Standing in a park in Toronto, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was blunt in his assessment of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge to fix the immigration system: Don’t believe him.
“He can’t fix the immigration system that he broke,” Poilievre said.
Earlier in the day, Trudeau had appeared at a news conference with Immigration Minister Marc Miller, promising to restore trust in Canada’s immigration system. The government now says they will drop the target for new permanent residents from 500,000 in 2025 to 395,000, that will be further reduced to 380,000 in 2026 and a target of 365,000 permanent residents in 2027.
“We didn’t get the balance quite right,” Trudeau said of his government’s massive increase in immigration over the past several years.
While the Trudeau government was upfront that that they wanted to increase the number of permanent residents accepted to 500,000 per year, they really lost control of the number of temporary residents being admitted. The number of international students and temporary foreign workers ballooned over the past several years, something Trudeau blamed on provinces and businesses.
“Far too many corporations have chosen to abuse our temporary measures by exploiting foreign workers while refusing to hire Canadians for a fair wage,” Trudeau said. “All while under the watch of provinces, some colleges and universities are bringing in more international students than communities can accommodate.”
The problem with him trying to shift blame is that the federal government is solely responsible for administering visas for entry for the students and temporary workers. If they felt things were getting out of hand, they could have shut this abuse down at any point, but they didn’t – until it became a crisis.
Even Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal took advantage of the temporary foreign workers program to get a federal ruling that his land surveying firm in Surrey, British Columbia could hire “legal administrative assistants” because none were available in Canada. It looks like the reports required by the federal government to take advantage of the program became too easy to get.
Between July 1, 2023, and July 1, 2024, Canada’s population grew by more than 1.2 million people, almost all of that due to immigration and most of that was temporary residents. This has long been pointed to as part of the problem with the housing crisis, something Marc Miller acknowledged on Thursday.
“Clearly the volume of immigration has affected affordability when we consider housing,” Miller said.
So, Miller has said it impacted housing, Trudeau said it drove down wages and now they are promising to fix the system they broke. That is where Poilievre has a valid point – the Trudeau government was warned about these problems, including by their own bureaucracy, but they ignored those warnings.
Worse, Trudeau called anyone who raised these issues racist and anti-immigrant.
“He destroyed the best immigration system in the world, a system that had a commonsense consensus of Conservatives and Liberals for 150 years. Immigration was not even controversial before Trudeau came along,” Poilievre said.
The Conservative Leader said that if elected, he will tie future population growth through immigration to the availability of housing, jobs and healthcare.
“We will have a mathematical formula that ensures that we never grow our population at a faster rate than we grow the availability of jobs, homes and healthcare,” Poilievre said.
That’s what Trudeau should have been doing all along. Instead, he took an immigration system that had broad support, put it on steroids without bringing provinces and municipalities in on his plans, and then blamed everyone else when his government broke the system.
A recent poll by Leger for the Association of Canadian Studies at McGill University showed that 60% of Canadians believe we are letting in too many immigrants. The same poll by the same organization in 2019 saw just 35% of Canadians felt that way.
That’s proof that Trudeau and his government ruined the system and the Canadian consensus, the idea that they can fix this is laughable.