Canada’s Corrupt Political Class

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration plan is broken. His Liberal government may not have admitted it in so many words, but their recent actions speak quite clearly.

After steadily increasing the number of newcomers over the years, Ottawa has announced it will cap the number of permanent residents it accepts at 500,000 in both 2025 and 2026. It’s finally dawned on the Trudeau Liberals that there needs to be an economic reset. Canada’s housing market is too expensive and our health care system is overloaded — and the impact of costly temporary resident programs is too often overlooked .

This week, when it releases its new immigration targets, the Trudeau government has an opportunity to begin rethinking immigration policy.

For the past eight years, the Liberal plan has been about sharply and steadily increasing permanent immigration, while enabling even sharper increases in temporary immigration – with the two interconnected streams powered by huge jumps in the number of foreign students.

Why? The government’s reasons are a combination of faith and politics.

Immigration is going to mean more extremists marching in our streets.

In response to growing concern over Canada’s capacity to welcome more newcomers, the federal government says it will incorporate housing, health care and infrastructure planning with provinces and municipalities when setting the country’s annual immigration targets.

On Tuesday, Immigration Minister Marc Miller unveiled a report on the current state of Canadian immigration — along with a road map for tackling those challenges.

“We aim to build a system that is easier to navigate, with an inclusive and co-ordinated plan that aligns our immigration programs and policies with the needs of the country,” Miller said in a statement released the day before he will table his 2024-26 immigration levels plan.

It’s not racism or xenophobia, it’s simply mathematics.

As the Trudeau government has cranked up immigration to record levels, the nation’s housing supply has failed to keep up. Hundreds of thousands of new Canadians are entering the country each year, while the number of new housing units being built is not even as high as it was in the 1970s.

Canada is currently subjecting itself to a bizarre experiment in extreme population growth due to pedal-to-the-metal legal immigration.

Canada’s population rose about 1 percent per year for the first decade and a half of this century. But the Justin Trudeau era began in 2015, and growth was goosed to 1.5 percent by 2019. After a brief pandemic pause, the Trudeau government is now opening the borders extraordinarily wide.

In response, Canada’s annual population growth rate hit 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2023, the kind of rise normally associated with Bangladesh in the 1980s. Over the summer, Canada’s population reached 40 million, up from 30 million in 1997.

h/t Lesley

This time last year, the media buzz about the labour market was over The Great Resignation, a bigger phenomenon in the United States but occurring here too, as workers took advantage of record-high job vacancy rates to abandon suboptimal jobs for better ones.

This year there’s an emerging made-in-Canada phenomenon that has barely generated a whisper, let alone a buzz: wage slaves from abroad. It’s a result of public policy.

The idea of owning workers seems like an abomination from another time and place. In Canada, in 2023, it’s difficult to comprehend how any worker could be beholden to a single employer.