LILLEY: As Trudeau botches immigration, poll shows falling support

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The Trudeau Liberals have broken Canada immigration system and with it, public support for that system.

And now we have the numbers to back that up thanks to a poll by Leger for the Association of Canadian Studies.

According to Leger’s findings, 60% of Canadians now believe we have too many immigrants coming into Canada.

That’s almost two-thirds of the population saying we are bringing in too many people compared with 28% who believe it is just the right amount, 9% who said they didn’t know and 3% who said we aren’t bringing in enough people. If we go back just five years ago to 2019, 49% believed we were bringing in the right amount of people, 35% said too many, 12% said too few and 3% didn’t have an answer.

That is a shocking change over five years and the opposition to the high number of newcomers is widespread.

In Alberta, 67% say there are too many newcomers compared to 62% in Ontario and 61% in Quebec. In Toronto, 64% agree there are too many newcomers, it’s 59% in Montreal saying that and 55% in Vancouver.

The poll even breaks down how people feel based on whether they are white or non-white. Among those who identified as white, 62% said there were too many immigrants compared to 55% who identified as non-white.

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The question is how did we get here?

The answer may be complicated but can be summed up in one phrase – bad management.

For years, the Trudeau government has been pushing to increase immigration on all fronts. We went from taking in roughly 250,000-300,000 people per year as permanent residents to pushing towards 500,000.

Beyond permanent residents, we’ve also increased the number of temporary foreign workers and temporary foreign students. On the asylum seeker side of the equation, we’ve gone from 4,000-10,000 people a year a decade ago to 72,000 last year and another 30,000 in the first five months of this year.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration, whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students, in particular, that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in April.

If only Trudeau knew someone he could call to try and fix this problematic spike in immigration numbers.

In addition to saying we were bringing in people faster than we could absorb them, which is contributing to the housing crunch, Trudeau also said that in some sectors, all this surplus labour is pushing down wages.

For months now, Statistics Canada has been warning that population growth, driven exclusively by immigration, is outpacing job growth, which is one reason why Canada’s unemployment rate rose from 5% in the spring of 2023 to 6.4% now.

The Trudeau government has promised to reduce the number of non-permanent residents, be they temporary foreign workers or students, but just this week, the Bank of Canada cast doubt on the government’s ability to do that. Not surprising given that in the first five months of this year the federal government approved 216,000 student permits compared to 200,000 the previous year.

An 8% increase can’t be sold as a cut no matter how you look at it.

Canada’s immigration system worked and was well supported in the past because it was orderly and reliable. The current system is failing us because we have abandoned orderly and reliable in favour of embracing chaos.

It’s time for the Trudeau government, starting with Immigration Minister Marc Miller, to take control of the system. That would include lowering the number of non-permanent residents being accepted, stopping the flow of asylum claimants, most of whom are economic migrants jumping the queue and ensuring an orderly flow for new permanent residents.

Canada has for the most part escaped the anti-immigrant wave that has swept many parts of the world. That won’t last if the government doesn’t fix what is clearly a broken and out of control system.

blilley@postmedia.com