EDITORIAL: What’s going on with immigration?

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Just when you thought the federal government couldn’t mess up the immigration file any more than it has, along comes another report that poses one question: What’s going on?

As Postmedia columnist Brian Lilley reported last week, the Liberals haven’t released immigration data in months and critics are wondering why.

In a recent statement, Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner, who brought this omission to light, asked for more numbers.

“How many illegal border crossings have we had? How many more asylum claims have piled onto 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?” she asked.

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

These are critical files. Major cities have housing crises and hospitals are creaking at the seams under the pressure of an increased number of patients. Youth unemployment is soaring.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Immigration Minister Lena Diab have done little to improve a chaotic immigration system.

The deregulation of the Temporary Foreign Workers (FTW) program by the previous government of Justin Trudeau in 2022 opened the floodgates. It raised caps on the percentage of immigrants that workforce industries were allowed to hire under the TFW program. It also removed the stipulation that if unemployment was above 6%, TFW approval would not be granted. At the same time, the official Liberal immigration plan called for an increase to 465,000 in new permanent residents in 2023; 485,000 in 2024; and 500,000 in 2025.

Meanwhile, figures released by Statistics Canada show unemployment in July was 6.9%, down slightly from the 7% high in May. Youth unemployment is particularly problematic, StatsCan said.

“Youth continue to face challenging labour market conditions; the youth employment rate fell 0.7 percentage points to 53.6% in July — the lowest rate since November 1998 (excluding 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic),” the report said.

With the looming impact from U.S. tariffs threatening thousands of jobs in our economy, surely it would make sense for the government to keep close tabs on immigration, so it doesn’t add fuel to the unemployment fire.

Instead, it seems, the feds have thrown up their hands and opened the floodgates. And we can’t see the numbers to know how bad it could get.