EDITORIAL: PM's mea culpa on immigration falls short

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s admission in a seven-minute video released on social media that he ramped up Canada’s annual immigration targets for too long post-pandemic omits some key facts.

Absolving himself, Trudeau puts most of the blame on what he calls “bad actors.”

First, unethical colleges and universities that cashed in by overcharging international students for often worthless diplomas.

Second, greedy corporations that abused the temporary foreign worker program to hire cheap labour instead of employing Canadians.

Third, unscrupulous immigration consultants who committed fraud.

Trudeau said increasing the number of permanent and temporary residents post-pandemic helped ease Canada’s labour shortage and avoid a recession, but “looking back, when the post-pandemic boom cooled and businesses no longer needed additional labour help, as a federal team we could have acted quicker and turned off the taps faster.”

That’s it?

In fact, as Trudeau himself acknowledges in the video: “Immigration is primarily a federal job. We have the levers to rein it in”.

So if the government had wanted to cut immigration levels, it could have done so at any time.

Instead it ignored warnings from its own public servants two years ago that the big hikes in immigration it was planning would increase the cost of housing, decrease affordability and put added pressure on already beleaguered public services like health care.

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Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request advised the government that: “Population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units … policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply, and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth.”

The Trudeau government ignored that when it announced in November 2022 an “ambitious” plan to boost annual immigration targets to 465,000 permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024, 500,000 in 2025 and (later) 500,000 in 2026, while leaving the number of international students and temporary foreign workers uncapped.

That’s why it has had to announce that it’s cutting the number of permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027, plus reducing temporary residents by 445,901 in 2025 and 445,662 in 2026.

Canada’s parliamentary budget officer is now warning that the government has over-estimated the impact of these new targets on reducing Canada’s housing shortage.