More than a century ago, Wilfrid Laurier envisioned a Canada bigger and more powerful than the United States. It was as bold a prediction as it was incongruent, made by Canada’s first francophone prime minister, who in his youth had called Confederation “the tomb of the French race and the ruin of Lower Canada.” But by 1904, when Laurier was in his sixties, frail from illness and with nearly a decade of experience running the country under his belt, something had changed. “Let me tell you, my fellow countrymen,” Laurier told a swooning audience during a speech at Toronto’s Massey Hall, “all the signs point this way, that the twentieth century shall be the century of Canada.”

At the time, Canada barely had 6 million citizens. Compared to its southern neighbour, with its population of 76.3 million, Canada was a rural backwater, surviving largely on resource extraction and agricultural products while lagging far behind the US in manufacturing capacity and innovation. To turn things around, Laurier adopted the language of American exceptionalism, calling on Canada to be “the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come,” and predicted its population would surge to 40 million by the mid-twentieth century.

In an effort to reach that goal, Laurier launched an ambitious immigration policy that opened up Western Canada to a new wave of settler colonization. In the first decade of the new century, 1.5 million people arrived in the country while 740,000 left, reversing a decades-long trend of migratory outflow. The vast majority were white Europeans—Laurier’s Liberal government passed racist laws barring or taxing most non-white immigrants from entering Canada. Many of the new arrivals settled in the prairie provinces on land stolen from Indigenous peoples.

As ugly as it was in practice, Laurier’s ambition was grounded in legitimate concerns over the scarce population in Canada. The country needed more people, not only to expand the workforce but to justify building the infrastructure to support a modern industrialized economy. Otherwise, Canada would be relegated to a raw materials repository, feeding a booming US manufacturing base.

Over the subsequent decades, Canada struggled to hit Laurier’s mark. By 1950, the population was inching toward the 14 million mark. In 1962, still below 20 million, the Progressive Conservatives under John Diefenbaker finally abandoned the most outwardly racist elements of immigration policy and allowed non-white immigrants. By 1968, a year after the launch of the points system for skilled immigration, scholars and business leaders began calling for a population of........

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