Immigration has been a hot topic in the media for a long time now, and I have commented on it from time to time in this blog, principally on how immigration in Canada used to be an all-party vote-winner, universally approved, while in recent months it has suddenly become a political kiss-of-death, widely derided.
But I thought that Tony Keller's analysis in the Globe and Mail last weekend was a very good summary of a confusing and often misunderstood situation.
In Canada, public opinion has whipsawed from 68% saying that immigration makes the country stronger as recently as 2019, to almost the direct opposite (64% believe that Canada should taking in fewer immigrants in 2024). (UPDATE: An Environics survey in October 2025 yielded a slightly more nuanced statistic: the percentage of Canadians who think there is too much immigration has been rising rapidly in recent years - from just 27% in 2022 to 44% in 2023 to 58% in 2024 - but 2025's poll actually saw a small decrease to 56%, although this is still a majority).
Before the 2020 pandemic, immigration was one of the few issues where Bay Steeet and the social justice warriors and all the provinces seemed to be pretty much on the same page. Now, and in recent years, the country seems inexorably split.
So, yes, it seems that the Trudeau administration got carried away and mismanaged the file in the years from 2015, and particularly since the pandemic and its aftermath. But, if you remember the labour shortages in the early 2020s and the businesses clamouring for new sources of labour, not to mention sluggish economic growth, poor productivity and chronic underinvestment by businesses, I think you can see that much of this was not just due to misguided Liberal ideology, as Pierre Poilievre would have us believe, but more to a poorly-managed response to an urgent economic need. I firmly believe that a Conservative government would have gone down pretty much the same road, whatever Poilievre might say now.
Then, though, the temporary foreign workers program - both the official one and the less official one - got out of hand, as did the foreign students intake, especially in the less-supervised community college system, which apparently didn't even bother to monitor whether students were attending classes or just working multiple part-time jobs. The student visa program turned into an alternative low-wage temporary foreign worker program, eventually growing far larger than the official TFW program. THAT part was botched for sure, and still needs additional controls.
All of this watered down everything that had made the Canadian immigration system so successful and so popular, and we are now witnessing the backlash, largely stoked by a housing shortage, stagnation in real GDP per capita, a post-pandemic spike in inflation that was really nothing to do with immigration but became conflated with it, and a spike in youth unemployment which is also almost certainly not caused by immigration but by a weak economy and, yes, those tarriffs. And, of course, by nefarious politicians.
Like most backlashes, it has been overblown and exaggerated, an excessive reaction to a bunch of poorly-understood perceived problems. Let's not forget, there is still a pretty iron-clad case for substantial immigration, and it would be a huge mistake to decimate Canada's highly successful and necessary immigration system. Rightly or wrongly, immigrants fill jobs that natural-born Canadians can't or won't do, and for less money. Provided there are checks that immigrants are not being abused or taken advantage of, then, as a country with a low (and falling) fertility rate, we still need more rather than fewer immigrants.
No comments:
Post a Comment