EDITORIAL: Liberals ignored warnings about high immigration

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The Trudeau government routinely mocks critics for not heeding the advice of experts, a hollow claim given its habit of only following expert advice when it agrees with it.

Two years ago, the federal immigration department received advice from its own public servants that large increases to immigration would adversely impact housing affordability, health care and other government services.

As reported by The Canadian Press through documents obtained from access-to-information requests, the department was warned that:

“Population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units.

“As the federal authority charged with managing immigration … policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth.

“Rapid increases put pressure on health care and affordable housing. Settlement and resettlement service providers are expressing short-term strain due to labour market conditions, increased levels and the Afghanistan and Ukraine initiatives.”

The Trudeau government ignored this advice when then immigration minister Sean Fraser (now housing minister) proudly announced in November 2022 the Liberals’ “ambitious” plan to boost Canada’s annual immigration targets to 465,000 permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

The Liberals recently announced another 500,000 target for 2026, compared to 272,000 annually when the Liberals came to power in 2015.

According to current immigration minister Marc Miller, Canada is hosting 900,000 international students this year, compared to 352,000 in 2015.

He told CTV’s Question Period in an interview to be aired Sunday that Ottawa is now considering a cap on international students because, “It’s really a system that has gotten out of control.”

Meanwhile, Canada admitted 220,00 temporary foreign workers in 2022, an increase of 68% over 2021 according to a Globe and Mail analysis of federal data.

The cumulative result of these policies, as Statistics Canada reported in December, is that, “Canada’s population was estimated at 40,528,396 on Oct. 1, 2023, an increase of 430,635 people (+1.1%) from July 1 … the highest population growth rate in any quarter since the second quarter of 1957 (+1.2%), when Canada’s population grew by 198,000 people.”

So, once again, the Liberals are now frantically trying to fix a problem they exacerbated through their own policies, because they ignored the advice of their own experts.