When circumstances warrant, the prime minister deserves to be praised — if faintly.
He has been roundly criticized —not least by members of his own caucus — for not listening, and for digging in when it is clear that the government needs to retreat.
Yet on Thursday, he unveiled a new immigration plan that cut the number of newcomers by one-fifth in response to criticism from across the country that the flood of arrivals in recent years has been too dramatic for the housing, education and health-care systems to absorb.
Justin Trudeau said governments have to make sure faith in the immigration system is not undermined and admitted his government “didn’t get the balance quite right” as the country emerged from the pandemic.
The measures to reduce the number of new residents to 395,000 from 500,000 next year are meant to “stabilize” the system, he said, and will work in conjunction with plans to reduce the number of temporary residents that are already public.
This being Trudeau, the blame for the problem was shifted elsewhere: corporations who abused the relaxation on the numbers of temporary workers to pay lower wages; provinces that didn’t enforce their own regulations over student admissions; and “exploitative” colleges and universities that brought in more students than the country could accommodate to “line their own pockets.”
The truth is the federal government released the brakes on a runaway train, despite warnings from the public service about unintended consequences.
Ottawa then waited two years before it reacted.
“Did we take too long to adjust? I think there is some responsibility to assume,” said Marc Miller, the impressively candid immigration minister.
The result was that the number of non-permanent residents doubled from 1.35 million, or 3.5 per cent of the population in early 2022, to 2.79 million or 6.7 per cent of the population by the middle of this year.
Miller defended the move made by his immigration predecessor, Sean Fraser, saying it “as the IMF noted, we prevented a recession.”
If the new immigration plan is a lesser evil, that does not necessarily make it good
Economists can argue that hypothetical point. The Bank of Canada’s latest monetary policy report certainly notes that, as the economy emerged from the pandemic, 50 per cent of businesses were unable to find suitable labour at current wages. (The Canadian Chamber of Commerce complained in a news release Thursday that the new changes will “significantly decrease our labour pool,” but the bank’s report says the number of firms unable to find suitable labour has fallen to 10 per cent.)
What’s not in question is that deregulation hit housing affordability, as Miller conceded. “Clearly the volume of immigration has affected affordability when we consider housing,” he said Thursday.
It also impacted Canada’s competitiveness, since economic output of 1.1 per cent in the year from the end of 2022 to late 2023 was outpaced by population growth of 3.2 per cent (meaning GDP per capita fell two per cent).
The Liberal government has now recognized that this situation is untenable. Miller has already made tweaks, capping the number of new international students and tightening requirements on those seeking work permits after graduation. On Thursday, he and the prime minister announced a more holistic solution.
The plan involves transitioning the hundreds of thousands of temporary residents already here into permanent residents.
Miller called this a highly talented pool of labour that is already integrating into Canadian life.
He has committed to a goal of reducing the number of temporary residents to five per cent of the population (from 6.7 per cent) by the end of 2026 and said that the plan anticipates a reduction of 445,000 temporary residents next year and the same number in the year after.
Critically, he said that “adjustments will be made to our economic immigration streams” to aid this shift.
So how will that reduction happen? There was no detail on what “adjustments” will look like, but it should be remembered that many of the new workers who arrived over the past two years were food-counter attendants, cooks, cleaners and fish-plant staff, according to the government’s own statistics.
The new immigration plan says that 62 per cent of permanent resident admissions will come from the economic class next year, up from 58 per cent in 2024.
But that might simply reflect the adoption of a proposal circulating in the Immigration Department that would create a new economic class of permanent residents for people with high-school education or less, who would otherwise not pass the Comprehensive Ranking point-system that has served Canada so well when it comes to selecting the best and brightest.
The fear among some economists is that this might apply the brakes to a situation that is out of control but risk derailing the whole locomotive by undermining the skills-based system and lowering the standard of permanent resident that Canada accepts.
The Department of Immigration did not respond to emails Thursday seeking confirmation, but if lowering our immigration standards is not the plan, how else does the government intend to absorb (or eject) the hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers and students who are no longer needed or welcome?
The new plan is clearly good news for the Liberal party, but is it good for Canada? Each temporary resident that becomes a permanent resident takes the spot of someone capable of passing the points system from overseas.
The government deserves credit for recognizing — belatedly — that its enthusiasm for ever more immigration was becoming unpopular and contributing to rising unemployment levels.
But if the new immigration plan is a lesser evil, that does not necessarily make it good.
National Post
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