The Liberals have piloted the Canadian immigration system for nearly a decade, and they’ve only abused their time in the cockpit. Turns out, it’s pretty easy to drive the machine into the ground in just nine years.
It’s a shame, because responsible, orderly immigration has been great for Canada, helping create a growing, wonderfully diverse nation with a quality of life unmatched nearly anywhere else in the world.
Skilled newcomers provide more hands on deck in the professional and business world; the industrious find new ways to innovate and provide their own contributions to private sector growth. Many immigrants over the years have been eager to embrace a Canadian life, and their resolve has delivered a bigger, better, more interesting nation.
Instead, the Liberals have decided to run by a standard operating procedure that throws responsible immigration out the window. It goes like this. Crank the intake numbers and detour much of the new inflow around our once-prized points system. Ignore warnings that the housing supply might suffer. Rattle on about a mysterious labour shortage as youth and new arrivals struggle to find jobs.
For greater effect, tell the world that illegal entry may soon be rewarded with permanent status, allow migration highways to remain open for years and shrug when criminals and terrorists find their way into the country. Make sure to strip away citizenship revocation powers while you’re at it, and expand passport eligibility to generations born abroad.
To finish it all off with a good nose-rub in the dirt, spend millions of dollars on newcomer wage subsidies and migrant housing as homelessness spikes, while continuing to allow newcomer-specific criminal sentence discounts.
And, if people begin to notice that it’s getting crowded, and that GDP per capita is gliding steadily downward, gaslight, gaslight, gaslight.
Canada’s population growth has ratcheted up since 2015 under this troupe of managers, rising to 1.3 million new entrants in 2023 alone, according to Statistics Canada. Only 500,000 of these were permanent immigrants; the majority, 800,000 were non-permanent residents — temporary foreign workers and international students.
Economists are now linking these 70-year population growth highs to this summer’s high youth unemployment rate. The Bank of Canada has sounded its own warning: falling GDP per capita continues to be in the cards, as is declining consumer spending, poor housing growth and integration-delaying labour markets.
None of this has been without consequence, as far as public opinion goes. Leger polling from this July shows that immigration has become an issue of high concern for 18 per cent of Canadians — that’s up from eight per cent last fall. A Research Co. survey from June found that 44 per cent of Canadians think immigration is negatively affecting the country, and 46 believe that immigration volumes should decrease. Abacus, meanwhile, found that two-thirds of Canadians thought intake levels were too high.
It’s a sentiment that the Liberals have only seemed to acknowledge with words. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admitted in April that “Whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular,” temporary immigration has “grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb…. We want to get those numbers down.”
If only he hadn’t let the numbers soar too high in the first place. The government made a conscious choice to, in the words of economist Mike Moffatt, arguing in the Liberal friendly Toronto Star, facilitate “arguably the largest deregulation of the Temporary Foreign Worker program in Canadian history” in 2022, allowing businesses to tap into cheap labour at levels much greater than before.
To soften the blow, off-record Liberals have announced their intent to reduce, at some undetermined point in the future, some elements of the temporary foreign worker program. It’s unclear what effect it might have overall, as this week, Miller’s office quietly announced that a new route for uneducated and high-school-educated applicants to obtain permanent residency is in the works.
“The initiative would support the modernization of the economic immigration system by expanding the selection of permanent residents to candidates with a more diverse range of skills and experience,” reads the buzzword-replete defence.
The actual likely story? University of Waterloo Prof. Mikal Skuterud predicts that this will be used to absorb unskilled foreign workers who have overstayed their visas.
Similar talk of getting the international student numbers, which quadrupled from 2014 levels to more than one million in 2023, seems just as deceptive. It’s true that Immigration Minister Marc Miller instituted a visa “cap” in January, but it was so high that the maximum number of new students admitted to the country in 2025 will still be 70 per cent higher than 2015’s entire international student body.
There was a time when the popular concerns with Canada’s immigration system had nothing to do with actual numbers. There were the backlogs caused by bureaucracy and professionals who struggled to have their credentials recognized — barriers that Canadians shook their heads at in disapproval. If only the Liberals set themselves on fixing the problems that everyone wanted fixed.
Canadians are welcoming, generous people who recognize the immense value of newcomers, and in relatively large numbers. It took a government as incompetent as the Trudeau Liberals to allow those numbers to spiral beyond our short-term capacity.
Nine years under Justin Trudeau, the immigration system has been stretched to high tension, and risks snapping in the faces of Canadians. What a disaster that would be: this country needs population growth, but it won’t succeed if persistent over-capacity sours the population against newcomers.
National Post