clearly well-organised show of strength. An unprepared police force looked on but decided not to intervene – likely due to the fact that they were considerably outnumbered. The group, understood to be Patriot Platform (an anti-immigration group founded in June of last year in response to government inaction and migrant criminal activity), brought the streets and the port to a standstill alongside peaceful shouts of ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ and asphalt-chalked messages such as ‘Blood is on your hands’ and ‘Are you listening now?’ The group dispersed just after midday, entirely without incident.
While Saturday’s event was clearly a dry-run, on Sunday the stakes rose significantly. For the first time, a ‘small boat’ with 140 illegals on-board attempted to make its way to the Royal Navy’s home of Portsmouth – an unusual deviation from the much shorter route to Dover. Patriot Platform sounded the alarm, and was matched roughly three-to-one by members of the public, who turned up in response to social media livestreams.
This particular migrant operation was clearly well-orchestrated and organised in advance; tents had already been erected, packed with migrant supplies (food, new clothes, and pyjamas). Several coaches were also idling at Eastney Landing, ready to transport the arrivals out of Hampshire for routine processing:
I was at the No Frills on Upper James when I saw a woman, who appeared to be of Indian background, sitting outside with a sign asking for money to help pay her rent.
( Before I continue, she had a heavy Indian accent, which leads me to believe this was not her country of birth )
My first reaction was that newcomers already have access to various settlement programs and forms of government support. But then I started thinking about the bigger picture. What if the enormous population growth Canada has allowed is now beginning to hurt the very newcomers it was supposed to help?
When housing supply doesn’t keep pace with population growth, rents rise. When more people are competing for entry-level jobs, employment becomes harder to find. When food, transportation and basic necessities become more expensive, everybody at the lower end of the income scale gets squeezed, whether they were born here or arrived last year.
And that brings me to the larger problem.
Ontario Works caseloads are climbing. Food-bank use across Canada has essentially doubled since 2019. Ontario food-bank visits have increased by more than 120%. Here in Hamilton, food-bank use has risen dramatically, homelessness remains extremely high, and encampments have become a far more visible part of everyday life.
Canadians are struggling to pay rent, buy groceries, find affordable housing and secure decent-paying jobs.
My own daughter attended Mohawk College and estimated that 80 to 90% of one of her classes was made up of students of Indian background. I’m not blaming those students for applying. I’m questioning how Canada’s immigration and college systems were allowed to become so heavily dependent on enormous numbers of international students, especially when international students pay colleges several times what Canadian students do.
And I’m not just talking about international students. I’m talking about the total number of permanent immigrants, temporary workers, international students, refugees and asylum seekers entering Canada.
Immigration obviously didn’t cause every homeless person, every food-bank visit or every Ontario Works case.
But the question is still completely legitimate:
If welfare caseloads are increasing, food banks are breaking records, homelessness is rising, housing is unaffordable, healthcare is overwhelmed and Canadians are already struggling, why is the government continually increasing the population faster than Canada could build the housing, infrastructure and services needed to support it?
Immigration should benefit Canada, and it should also give newcomers a genuine chance to succeed once they arrive.
The number of people entering this country should be based on how many people Canada can realistically house, employ and support.
Build the capacity first.
Then set the immigration numbers.
Because bringing people into an affordability crisis and expecting both Canadians and newcomers to somehow absorb the consequences isn’t compassionate or intelligent policy.
At some point, we have to acknowledge that this is a real issue and one that can no longer be brushed aside.
I would imagine that many people who dismiss these concerns are simply fortunate enough not to be feeling the effects personally. But when someone is financially secure, comfortable and largely insulated from the consequences, it becomes very easy to tell everyone else that there is no problem. In my opinion, there is something deeply self-absorbed about that.
Canada cannot keep expanding its population while housing, healthcare, employment opportunities, social assistance and food-bank systems are already under this much pressure.
In my opinion, Canada needs to temporarily close, or at the very least drastically restrict, new admissions until we get these problems under control and build the capacity to properly support the people who are already here, both Canadian-born and newcomers alike.
That isn’t about hostility toward immigrants. It’s about recognizing that no system can absorb unlimited pressure without eventually failing the very people it is supposed to serve.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Canada should significantly reduce immigration until housing, healthcare, employment and affordability catch up? – Kristopher Hunter, Hamilton
Mcgill University’s most recent equity quotas require the school to hire 34 “racialized” Canada Research Chairs, five Indigenous Canada Research Chairs and 10 “persons with disabilities.”
TRISTIN HOPPER
2 Sep 2026
Canadian mandates on race-based hiring quotas in academia have done measurable damage to the country’s research productivity, according to a new report by the Macdonald-laurier Institute.
Ever since 2017, Canadian universities have been subject to strict identity-based hiring quotas as a condition of receiving federal research funding.
In recent years, this has resulted in a regular stream of academic job postings that are explicitly barred to straight, white men. Newfoundland’s Memorial University, for instance, advertised a tranche of five new jobs in April that were open only to “women; 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indigenous peoples; racialized persons; and persons with disabilities.”
And according to a 54-page report published Tuesday, all of this identity-based hiring has yielded a notable drop off in the amount of Canadian research being published or cited by other scholars.
“Our analysis … confirms that diversity is not merely neutral but can lower performance,” reads the conclusion of The Equity-excellence Tradeoff report.
It added, “all told, ending EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) initiatives in Canadian research should be a top priority for any responsible government.”
The report zeroed in on the $311-million per year Canada Research Chair program, the federal research fund with the most overt strictures on identity-based hiring.
The program funds 2,285 university-based Canada Research Chairs whose salary and office expenses are covered entirely by federal grant money. For a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, for instance, schools receive $200,000 a year. For Tier 2, it’s $100,000 per year.
In return, schools must submit to federally set quotas on the race, gender and sexual characteristics of the researchers they’re allowed to hire.
According to the most recent “equity targets” published by the Government of Canada, Canada Research Chairs must be 22 per cent “racialized,” 4.9 per cent “Indigenous” and 50.9 per cent “women and gender equity-seeking groups.”
These targets take the form of regularly updated tables in which individual universities are told the precise number of Canada Research Chairs they’re required to hire in one of four “equity-deserving” groups.
Mcgill University’s most recent equity quotas, for instance, require the school to hire 34 “racialized” Canada
Research Chairs, five Indigenous Canada Research Chairs and 10 “persons with disabilities.”
The Canada Research Chair program began in 2000, but its identity mandates started only in 2017 under the oversight of then-prime minister Justin Trudeau. And in just nine years, the effect has been precipitous.
At the program’s launch, 80 per cent of Canada Research Chairs were white males. As of 2025, white males comprised just 25 per cent of the total.
Macdonald-laurier Institute analysts ranked the productivity of Canada Research Chairs both before and after the identity mandates.
What they determined was that the quantity and quality of Canada Research Chair scholarship had declined from between 10 per cent to 15 per cent, which the report attributed to the “non-meritorious appointment of less qualified Black, Indigenous, and female chairs.”
The report categorized the performance of 1,906 Canada Research Chairs by their “h-index,” a standard global measure of a scholar’s productivity and relevance.
An h-index ranks the number of papers in which a researcher is listed as an author, as well as the number of instances in which those papers have been cited by others, and then arrives at a number that is typically between one and 100.
Currently, Canada’s highest h-index belongs to Mcmaster University health researcher Gordon Guyatt. With his name on 1,715 publications and 366,582 citations, as of last count, he has an h-index of 290.
In a close second is another Mcmaster University health researcher, Salim Yusuf, with an h-index of 280.
The Macdonald-laurier Institute paper broke down the median h-index for different races of Canada Research Chairs, and found that the cohorts with the lowest research productivity are the same cohorts being given priority for academic jobs.
The average white or Asian male scholar, for instance, had an h-index of 39. For male scholars who were Black or Indigenous, meanwhile, the h-index came to 25.
There was also an h-index gap between women and men generally. Male Canada Research Chairs averaged an h-index of 38, while female scholars averaged 28.
From this, the paper concluded that the gradual replacement of high-achieving cohorts with lower-achieving ones was coming at the cost of lower quality research — at least in terms of h-index scores.
“There will be many cases in which female, Black, or Indigenous scholars will not impose a cost, but on average — underan Edidispensation in which race and sex considerations can outweigh scholarly merit — this will be the case,” it said.
As one example, the paper noted that in instances where a university took a position previously filled by a white or Asian scholar, and filled it with a Black or Indigenous hire, that’s likely to entail an “average loss of 3.2 h-index points.”
When asked whether Japan will welcome more immigrants, Japanese Finance Minister Katayama said, “We are not imagining a situation where our society will be like European countries.”
She also spoke about when she was in France for two years and noted that even though immigrants from former French colonies speak French, there was still a feeling among French people that they are of a different culture, like how Japanese people feel they are also of a different culture.
