LILLEY: Trudeau's out-of-control immigration policies hitting Canada hard

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In the last six months, Canada has added nearly 600,000 people to our population due to out-of-control immigration. That’s an increase in population of 1.5% in just six months — or put another way, we are increasing our population at a rate of 3% a year, all through immigration. 

It is out of control.

This is happening at a time when we have a housing affordability crisis driven by the fact that we don’t have enough supply to keep up with demand. We have a health-care crisis where millions of Canadians don’t have access to a family doctor and surgical wait times are far too long. 

Still, we keep bringing in more people. 

We are told these are temporary foreign workers or international students or asylum-seekers rather than permanent residents. Officially, the government’s immigration target is still below 500,000 permanent residents per year and yet somehow we are on pace to bring in more than double that. 

“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 at the beginning of April. 

“Increasingly, more and more businesses are relying on temporary foreign workers in a way that is driving down wages in some sectors.” 

OK, to sum up: Canada’s prime minister said on April 2 that we are bringing in people faster than we can absorb them and this is driving down wages. So given his access to the levers of power, what is Trudeau doing to reverse this, to fix the problem? 

Based on the latest numbers from Statistics Canada, absolutely nothing. 

In May 2023, Canada’s unemployment rate was 5.2%, but by May 2024 it was 6.2%.  

What was the major difference? 

According to Statistics Canada, we are bringing in people faster than our ability to create jobs. Which is odd because part of the reason we are told we need such high immigration numbers is to fill jobs that Canadians won’t take. 

According to the latest jobs report from Statistics Canada, we added 1.1 million people to the working-age population of 15 years of age and older. We added 652,000 people to the labour force, but only 402,000 jobs, meaning we added 250,000 people to the unemployment line. 

In what world is it fair to entice people to move here with the promise of unemployment? In what world is it fair to have Canadians watch wages go down or stagnate because we are bringing in more people than we can employ. 

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That doesn’t even touch on the impact of such over-the-top immigration numbers on the housing crisis or the ability of provinces to reduce the strain on our health-care system. 

It was just a few years ago that Ontario had a population of 14.7 million, but now Statistics Canada pegs the province as having 16.1 million people and growing. Much of that increase is due to temporary immigration, but increasingly those who have come as students or as temporary workers have said they don’t want to leave. 

Meanwhile, the Trudeau government is offering faster work permits to asylum claimants and promising immediate permanent residency status for anyone who comes to Canada as a caregiver. Already, immigration consultants have been taking to social media to explain how people can bring their brothers, sisters or other family members to Canada by claiming they are coming to look after the kids. 

Canada has long had high immigration numbers; we’ve also had a fairly general consensus to support that. The Liberals are breaking that consensus with poor management of the system. 

The Liberals say they are concerned about the rise of anti-immigrant votes in Europe and yet they ignore the same warning signs here at home. 

They are sowing the seeds of our future discontent.