On Wednesday, the same day that the Liberal caucus gathered to hear the contents of a letter signed by 20 Liberal MPs asking for Trudeau to step down, the National Post broke the story that the Trudeau government plans to slash immigration levels. The next three-year Immigration Levels Plan would have normally been released on November 1st, leading to speculation that one of the prominent topics in the three-hour long caucus meeting was how the prime minister plans to accomodate the dramatic public opinion shift against high immigration.
While listening to yesterday’s press conference and reading through various analyses, the principal goal of the Liberal immigration pivot became clear. After the pandemic, the Trudeau government pulled out all the stops on the temporary resident streams (mainly international students and foreign workers) and allowed this population to soar to roughly three million – about 7% of Canada’s population. We all know the consequences this had on our housing, infrastructure, social services, schools, hospitals, food banks, and social cohesion. The backlash among the Canadian public was unprecedented, and the Liberal government is now attempting to reverse this disaster.
Throughout this year, Immigration Minister Marc Miller has been toughening rules on international students and foreign workers (embarrassingly, this mostly consisted of restoring rules that the Liberals had removed). I catalogued ten such rule changes in this article, including fairly major ones like placing strict new restrictions on low-wage workers and then dramatically expanding the definition of what constitutes a low-wage worker. Now, the Trudeau government is cutting permanent resident levels to 395,000 in 2025 (until now, this number was slated to rise to 500,000 in 2025). In the unlikely scenario that Trudeau is still prime minister after next year, the number would fall to 380,000 in 2026, and 365,000 in 2027.
Both the Trudeau government and mainstream figures like bank economists agree that the combined effect of these two desperate strategies – tightening rules on temporary residents and then cutting permanent resident levels – will cause population growth to stop. Not slow, stop. And to be more accurate, the population is actually projected to shrink by 0.2%.
How could Canada’s population stay flat or shrink, if we are still allowing in 395,000 permanent residents, as well as a smaller but not insignificant number of new foreign students and workers? There are two reasons: 1) about 40% of those new permanent residents are going to come from the pool of temporary residents and 2) the tightened restrictions and reduced permanent resident levels will lead to a massive exodus of temporary residents.
How massive? Senior BMO economist Robert Kavcic writes that there will be a net temporary resident outflow of 445,000 per year over the next two years. It sounds exaggerated, but it isn’t. Because temporary residents are always leaving and always arriving – that’s the nature of the temporary resident streams – even a small change to arrivals or departures has a dramatic effect on the population of temporary residents.
That’s what happened after the pandemic, when the Trudeau government turned the dial up a little and Canadians woke up two years later to realize that 7% of the country is here on a temporary visa. And that’s what’s happening now, except in reverse. The dial is being turned down, and we are going to see major outflows of temporary residents.
And that’s a good thing – because the Liberals never should have let so many temporary residents come to Canada in the first place. The Trudeau government’s decision led to real suffering for Canadians – senior citizens moved into RVs or gave up buying meat because they couldn’t pay sky-high rent, young couples delayed family formation because housing prices soared, and many Canadians watched helplessly while their neighbourhoods were rendered chaotic and unrecognizable as immigration profiteers turned single-family homes into international student rooming houses.
The disastrous Liberal immigration policy also led to suffering for the foreign nationals who were treated as abstract economic units whose only function was to fill so-called labour shortages, including the international students who Marc Miller described as “assets that are very lucrative”. Young men from Punjab were essentially imported to serve the needs of business interests in Canada, and many will now return in shame to their family’s farms – some of which were mortgaged to fund their journey here. Canada’s temporary resident population needs to be dramatically reduced, but the human cost of the reduction could have been avoided had the Liberals not created this situation in the first place.
There are notable flaws to the immigration cut. If 40% of new permanent residents are coming from what Marc Miller described as the “young labour pool” of temporary residents – many of whom work in low-skill sectors like fast food and retail – this means that the skill level of the average permanent resident will go down. This is another consequence of the Liberal government’s incompetence on immigration.
Another flaw is that some of the temporary residents will not leave after their visa expires, and will instead join the black market and stay illegally as long as possible. Though he still supports the idea, Minister Miller has thankfully backed down on his plan for a general amnesty (which he euphemistically calls a “mass regularization”). Still, this means that Canada will have to deal with an increased population of illegal immigrants on our soil (we already have somewhere between 300,000 and 600,00). Poor, desperate, probably resentful, with non-existent or fake documents, this population will be a thorn in Canada’s side. Locked out of most employment, some may turn to petty or organized crime.
Yet another consequence of the jaw-dropping Liberal immigration incompetence.
This being said, Prime Minister Trudeau’s immigration U-turn is a good thing. If estimates are correct, population growth will stall next year – as I have argued in many articles, Canada is better off without immigration-driven population growth. The temporary resident population should start to shrink – fulfilling the wishes of Canadians who don’t want this country to rely on a foreign slave class like the Arab Gulf States, and reducing pressure on all of our systems, notably housing and healthcare. This should also help reduce unemployment, and potentially boost domestic wages.
Most importantly, the immigration cut shows that, though our political elite clearly has little regard for ordinary Canadians, it is nevertheless capable of being pressured into restricting immigration by an outraged citizenry. Advocates for immigration restriction – and I count among their ranks all of my loyal readers who share this publication’s articles, raise hell on social media, and write to their elected representatives – have made this country’s out-of -touch political class tremble. This was accomplished despite an Official Opposition that marched lockstep with the Trudeau government’s mass immigration agenda until very recently, when it became politically convenient to echo the concerns of Canadians.
Much work remains to be done.
A permanent resident level of 395,000 is still shockingly high – a little less than a new London, Ontario every single year. This scale of immigration will still raise housing prices, strain infrastructure, congest roads, grow diasporas in urban areas and thereby invite foreign interference in our political process, crowd our schools and hospitals, negatively impact wages, reduce social cohesion, and erode national identity by dramatically increasing the percentage of our country born outside Canada.
Once it is no longer counterbalanced by large temporary resident outflows, an annual rate of 395,000 permanent residents will go back to growing our population and fulfilling the Century Initiative’s objective of 100 million Canadians – just more slowly than before. I will elaborate on the details in a future article, but I will briefly note here that 395,000 permanent residents per year is also astronomically out of step with our historic permanent resident levels, which were much lower.
On the temporary resident front, our experience over the last few years has taught us that these streams mostly serve the needs of business interests and cause suffering for Canadians of all backgrounds. Why should we bring in either low-wage or high-wage foreign workers, at all? Why should the international student stream be treated as a pipeline to permanent residency rather than a truly temporary study visa? Why should our immigration system put anyone other than Canadians first?
Canadians who support immigration restriction should celebrate this major victory, stay vigilant, and keep the pressure up on political representatives of all parties. The fight to dismantle the immigration Ponzi scheme is only just beginning.
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