We aren’t going to fault Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for admitting his high immigration policies were a mistake that contributed to today’s affordability crisis, including high housing costs.
We do fault him for his government’s false depiction of Canadians who were raising these concerns long before he did, as racists.
In a major flip-glop on Thursday, Trudeau slashed his government’s current policy of admitting 500,000 new permanent residents to Canada annually to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027.
He also said the government will reduce the number of non-permanent residents in Canada — mainly international students and temporary foreign workers — to 5% of the population over the next three years, down from 7.2% today, to help alleviate the housing crisis.
“In the tumultuous times as we emerged from the pandemic, between addressing labour needs and maintaining population growth, we didn’t get the balance quite right,” Trudeau said.
What really happened was that Trudeau and Co. ignored warnings from the government’s own public servants in the immigration department two years ago that the big hikes in immigration targets the government was going ahead with would increase the cost of housing and put added pressure on already beleaguered public services like health care.
Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request explicitly warned the Trudeau government that:
“In Canada, population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units. As the federal authority charged with managing immigration, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply, and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth.”
The Bank of Canada, along with commercial banks such as TD and BMO warned that strong population growth, fuelled by high immigration policies was, driving up rents as well as the cost of home ownership.
National Bank said: “The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing and demand.”
Polls showed Canadians were increasingly concerned that immigration levels were too high, not because they were racists but because the policy was wrong for the time.
That’s what is so exhausting about the Trudeau government — it’s perpetual gaslighting of Canadians on problems its policies created.