Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller holds a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Oct. 24.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Good news: Canada’s immigration consensus is back. Better news: It’s being restored by the people who broke it.
That means immigration is not going to become a divisive, polarizing and potentially explosive issue in the next federal election. Unlike our peers in Europe and the United States, we’re not going to have a radical left versus radical right brawl over the issue.
Why not? Because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has come to its senses on this issue. It’s been moving in that direction for the last year and a half, and as of this week, it’s close to fully there.
As someone once said: In Canada, better is always possible. On Thursday, better happened.
Not every detail of the new, three-year immigration-reduction plan is perfect. I have criticisms, and in future columns I’ll lay them out. But today, let’s focus on the big picture. Liberal policy has finally U-turned, as has Liberal rhetoric.
My fear has long been that the Liberals massively and abruptly increased immigration not only because they were in the thrall of lobbyists such as the Century Initiative, and not only because they failed to grasp the difference between gross domestic product and GDP per capita, but because they saw a potential wedge issue.
I was not the only one who wondered if the Liberals hoped to goad the Conservatives into criticizing them, so that they could then accuse them of being anti-immigrant and racist. Last year, a senior Conservative told me the party was deliberately steering clear of the issue, for precisely this reason. And even as criticism of Liberal immigration policy grew, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who normally never fails to attack and never fails to torque the volume to 11, remained mostly on mute.
But the Liberals, to their credit, did not weaponize immigration as a wedge issue. And on Thursday, they buried the opportunity to do so. Having presided over the most aggressive and poorly-managed immigration spike in modern Canadian history, they are now committed to implementing an aggressive pullback.
The thrust of Liberal immigration policy no longer looks so different from what we got from prime ministers Stephen Harper or Jean Chrétien. Thursday’s numbers and targets could easily be photocopied by a future Conservative government, and probably will be.
That’s what the immigration consensus used to look like. That’s what it can look like again.
Until Mr. Trudeau’s team got caught lost in their own enthusiasms, Canada was a happy outlier on immigration. Public support was high – unlike the U.S. and Europe, there were no anti-immigrant parties or impulses of consequence – even though our immigration rate had long been among the highest in the developed world.
The secret sauce was public confidence that our borders were secure; that people only arrived because Canada had chosen them; and that they’d been chosen with care, to benefit Canada and Canadians. We had a bigger door than other countries, but also had higher walls and higher standards. Canadians didn’t feel like they were being scammed. They thought immigration was a win-win for them and for immigrants. It mostly was.
The Trudeau government ignored that when it encouraged an unprecedented run-up in the number of visa workers and visa students. It failed to notice or care that a high percentage of the temporary foreign workers were low-wage and low-skill, or that a high percentage of the students were only forking over tuition to No-Name Strip Mall College because it bought the legal right to enter Canada to work a low-wage, low-skill job.
Canada’s selective, best-and-brightest immigration system went out the window. And in lockstep, public confidence collapsed.
The government also failed to do the most basic arithmetic. As of this past summer, there were three million people living in Canada on temporary residence permits, most of whom came in the hope of becoming permanent residents. (How many had seen their permits expire, but were still here? We don’t know.)
In contrast, even after the Liberals rejected the wisdom of the Chrétien and Harper governments and nearly doubled permanent immigration levels, that still left three million temporary residents chasing fewer than 500,000 permanent residency spots, with many of those reserved for family reunifications, immigrants from overseas and refugees.
It meant that it was arithmetically impossible for all those temporary residents to get permanent residency. That’s even more true now that the Trudeau government has lowered the permanent immigration quota. In future, about 40 per cent of permanent spots will go to those already in Canada, but with new crops of temporary workers and students arriving each year, a lot of people already here will need to go home.
That truth is inescapable. The math is the math. Thursday’s press release notes that temporary residents not selected for permanent immigration will be asked to “leave Canada.”
The new Liberal policy does not fix all that they broke. And they probably won’t be in government long enough to finish the job. But they have started the process. The enthusiastic eviscerators of the multigenerational immigration consensus are now claiming to be the chief architects of its restoration.
That’s a lot better than the alternative.