In a country loaded with conservative leaders who are shy about combating over-immigration, former Prince Edward Island premier Dennis King was a rarity. He saw that numbers were too high, so he lowered them — and he didn’t cower when cries of protest broke out afterwards.
When he resigned on Friday, ending his six-year premiership on a high note, he left the world of Canadian conservatism a model to emulate when it comes to standing one’s ground: be honest, be frank and, above all, don’t be a coward.
King set out to cut immigration to the Island in February 2024 by reducing intake via the provincial nominee program, which allows the province to nominate certain immigrants for permanent residency, by 25 per cent.
The remaining 75 per cent were restricted to in-demand sectors, such as construction and health care — retail and restaurant workers be damned. (This year, the program was reduced even further by the feds.)
The announcement was made with an acknowledgement that population growth had strained the Island’s infrastructure and public services.
Once a province with a stable population, P.E.I.’s growth has reached a crescendo in recent years. From 2000 to 2010, total residents ranged from 136,000 to roughly 140,000. From 2010 to 2020, that figure rose to 159,000. Since 2020, it reached a whopping 179,000.
In other words, it once took a whole decade for the province to gain 4,000 people. Now, it takes five years to gain 20,000 people.
The consequences? Crowding in virtually every system. Housing is stretched to its limit, with vacancy rates in the province ranging from two to 0.1 per cent, depending on the quarter, in 2023 and 2024 (for comparison, 2012 vacancy rates hovered at about five per cent).
Health care, meanwhile, hasn’t fared much better. One-fifth of Islanders were without a doctor in 2024 and wait times are long. While P.E.I. has attempted to tackle backlogs by all sorts of means — it’s worked with the telehealth platform Maple to increase access to primary care, for example — capacity remains slim. In 2023, the province’s health minister pinned much of the blame on impossible-to-keep-up-with population growth.
While most immigration is within the federal government’s sphere of control, the provinces can alter the number of immigrants coming in through the provincial nominee program (subject to federal limits), and this is where King found an opportunity to make cuts.
He would have known that outrage would follow when he announced the cuts — and indeed, it did. A loud contingent of foreign workers and students, who believed the provincial nominee program was their ticket to permanent Canadian residency, organized a protest that lasted for months.
They marched and chanted. They set up encampments. They held on-and-off hunger strikes. They spoke to the legislature. They found support among pro-immigration non-profits and in the media — CBC’s coverage naturally focused on the plight of the protesters and the loyalty of their allies rather than their critics, creating an illusion of popularity (online forums, like Reddit, generally featured far more contempt for the protesters than sympathy).
King stood up to accusations of wrongdoing, disputing the narrative that the province “lured” foreigners with promises of an easier permanent residency pathway, and pointing out that even prior to the changes, permanent residency was no guarantee for foreign workers. But at no point did he become spiteful or mean about it.
“I think it’s a very open place,” King told a reporter last May. “Look around, there are people who are here in the wonderful place of P.E.I., and they have the freedom to have posters and protest, and that’s an absolutely wonderful thing. But my job is to do the best that I can for the province as a whole.”
King was clear without being cruel. He faced the policy issue that’s made many leaders, particularly conservative ones, tremble at the thought of what their reception in the media might look like if they did something similar. And he won: within months, he had the protesters packing. That’s how you do it, folks.
The results have been strong. In November, King’s performance was rated as satisfactory by 59 per cent of the population. The pollster, Narrative Research CEO Margaret Brigley, noted that this was the “highest level of government satisfaction recorded” in the company’s 25 years of tracking voter sentiment in the province.
The guy wasn’t the perfect conservative leader — he was willing to indulge gender ideologues by observing Transgender Day of Remembrance, and in 2022, he put forward a motion calling on the federal government to change the name of the Confederation Bridge to “Epekwitk Crossing” as a decolonization measure — but on the practical matter of immigration, he nailed it.
At the federal level, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has shied away from the topic, only recently having pledged to cap immigration at 250,000 per year.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, meanwhile, has flip-flopped on the issue: last spring, she asked the federal government to double her own province’s nominee program, and even set a goal to double the province’s population by 2050; by the fall, she was asking Ottawa to cut back on immigration.
Nova Scotia’s Progressive Conservative premier pledged to double the population, handing the voice of reason over to the provincial Liberals. And in Saskatchewan, it’s unclear what’s going on, as the provincial nominee program was paused on Monday. The province blames the feds for cutting its number of slots, but that doesn’t explain why the entire program has been suspended.
If only those in charge shared King’s frankness.
National Post