Immigration Restriction Is Mainstream But The Fight To End Mass Immigration Has Just Begun

This week the CBSA showed up to check the immigration status of international student protestors demanding work permits in Calgary, and Premier Doug Ford’s government amended regulations to bar illegal immigrants, international students, foreign workers, and visitors from accessing government social assistance.

These two instances are just a sample of a hardening attitude towards immigration spreading through federal and provincial governments. The powers that be have come to recognize the Canadian public’s strong support for immigration restriction, and are reacting accordingly.

We can also see a striking change in rhetoric from politicians.

On July 29th, at a joint press conference with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, Prime Minister Carney responded to a question on Alberta’s quest for expanded provincial control over immigration by heralding his government’s crackdown on immigration. Bluntly stating that “immigration had been far too high” before he took office, Carney boasted that levels have dropped significantly: “The level of asylum seekers is down a third…temporary foreign workers down by a half, foreign students down by two thirds”. He went on to hint that his government would maintain or possibly expand its restrictive approach well into the future: “The overall levels still are putting pressure on housing and others…Do we still need a few more years of restraint? There’s a good argument for that.”

This is a remarkable shift in rhetoric on immigration from a Canadian head of government. CBC’s Front Burner (a somewhat biased but still informative podcast, by the way) has released a two-part series on “Canada’s 180 on immigration” contrasting past and present statements on immigration by a range of Canadian politicians to demonstrate how they have changed their tune in the span of just a few years.

I have also been tracking this. After founding Dominion Review in the spring of 2023 the first major theme of my activism was to continually expose on a day-by-day basis the fanatically pro-immigration statements of everyone from former Immigration Minister Marc Miller (who claimed it was “unhealthy” to link housing to immigration) to Conservative Leader Poilievre (who called for a halt to the deportation of 700 international students with fake admission letters, citing in part our alleged need for “700 young people” because Canada’s population is “too old”) to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith (who for a time wanted to double Alberta’s population to ten million).

All of these individuals – indeed most of the many politicians I exposed – have altered their rhetoric considerably. Marc Miller has gone on record to say “the age of unlimited supply of cheap foreign labour is over”. Poilievre condemns what he calls the “radical, globalist ideology of uncontrolled population growth” driven by “corporate elites” to suppress wages. Premier Danielle Smith’s shift is possibly the most dramatic of all; she is giving Albertans the chance to vote on an array of measures cracking down on immigration, including cutting off social services to temporary residents, in her province’s upcoming October sovereignty referendum.

Of course we should not be surprised by this. Politicians seldom have fixed beliefs, and thus for the most part function as empty vessels floating on the waves of public opinion. Embracing immigration restriction has been an easy choice for the Conservative Party, which freely aligns with numerous populist causes and whose base tends to be more anti-immigration. The Liberal Party is also untroubled by the necessity of adopting a tough attitude towards immigration. Canada’s Natural Governing Party has wielded power for nearly 70% of Canadian history since the First World War by continually adapting to public opinion in a chameleon like fashion (or in other words, by being very good at politics).

There is little point in calling out these empty vessels for hypocrisy. After all, if you have no consistent set of unchanging values, you cannot be guilty of hypocrisy. We must simply recognize the changeable nature of politicians, and act accordingly. Canadian nationalists have successfully pushed immigration restrictionism into the mainstream – what next?

I put it to you that the next step is to take on the system of mass immigration itself, by which I mean the policy of a high, continuous yearly inflow of immigrants imposed in 1990 by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Up until that point in Canadian history, our immigration levels varied according to domestic economic conditions in an approach known as the “tap on, tap off” policy. This is how President of Population Institute Canada Madeline Weld explains the imposition of mass immigration in the early 1990s:

“In 1990, Mulroney’s immigration minister Barbara McDougall won a major cabinet battle when she succeeded in raising Canada’s target for immigration to 250,000 annually, regardless of economic conditions. Prior to that time, the number of new immigrants to Canada had varied from year to year, depending on perceived economic conditions.

McDougall would have known that her arguments for the alleged economic benefits of uninterrupted high immigration were on shaky ground given that immigrants who had come to Canada since 1978, when the family class was introduced, were less educated, less able to speak English or French, and had dramatically lower earnings than their predecessors. But she also mentioned a more credible reason for the change in policy – a new source of voters for the Conservative party.

Brian Mulroney’s successors, regardless of political party, maintained the annual target of 250,000, using the same bogus economic arguments. Of course, they too had an eye on the immigrant vote. And likely on the people who actually benefitted from mass immigration, such as bankers, real estate developers, and cheap labour employers, who could perhaps be counted on for political donations and other kinds of rewards.

So, despite warning signs both economic and social, not to mention the environmental impact and tremendous loss of farmland, Barbara McDougall’s high target was followed by Liberals Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, and Conservative Stephen Harper. (Kim Campbell was not in office long enough to be held responsible for any policy.)”

The post-pandemic Trudeau immigration wave ignited such a massive backlash from Canadians that our political elite has abrogated it. Our national population growth rate has fallen from nearly +1.3 million in 2023, to roughly +700,000 in 2024, to a loss of -100,000 in 2025. Much of this decline reflects adjustments in the temporary resident population, which skyrocketed in the waning years of the Trudeau government and is now dropping substantially.

The most likely next course of action for the vested pro-immigration interests, notably the cheap labour employers and real estate developers mentioned by Madeline Weld, is to acknowledge that immigration was too high in the post-pandemic Trudeau years but to argue against overcorrecting by cutting levels too deeply.

We can see an attempt to reforge some kind of national pro-immigration consensus on the part of Prime Minister Carney, who frequently emphasizes that his government has “taken back control” of immigration.

Yet the Carney government nevertheless intends to admit nearly 1.3 million permanent residents in three years, plans to maintain the Temporary Foreign Worker program, and has avoided structural reforms to the international student program such as banning students from working and closing pathways to permanent residency. While the Carney government has rightly stopped accepting asylum claims from individuals who have been in the country for over a year, it has skittishly held back from more fundamental reforms such as those pursued by the Labour government in Britain, which has adopted a new policy of granting successful asylum claimants temporary protection rather than permanent residency.

The Canadian political elite’s immigration U-turn has shown that public pressure can bear fruit when it comes to immigration policy. Rather than letting the powers that be reforge a new immigration consensus based on a policy of slower, managed, and controlled mass immigration, Canadian nationalists and immigration restrictionists should seize the initiative by demanding the restoration of the historic “tap on, tap off” policy, the abolition of all foreign worker streams, and serious structural reforms to the international student and asylum programs.