Poilievre says Canada needs ‘more people leaving than coming’

Of note:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says for the next couple of years “we need more people leaving than coming” into Canada.

On Monday, Poilievre was asked by Global News to clarify his June comments calling for “severe limits on population growth.

“In order to fix the problem we’ve got to put very hard caps on immigration levels. We need more people leaving than coming for the next couple of years,” said Poilievre at a news conference in Ottawa. “So our country can actually catch up.”

 Poilievre said this move could help housing, health care and jobs “catch up,” but he did not elaborate on how he would ensure more people leave the country.

“We’ve had population growth of roughly a million a year under the Liberals while we barely built 200,000 homes. Our job market is stalled and yet we are adding more people to the workforce,” said Poilievre.

“Our young people are facing generational highs in unemployment because the jobs are, multinational corporations are giving jobs to low wage temporary foreign workers.”…

Source: Poilievre says Canada needs ‘more people leaving than coming’

And the Globe editorial commenting on his remarks:

…Mr. Poilievre would take a different approach by applying a “hard rule” in which population intake does not exceed the growth in the housing stock, the job market and the availability of doctors.

There is merit to that approach, although the emphasis should be on using permanent residency as a tool to ease shortages of specific skills, such as doctors. The focus of any effort to reduce the weight of migration on housing and social services should be squarely on temporary residents. 

Re-establishing public confidence in the immigration system means restricting temporary foreign workers to areas where there simply aren’t Canadians able and willing to take a job, such as in the agriculture sector. Permits for other businesses should, for the most part, be denied. If those firms cannot operate without the subsidy of indentured labour, then they do not have a viable business model.

Federal and provincial governments must return the international student program to its former role of recruiting highly qualified students from around the world who will make excellent candidates to become permanent residents once they graduate. As this space has repeatedly argued, those students should be limited to on-campus work.

And the government must follow through on its proposals to end the abuses of the asylum system.

Mr. Poilievre’s proposed formula needs work, but the idea is at least a recognition that immigration targets in recent years have been arbitrary – and a big part of the reason that Canadians are losing faith in the system.

Source: Let’s focus on the right fix for immigration