LILLEY: Carney's Liberals hiding immigration data as questions mount

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The Carney Liberals have been hiding immigration data from Canadians for months. Now, after being called out on it, the government says it’s all in the name of openness and transparency.

Normally, government numbers on the number of new arrivals, the number of asylum seekers and more are released on the government’s open data portal. As of now, the government hasn’t released any data since May and that information only covers until the end of March.

The news was made public in a statement last week by Conservative Immigration Critic Michelle Rempel-Garner.

“How many illegal border crossings have we had? How many more asylum claims have piled on to an already backlogged waitlist? How many more permits have the Liberals handed out that continue to overwhelm our housing, health-care system and job market?” Rempel Garner asked.

“Whatever they are, Canada has a right to know.”

She’s right: We do have a right to know, especially since the Liberals have made such a disaster of the immigration system.

For decades, under both Liberal and Conservative governments, Canada’s immigration system was considered a model in the world. Because of its orderly nature, public support remained quite high for high immigration levels.

A few years ago, that changed.

In April 2022, the Trudeau Liberals made several changes to allow a massive deregulation of the program of the Temporary Foreign Workers program. Under the changes announced then, seasonal industries could hire under the TFW for the full year while the cap on an employer having only 10% of their workforce come from the TFW program was lifted to 20% in most industries but higher in others.

The feds raised the cap to 30% for manufacturing, food and accommodations, hospitals and nursing homes. They also got rid of a stipulation that if unemployment was above 6% then TFW approval would not be granted.

They did this at the same time as they were dramatically increasing the number of permanent residents allowed into Canada each year. The official Liberal immigration plan called for an increase to 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

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Of course, as we later learned, they also opened the floodgates for international students and then opened up their ability to work and take jobs.

A growing problem prior to the government halting their release of official data was the increasing number of foreign workers and international students who would claim asylum rather than return home after their visas expired. It’s hard to assess that kind of issue if you don’t have data because the government is hiding it.

My colleague Bryan Passifiume asked Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada for a comment on the issue last Wednesday and didn’t hear back anything until late Friday. Even at that, their statement was vague and not overly reassuring about what was happening.

They said that monthly data was still available upon request but that they were in the process of updating how the data would be presented.

“The goal is provide clearer explanations of trends and greater context to help Canadians better understand data about key IRCC programs,” the statement read.

“The Liberal government just admitted that they have purposefully withheld raw immigration data from the public, and intend on replacing it with heavily edited information that will likely be packaged with Liberal spin,” Rempel-Garner said in response to the statement.

It’s an understandable apprehension for her to have. This kind of data is normally provided in raw form so business and academic researchers, or journalists, can interpret it.

Now it seems after months of hiding the data, they want to release information only after it has been massaged.

Given the Liberal track record on immigration over the past several years, we all have reason to be concerned.