LILLEY: Poll shows Trudeau killed consensus on immigration

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Canadians are fed up with the way the Trudeau Liberals are managing the immigration system, and they’ve lost faith in the PM’s ability to handle the file. A new poll for Postmedia by Leger, Canada’s most accurate pollster in the last election, lays out how the country is feeling.

About two-thirds think that the Trudeau government is bringing in too many people through the permanent resident program. More than half believe higher wages should be offered to Canadian workers before bringing in temporary foreign workers.

Meanwhile, on the issue of screening the up to 5,000 refugees from Gaza the government has agreed to bring in, just 6% are very confident in the Trudeau government’s ability to properly screen these asylum applicants.

Given that Gaza is run by a terrorist group, Hamas, and that most of the population supports Hamas and their attack on Israel last October, we should be worried about who is coming in. Only those who are approved by Hamas to leave Gaza will be given permission to come to Canada.

And, in light of the debacle we saw unfold this week on Parliament Hill, all of us should be concerned.

Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, one of Trudeau’s smarter and more politically astute ministers, said, “This is the way that the investigative and national security system should work.”

That was LeBlanc reacting to the news that Ahmed Eldidi had received Canadian citizenship.

Ahmed Eldidi is the father part of the father-son duo arrested a month ago and charged with plotting to carry out a terrorist attack in Toronto. The senior Eldidi is also facing a charge over his alleged participation in an ISIS torture and propaganda video.

He came to Canada in 2018 on a visitor’s visa, quickly claimed refugee status, then became a permanent resident and then a citizen. Despite roughly half a dozen references to him being sent for “biometric” or other security screening, officials never caught the fact that he was the alleged star of an ISIS video.

Based on all of that, it’s not surprising that 64% of all Canadians say that they are not confident that the refugees coming from Gaza will be “thoroughly screened” by the government. Even 53% of those who said they would vote Liberal, told Leger that they don’t think the government will do a good job.

How can we do a good job?

The term “biometrics” sounds good, but it amounts to running your photo and fingerprints through a Canadian database. The entire Eldidi incident should make federal officials reconsider their methods rather than saying as Leblanc did that this is how the system should work.

On the question of bringing in 500,000 people per year, when presented with the Trudeau Liberal plan for permanent residents, 65% said we were bringing in too many people. That includes 86% who say they will vote Conservative in the next election, 75% who say they will vote Bloc Quebecois, 63% who will vote Green, 53% who will vote Liberal and 46% who say they will vote NDP.

Among the voters of every single party represented in Parliament, more said we were bringing in too many immigrants than said we were bringing in the right amount or not enough.

“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,” Trudeau said in early April.

It’s nearly five months since Trudeau made those statements and nothing substantive has changed. He signaled there were problems but refused to actually enable fixes until it was well past a crisis point.

We’ve long had a political consensus on immigration being a good thing for Canada. That is now broken, and it is due to Trudeau’s incompetence.

This will be his legacy.

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