Have you heard the news? Canada has admitted too many immigrants, crippling the economy and undermining the traditional faith Canadians have in immigration as a tool to serve our humanitarian and economic goals.
That’s a compelling narrative, but is it true?
Canada’s immigration system is struggling, to be sure. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government have mismanaged some of the programs that admit people to Canada, and that has caused stress in some parts of the country. And, yes, support for immigration has dropped.
A young new Canadian holds a flag as she takes part in a citizenship ceremony in Ottawa. (Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press files)
A late-August Leger poll found 65 per cent of Canadians think the Trudeau government are admitting too many people, and more than three quarters believe the flood of immigrants has made housing more expensive and stressed out key government services like health care.
Based on those results, a myriad of pundits and media commentators have concluded Trudeau has broken the country’s support for immigration. “Justin Trudeau’s legacy will be destroying the Canadian consensus on immigration,” thundered a recent headline in the Globe and Mail.
The column really only parrots talking points from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has repeatedly claimed the rise in immigration sparked the affordable housing crisis and broke “the multi-generational consensus” that immigration is a net benefit in this country.
That is powerful rhetoric, both from the news media and the man who would be prime minister. It’s also mostly untrue.
Immigration is high in some of the programs we use to admit people to Canada, maybe too high. But immigration is not the cause of the housing crisis, or inflation, or surgical waiting lists. It is, however, a convenient excuse.
Immigration is now, as it has always been, the obvious scapegoat any time we experience economic stress.
Canada’s “multi-generational consensus” on immigration includes a head-tax on Chinese migrants, a refusal to allow ship carrying nearly 400 Sikh refugees to dock in British Columbia and a systemic refusal to admit Jewish refugees during the Second World War. Canada infamously accepted fewer Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust than any other Allied nation.
Remember the $975 landing fee, introduced by Jean Chrétien in 1994? The Liberals claimed it was because settlement costs were out of control but when some digging was done by news organizations, there was no evidence government was facing a higher financial burden. The real motivation for the landing fee was the economic context: Canada had just come out of a deep recession and Canadians were fearful that a flood of immigrants would delay the recovery.
If we’ve ever had a national consensus, it is that our support for immigration should be allowed to rise and fall with our own economic circumstances.
It is the same all over the world. Anti-immigration protests, almost all driven by far-right political parties, unfairly hold immigrants responsible for a broad range of economic woes.
Across the United Kingdom and most of Europe, far-right politicians are clamouring for reduced admissions and fewer settlement supports. In some countries, like Ireland, anti-immigrant forces have staged violent protests and random attacks on newcomers. In France, a rising tide of racist right-wing sentiment prompted the government to introduce a law limiting social benefits for migrants and re-introducing penalties for the “offence of legal residence.”
You could write all this off as political performance art, except that it’s getting governments to make major changes to immigration policy.
Fuelled in large part by the potent, anti-immigration campaigning of the Conservative Party, Canada has already cut way down on visitor visas, and has raised the prospect that tens of thousands of international students may be deported before their programs are finished.
And what of Poilievre, Canada’s prime minister-in-waiting? He has promised to significantly slow population growth as a panacea for fixing all that is wrong with the economy. Given the aforementioned public opinions on immigration, Poilievre is playing a very strong political hand on this file.
The problem is that slowing immigration will not solve the housing crisis or fix the health-care system.
The shortage of affordable housing is a problem more than a decade in the making, dating back to the global financial crisis of 2008. It has been exacerbated not by immigration, but by inflation, a shortage of building materials and construction industry labour.
Could Poilievre’s plans to dramatically reduce immigration produce some economic gains? It’s more likely it will cause unintended economic woes given that not all parts of this country need fewer people.
Although bigger cities in more populous provinces feel overwhelmed by immigration, in smaller provinces like Manitoba immigration is the only source of net population growth. Efforts to curb immigration for political purposes may play well in Toronto or Vancouver, but in Winnipeg and other, similar-sized communities, the economic impacts of slowing or completely stalling population growth could be devastating.
Strip away the political rhetoric and you are left with these facts.
Canada’s rush to condemn immigration is largely fact-free and based on deeply flawed reasoning.
The immigration system has problems, but is not broken.
Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs. They aren’t driving up housing prices.
But immigrants are destined, once again, to be sacrificed on the altar of politics.
dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com
Dan Lett
Columnist
Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986. Read more about Dan.
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