Taxpayers are funding an ad blitz to push mass migration onto Vancouver Island with profiles that encourage anti-Canadian attitudes, LGBTQ activism, and DEI ideology.
In 2025 alone the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria has received $15.2 million from taxpayers.
The group is currently running a taxpayer-funded campaign spotlighting migrants who openly espouse anti-Canadian rhetoric, call for decolonization and paint Canada as a country steeped in systemic racism and exclusion. The campaign cost taxpayers nearly $300,000.
The campaign, titled “I’m More Than the Immigrant You Had in Mind” is part of a federally supported effort through the Department of Canadian Heritage to push further immigration onto a skeptical Canadian public as concerns have grown amid record-high migration, housing shortages and strained public services.
According to federal grants and contributions records, the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria has received $15,266,242.85 from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada and other departments this year.
Ads have appeared across the Greater Victoria Area on bus shelters and other public infrastructure.
“Nationwide, political shifts, soaring living costs, housing insecurity, and an overburdened healthcare system have ignited a surge in anti-immigration sentiment. However, it is crucial to recognize that these challenges are not caused by immigration,” reads the ICA’s program description.
Despite these concerns, Ottawa has doubled down: funding projects that critics veer away from promoting integration and instead amplify divisive ideologies rooted in identity politics and social justice activism.
The association interviewed several immigrants who shared their stories about their experiences as a newcomer, with some of the interviewees expressing radical views on the Israel-Hamas conflict and on the legitimacy of Canada.
Yasmeen Barakat, a self-described “uninvited racialized settler” from Jordan says she is an “Indigenous Palestinian,” but feels guilty for participating in what she calls a settler colonial system.
“Here, as an Indigenous person, I am living on land that was taken from the Indigenous peoples, and I never even asked to be invited. I wasn’t asked, I didn’t even try to reach out when I first got here,” said Barakat.
In a video posted to the ICA’s website, Barakat calls Canada “so-called Canada” and Turtle Island, a term used by Indigenous Canadians based on their folklore.
Barakat also describes Israel’s counteroffensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a “genocide.”
“But there’s this other side of me where I am currently as a Palestinian, an indigenous Palestinian, am experiencing a continuous destruction and genocide of my land.”
Barakat, a self-described queer Arab, says she often feels unwelcome and that she does not fit in because of her status as a “person of colour” and her self-identification as a non-binary lesbian.
Şansal Güngör Gümüşpala, a lesbian immigrant from Turkey who has been in Canada for three years, complains in an interview that Canada is not sufficiently accepting of LGBTQ people.
“Like right now, you still hear even in Canada, LGBTQ voices with like questioning and not acceptance and inclusion, but with like rhetoric of do you belong here,” said Gümüşpala.
“Or what about this fear, or what about that white fear, or that gay panic, or that things of all the intersectionalities of this exclusionary language.”
Unlike Canada, Turkey does not recognize gay marriage, excludes homosexuals from participating in the military, bans homosexuals from donating blood, and is host to a population that has broadly negative views on the LGBTQ community.
As part of the ICA’s pro-immigration campaign, many of Victoria’s bus shelters and billboards now promote the program, seeking to sway British Columbians towards pro-mass immigration attitudes.
In its official description, the ICA argues the campaign is essential amid what it calls a dangerous wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
But data suggests many Canadians disagree. A fall 2024 Environics poll found that 58% of Canadians now believe the country is taking in too many immigrants—a dramatic 31-point increase from just two years prior.
A recent report from the Fraser Institute supports these concerns, attributing much of Canada’s housing affordability crisis to the dramatic influx of both permanent and temporary immigrants, which outpaces housing construction.