Justin Trudeau hopes to be remembered for many things: legalizing marijuana, increasing family support payments, renegotiating NAFTA, and steering the country through the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Canadians might applaud his actions; the first two were major planks of his 2015 election platform, back in the day when voters still embraced his “sunny ways.”
But in 2024, the sky is dark, and the public mood darker still. Trudeau’s approval ratings have fallen to 33 per cent as Canadians struggle with the cost of living. Two million people now visit food banks every month due to the costs of groceries and housing. Unemployment hit a seven-year high in August, at 6.7 per cent; today, it’s not much better at 6.5 per cent. Five million Canadians can’t access primary health. And we need to build 3.5 million homes by 2030 to close the housing gap.
When things get this bad, people ask themselves, why? How did this happen? And they start looking around at what else has been going on while this mess was brewing. And what they see is now ripping the very fabric of our country, destroying a consensus that has been a defining feature of our nation, a point of pride, and an example to the world for generations — but is no longer.
That something is immigration.
Since confederation, immigration has been key to settling this land, farming our fields, building our infrastructure, and more recently, addressing Canada’s aging population, labour shortages, and demographic challenges. Successive governments enacted immigration programs such as points systems, the immigrant investor stream, and generous refugee settlement policies, which were praised around the world as a model for other nations. And Canadians have embraced immigration — until now.
Today six in ten Canadians believe there is too much immigration. This represents a 14 percentage point increase since 2023, building on a 17 point increase over the previous year, “the most rapid change over a two-year period since Focus Canada began asking this question in 1977,” according to Environics.
And what was happening those years? Well, in 2022, Canada admitted over 437,000 new permanent residents and 604,000 temporary workers. In 2023, Canada let in 471,550 new permanent residents, more even than its target of 465,000, and granted 1,646,300 temporary work permits. Over the same period, the government also finalized 1,089,600 study permits, including extensions, in 2023 and 917,900 study permits in 2022. And over the same period, 293,000 newcomers became Canadian citizens between April 1 and Dec. 31, 2023, as did 279,100 over the same period in 2022.
That’s over five million applications. Some of those were for people who were already here, like renewals of study and work permits. But still, for a country of 40 million people, that is insane. And a backlash was inevitable.
Now the government is scrambling to cut back. Last week, the Liberals unveiled a gradual rollback in immigration numbers, with targets set to decrease from 500,000 to 395,000 by 2025. The government had already announced cutbacks to international student numbers and temporary workers. But that’s still a huge number of people — and for some, still too many.
This week, in Quebec, the Parti Québécois announced that, if elected, it would drastically limit immigration to protect Quebec’s language, culture, and social services. The PQ would cap permanent immigration at 35,000 per year, reduce temporary residents from 600,000 to 250,000–300,000, and cut international students by more than half. It called on businesses to automate and innovate like those in Japan, which has also experienced demographic decline, but which has not sought to combat low birth rates with immigration.
PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon further declared that Quebec’s future autonomy depends on controlling immigration independently of Ottawa, reigniting calls for Quebec’s independence — and setting the stage for the next provincial election. His party has been leading in the polls for over a year, and with the provincial Liberal party now undergoing a leadership race, the old separatist-federalist polarization threatens once again to define Quebec politics and dominate public discourse in the rest of the country as well.
The ultimate legacy of the Trudeau government will thus be another debate on separation, and possibly, the breakup of our nation. Diversity will not be our strength, but our undoing.
Postmedia News
Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia’s national politics columnist.