Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks as federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Harjit Sajjan, and B.C. Minister of Housing, Ravi Kahlon listen during a news conference for a housing announcement in Vancouver on Dec. 15. A big driver of an increase in people saying there was too much immigration, according to a recent poll, was that many fear immigration is driving up housing prices.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
If Justin Trudeau is truly worried about Trump-style politics being imported into Canada, he should fix the massive policy failure that threatens to fuel it.
That’s the failure to control the unplanned boom in temporary residents that is already undermining one of Canada’s great strengths: public support for immigration.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump is now using nakedly fascist language to demonize immigrants – this past weekend, he said immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States.
What should be terrifying is that Mr. Trudeau’s pro-immigration Liberal government has messed up Canadian immigration egregiously while public support has fallen precipitously.
Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals have accused Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives of importing MAGA politics, and the Prime Minister has expressed concern about a vein of ugly political outrage in Canada. But if he is really worried about angry-Trumpian rhetoric, a good thing to do is fix the botched policies that can fuel support for this kind of xenophobia in Canada.
That isn’t really an issue with what Canadians traditionally consider to be immigration – permanent residents who are given status to stay and build lives here. It is about the boom in temporary residents, mostly foreign students and temporary foreign workers.
Canada’s population increased by a record-breaking 430,635 people in three months in the third quarter of 2023. Of those, 73 per cent – or 312,758 – were temporary residents, according to Statistics Canada.
There are now more than 2½ million temporary residents in Canada – 1.1 million more than 18 months earlier. They make up more than 6 per cent of Canada’s population.
Ottawa never planned that. It happened by accident. Negligence, really.
The federal government sets immigration targets for permanent residents, but not temporary residents. The temporary-resident numbers are driven by foreign-student admissions by (provincially regulated) colleges and universities and by industry requests for temporary workers. There is no cap.
The boom in their numbers has led to rapid population growth, especially in the past two years.
And there is a backlash. A poll by Environics and the pro-immigration Century Initiative in September found that the proportion of people who agree with the statement that there is too much immigration went up 17 percentage points in a year, to 44 per cent. A generation-long pro-immigration consensus has eroded in 12 months.
A big driver of that increase, according to the poll, was that many people fear that immigration is driving up housing prices. The awful thing is population growth from the temporary resident boom really is driving up rents and home prices.
It’s important to point out that immigrants are not to blame. Governments – provincial and federal – failed to plan for levels of population and housing that were roughly balanced.
But there are people who will skip over that. There are always people who will blame immigrants and more when there are palpable economic ills. So far, Canadian politicians haven’t made immigration a wedge issue. But public sentiment appears to have shifted. It would be a disgrace not to act to preserve public confidence in immigration.
The Decibel: Why the ‘lottery’ of Canadian immigration undermines the system
The policy failure itself is clear. “Immigration is excessive, full stop,” Bank of Nova Scotia vice-president and head of capital markets economics Derek Holt said in a note this week. University of Waterloo economist Mikal Skuterud called it a “runaway train.”
What happened? There is overly-easy access for business to hire in temporary foreign workers, including a stream for low-wage workers. And in recent years, Ottawa tinkered with the permanent-resident point system, making it unpredictable and encouraging people to come as temporary residents in the hope they will be able to stay – more like a lottery, Prof. Skuterud said.
A big part of the growth is foreign students, especially students going to colleges, not universities, Colleges pay recruiters commissions and collect tuitions, and many students hope that is the door to permanent residence. When they graduate, many are guaranteed a three-year work visa – so today’s foreign students become tomorrow’s temporary workers.
Controlling numbers is necessary. Ottawa can cap study permits for non-university students, allocating them to provinces. It can cap the work permits for non-university graduates and shorten their visas to two years. It can eliminate low-wage work permits. It can re-establish the predictability of the points system for permanent-resident status.
Mr. Trudeau’s government can do all those things. It should do them quickly, if it wants to preserve Canadians’ priceless support for immigration – and keep Mr. Trump’s xenophobia south of the border.