Trudeau Liberals ignored warnings on immigration, you pay the price

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The Trudeau government was warned that their rapid push for higher and higher immigration numbers was having a negative impact on housing and health care across the country. A presentation to the government in 2022 warned of the problems but rather than rethinking or adjusting their policy they pushed ahead.

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Now the man who was in charge of immigration when the warning was issued and is now in charge of housing, is defending what happened. Sean Fraser issued a joint statement Friday with current immigration minister Marc Miller after The Canadian Press reported on the presentation that they obtained under access to information legislation.

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“Had we not increased immigration post-pandemic, the economy would have shrunk. Businesses facing an acute labour shortage would have closed. The social services Canadians needed, including in health care, would be further delayed or even more difficult to access,” the two ministers said.

It’s a typical response, we had to do it, Canada needs immigrants. To a degree, that’s true. There is a shortage of workers in many areas and industries and natural population growth is stagnant.

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That said, the numbers the Liberals have been admitting, in particular temporary residents, mostly in the student sector, are not sustainable. Our population grew by one million people between Jan. 1 and Oct. 1, according to Statistics Canada’s quarterly population estimate.

When StatsCan released the October number three weeks ago, the population had already grown from 40,528,396 to 40,720,342. According to StatsCan’s real time population clock, we’ve added another 67,000 people in the last three weeks.

This is the unsustainable level bureaucrats were warning the government about in 2022.

“In Canada, population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units,” one of the documents obtained by CP stated.

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“As the federal authority charged with managing immigration, IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply, and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth.”

Over the past several months, StatsCan has been warning the government in their monthly jobs report that population growth was outstripping job creation.

None of that seems to matter to the Trudeau Liberals.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was asked twice about the CP report last week and offered platitudes about the benefits of immigration. Few are arguing that immigration isn’t a benefit, but many are now questioning the historically high numbers.

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CP reporter Nojoud Al Mallees, who wrote the original story, asked Freeland if tempering demand for housing by lowering immigration numbers was part of the solution.

“I think it’s important for us as Canadians to recognize the really positive role that immigration plays for our country,” Freeland said.

The closest she came to admitting that there was any problem was when she blamed post-secondary institutions for taking in close to 900,000 students this year without proper housing for them. These schools aren’t home builders, and they aren’t in charge of who gets admitted to the country. That would be the federal government, currently controlled by the Trudeau Liberals.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said the problem with the Liberal plan is that it doesn’t take the impact of the influx into account.

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“Obviously, you need to build homes if you are going to bring in people,” Poilievre said noting that last year fewer homes were built across Canada than in 1972 when the population was just about half of what it is today.

“Common sense Conservatives will get back to an approach of immigration that invites a number of people that we can house, employ and care for in our health care system,” Poilievre said.

That sounds like a better policy than the one Trudeau continues to push despite the harm it is causing. Is it any wonder that Poilievre and the Conservatives are leading in the polls?

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