Warning: The following includes references to partisan politics and controversial subject matter. Please read carefully the parts about how such things upset our brain chemistry before jumping to conclusions. 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has little good to say about the CBC. He castigates its journalists and excites his followers with promises to defund the Crown broadcaster. 

Nevertheless, Poilievre recently found a CBC story he likes. “Even the CBC admitted the number of Canadians leaving to the U.S. has hit a 10-year high,” said the runaway favourite to win the next election in his latest YouTube takedown of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s handling of the economy. 

Poilievre is an effective polemicist. One of his tactics is to pummel his targets with facts. The new video hammers viewers with charts and graphs that show Canada has plunged to the bottom of various league tables measuring economic strength. One of the data points comes from a CBC report on U.S. census data that shows 126,340 Canadians emigrated to the United States in 2022—more than the 73,982 in 2021 and the most in the 10 years since 2012. 

That seems bad. For Poilievre, the surge is evidence of what he’s been arguing since he became Opposition leader—that Trudeau has made Canada an undesirable place to live. “People leaving cited Canada’s housing, after Trudeau doubled the cost; access to doctors, after Trudeau tax hikes pushed physicians to leave; and high taxes and crime, driven by Liberal spending and ‘catch-and-release’ laws,” Poilievre narrates.

It’s possible Canadians are leaving for all those reasons. It’s also possible they are leaving because they are getting old and they’d like to retire somewhere warm, because they are expanding their businesses and they need to be on the ground or because they work for multinational companies and they need to cross the border to accept a promotion. The data at the heart of the CBC story preclude none of those things, but Poilievre—and to a certain extent, the journalist who wrote the story—chose to focus on the more catastrophic possibilities. 

Hans Rosling, the author of Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, warned against over-interpreting “lonely” numbers. Rosling observed that humans have what he called a “size instinct” that causes us to misjudge numbers that are presented out of context. This instinct is especially problematic in the highly polarized environment in which we live, where the hardening of tribal lines makes us susceptible to motivated reasoning, the term psychologists attached to their discovery that we have an impulse to use information to support pre-drawn conclusions rather than seek new ones. 

Let’s consider those eye-popping emigration numbers. A story that reported that 0.3 per cent of the Canadian population emigrated to the U.S. in 2022, a modest increase from 0.2 per cent in previous years, probably wouldn’t have been added to Poilievre’s arsenal of useful facts. Similarly, if the journalist had chosen a different frame for his discovery, the tone of the story would have been different. 

The story makes little attempt to adjust for the COVID-19 pandemic, an epic event whose ripples probably continue to influence behaviour today, and certainly were disrupting traditional patterns in 2022. The data are broken down into three groups: Canadian-born emigrants, Americans who returned home, and people who were born elsewhere. There was a big drop in Canadian-born emigrants in 2021, suggesting the subsequent outsized increase in 2022 is at least partially explained by a catch-up effect. 

Here’s some math: the average number of Canadian emigrants to the U.S. between 2020 and 2022 was 92,802, an increase of 13 per cent from the average between 2012 and 2019. Calculated this way, the number of Canadian-born emigrants actually declined by one per cent. The marginal change was explained entirely by a 26.4 per cent increase in Americans returning home and a 25 per cent increase in Canadian residents who were born elsewhere.       

An analysis of why foreign-born residents appear to be moving to the U.S. in greater numbers might be interesting. The CBC story takes a different slant, emphasizing the Canadian-born numbers. 

The article cites four people. One is a man who shared that he and his wife decided to split time between Toronto and Florida because they like the weather down south—not because they have any problem with Trudeau or life in Canada. Poilievre doesn’t mention him. The Opposition leader’s conclusions are based on a superficial analysis of some data and the observations of the other three people. 

Maybe those three interviews capture the essence of what is going on. But they also check another one of Rosling’s boxes: the negativity instinct. Behavioural science also has shown that we instinctively respond to bad news, creating a powerful incentive for media companies that rely on digital advertising to feed their audiences what they want. This doom loop has always existed, but the ease of measuring clicks has amplified it, creating the perfect conditions for what journalist and podcaster Derek Thompson calls “fake facts” to take root and flourish. 

Poilievre isn’t the only one who took note of the CBC story. John Ruffolo, managing partner at Maverix Private Equity and a vocal critic of Trudeau’s economic policies, said on LinkedIn that the immigration numbers support something that he was “fearful about.” Citing “several discussions,” Ruffolo wrote that Canadians are leaving because of politics and the perception that the U.S. is a better place to build a company. The post drew more than 1,200 favourable reactions. 

Again, Ruffolo might be right. But the data doesn’t show that. The stakes are high. Depending who you ask, democracy, the climate and humanity are in peril. Please check yourself before jumping to conclusions. Things probably aren’t as bad as you think.   

Kevin Carmichael is The Logic’s economics columnist and editor-at-large. He has spent more than two decades covering economics, business and finance for outlets including Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post, where he also served as editor-in-chief. 

Correction: This story has been updated to correct two emigration figures. About 0.3 per cent of the Canadian population emigrated to the U.S. in 2022, up from 0.2 per cent in 2021.