LILLEY: Time to end foreign flag-raising ceremonies at city halls across Canada

2025/11/19 1 Comment

Agree:

Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas has an idea that should be adopted at city halls across the country — end the practice of raising flags of other countries. It’s one thing for the federal government in Ottawa to follow protocol and fly the flag of a visiting foreign dignitary; that’s accepted and expected.

Municipalities, though, have no role in foreign affairs, and this practice, which likely started as a unifying measure, is now divisive, which is why Farkas says he wants to see it end.

“Calgary’s flag policy means any country recognized by Canada may have their flag flown at City Hall on their national day. But national flag-raisings are now creating division,” Farkas said last week.

Flag-raising policies now creating division, not unity

We’ve seen those divisions recently in attempts to get the raising of the Israeli flag cancelled at various city halls and now we’ve seen that with the Palestinian flag raising since Canada officially recognized a Palestinian State in September. Flag raisings over the past few days in cities like Mississauga and Toronto have been incredibly divisive and even involved attempted court injunctions.

Of note regarding the City of Calgary policy — and it appears similar for Toronto — we could be raising the flags of countries that we shouldn’t really be honouring all simply because the federal government recognizes the existence of that state.

City Council does not have legal authority to determine which countries Canada recognizes. Under our existing policy, any national flag request that meets the criteria must be considered equally,” he wrote.

Canadian cities recognizing countries with widespread human-rights abuses

By recognizing the Palestinian State, the Carney government is recognizing a state government in part, some would argue in whole, by a terrorist group. Hamas, which governs Gaza, is clearly a terrorist group and the Palestinian Authority, which is in charge of the West Bank, is an organization that doesn’t hold elections and is credibly accused of arbitrary arrest and torture, extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses.

It goes beyond just this conflict in the Middle East, though. Toronto has held flag raising ceremonies this year for several countries with questionable human rights records that we wouldn’t want to celebrate.

On Oct. 9, we raised the flag of Uganda at Toronto City Hall, a country where basic rights such as freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association are all curtailed and where homosexuality is punishable by death. This isn’t exactly the type of country that we should be celebrating with a ceremony at City Hall, the flag is a symbol of the government in charge and that government is repressive.

Similar complaints, though not as harsh, could be made against Angola. Their flag was raised on Nov. 12 at Toronto City Hall.

This past May 23, Calgary raised the flag of Eritrea, a country accused of widespread human rights abuses including extrajudicial killings and sexual violations, specifically in the Tigray region which is disputed with Ethiopia. Toronto raised Ethiopia’s flag on Sept. 11, despite their government facing many of the same accusations.

Both countries criminalize same-sex relations and yet here are two Canadian cities — likely more — celebrating and honouring these countries. Raising the flag that represents the regime in place does not honour the people, the diaspora living here, it is an honour to the repressive regime in place.

Honouring foreign regimes doesn’t represent local communities

Can you imagine seeing the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran flying at a government facility in Canada? It should never happen, but with these policies in place, it clearly could.

That’s why Calgary’s mayor wants to move a motion this week to end the practice.

It’s a good move; let’s hope it passes and then is replicated across the country.

Source: LILLEY: Time to end foreign flag-raising ceremonies at city halls across Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

LILLEY: Carney’s Liberals hiding immigration data as questions mount

2025/08/13 Leave a comment

Rather than defaulting to a conspiracy theory, perhaps this delay in releasing the data reflects reorganizational stress given resource constraints. Still no excuse for these delays as generally IRCC is one of the better departments in terms of data availability:

The Carney Liberals have been hiding immigration data from Canadians for months. Now, after being called out on it, the government says it’s all in the name of openness and transparency.

Normally, government numbers on the number of new arrivals, the number of asylum seekers and more are released on the government’s open data portal. As of now, the government hasn’t released any data since May and that information only covers until the end of March.

The news was made public in a statement last week by Conservative Immigration Critic Michelle Rempel-Garner.

“How many illegal border crossings have we had? How many more asylum claims have piled on to 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?” Rempel Garner asked.

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

She’s right: We do have a right to know, especially since the Liberals have made such a disaster of the immigration system….

Source: LILLEY: Carney’s Liberals hiding immigration data as questions mount

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LILLEY: Canada now a land of ethic and religious fighting

2024/11/06 Leave a comment

Overwrought and exaggerated, but yes, these are worrying signs:

We are the country we claim not to be. Canada is now a country of religious and ethnic tensions, bigotry and violence.

We saw this over the weekend in Brampton when a Hindu temple was attacked. People beaten with bats; video shows people carrying Khalistani flags hitting temple goers with the flag poles.

We even have a Peel Regional Police officer suspended for taking part in the protest which turned violent. Sergeant Harinder Sohi, an 18-year veteran of the force, is now suspended after being identified as a participant.

He’s apparently now receiving death threats for participating.

The outbreak of a Sikh-Hindu religious war isn’t the only problem facing our country on this front. For a year, we have seen hate marches rise up across the country in support of terrorist organizations.

In the weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks by Hamas against Israel, we heard countless politicians say, “This isn’t who we are.” They said this in response to synagogues being attacked, Jewish schools being shot at, and Jewish community centres being firebombed.

Well, apparently this is who we are because these incidents have not stopped.

Last week, Eylon Levy, a man I’ve interviewed multiple times — with whom I met with in Israel last January and who was an Israeli government spokesperson for a time — was on a speaking tour in Canada. While at the University of Calgary to give a talk, Levy was met with cries of “Allahu akbar!” and claims that he was personally responsible for genocide and killing babies.

“That crosses the line from any sort of political protest into a full-on Jihadi war cry,” Levy told my Toronto Sun colleague Bryan Passifiume.

This is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new Canada, full-on ethnic and religious wars on our streets and nothing more from our leadership than a tweet.

“The acts of violence at the Hindu Sabha Mandir in Brampton today are unacceptable. Every Canadian has the right to practice their faith freely and safely,” Trudeau said in a social media post.

It’s too bad that Trudeau has been part of what has encouraged these protests. Just like Trudeau has failed to deal with anti-Semitism and the attacks on Jewish institutions for political gain, he’s used tensions in India to win favour with some groups.

For years, Trudeau has decided to bring the tensions of India’s domestic politics into Canadian politics. He inserted himself into a dispute between the Indian government and farmers in 2020 in a way that would have caused great consternation had a foreign government done the same during our trucker’s protest.

He has campaigned in Canada against the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an attempt to win votes in Canada’s Sikh community. Immigration to Canada, in both the Sikh and Hindu communities, dates back more than 100 years.

For most of that time, there has been some form of peaceful co-existence. Tensions yes, but not an all-out religious war which is where we appear to be heading with no help from Trudeau and his politicking.

Meanwhile, India is set to take a harsher stand against Canada, even considering calling Canada a state sponsor of terrorism, according to some reports. The fact that we went from decades long ally of India to a pariah can only be laid at Trudeau’s feet.

It’s the same with Israel.

Canada voted for the creation of the State of Israel at the United Nations in 1948 and for the past several years has done everything possible to undermine that state. The Liberal Party has also taken policy positions that put ethno-religious politics above principle.

Foreign Minister Melanie Joly is openly courting the votes of people who back Hamas and Hezbollah. Yet, we are supposed to be shocked when an Israeli speaker is shut down at the University of Calgary and needs to be escorted out by security.

Add that to the schools being shot at, the synagogues attacked, the temples being swarmed, this is Justin Trudeau’s new Canada. The PM, who says he’s against divisiveness, sure has created a lot of it.

Source: LILLEY: Canada now a land of ethic and religious fighting

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ICYMI LILLEY: Trudeau has broken every aspect of our immigration system

2024/10/22 Leave a comment

Sample of some of the language being used. While the lion’s share of the blame lies with the federal government, other levels of government, business and educational institutions are also complicit:

If it wasn’t clear already, this past week showed there isn’t a single facet of the immigration system the Liberals haven’t broken.

A man on a student visa was in court on terrorism charges, a TD bank report showed temporary workers are harming the economy, and the Trudeau government started talking about moving tens of thousands of asylum seekers across the country.

“We could open a hotel in any particular province and ship people there,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said at the Liberal caucus retreat.

He was reacting to news that some premiers don’t want the federal government to ship thousands of asylum seekers their way from Ontario and Quebec. Rather than fix the problem, Miller and the rest of Trudeau’s team are trying to spread it around.

We’ve gone from a few thousand people showing up at airports and declaring asylum to a few thousand a month.

The problem is that the Trudeau government relaxed the visa requirements, in some cases waiving them. That has resulted in people who would otherwise be denied entrance to Canada being given permission to fly here and claim immediate asylum.

India is currently the top source country for people claiming asylum with more than 15,000 claims in the first six months of this year, claims from Mexico are at nearly 9,000. People coming here from India and Mexico, with rare exception, are not refugees, they are economic migrants abusing a system meant to protect people from persecution.

The Liberals could fix this problem by fixing the visa system, but they’d rather talk about building hotels, busing people across the country and be arguing with premiers than looking for solutions.

When it isn’t letting the visa system rot, we have questions about how well we vet people coming into the country.

On Friday, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan was in court on terrorism charges. Khan was arrested last week after the FBI uncovered a plot, they say would have seen Khan travel to Brooklyn, New York to carry out an attack on the Jewish community there.

Khan was living in the Toronto area for a little over a year but is a Pakistani national who was admitted to Canada in June 2023 on a student visa. The arrest came just five weeks after Ahmed Eldidi was arrested on terrorism charges with a plot allegedly targeting Toronto’s Jewish community.

Eldidi had come to Canada on a visitor’s visa in 2018, claimed refugee status a few months later and was granted Canadian citizenship in May 2024 just before he was arrested.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the strength of our vetting system during a news conference in Montreal. To listen to Trudeau, there are no problems with the system.

“First of all, this is an extraordinarily serious situation, and it highlights just how effective our security services and institutions are that we were able to interdict these, these very, very potentially devastating situations,” Trudeau said.

The arrests are one thing, but why are we not catching people before they enter the country. One of the charges against Eldidi is due to what police say was his participation in an ISIS terror and torture video in 2015.

Our asylum claims are off the charts, the visa system is broken, we can’t properly vet people coming into Canada and now a report from TD Bank that says the over reliance on temporary foreign workers is hurting the economy.

All of these problems have been created by the Trudeau Liberals and their mismanagement of the system.

Source: LILLEY: Trudeau has broken every aspect of our immigration system

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

LILLEY: Poilievre promises to cap immigration, tie it to housing

2024/09/13 Leave a comment

The devil, as in all areas of policy, and particularly in immigration and citizenship policy, will lie in the details and how a Conservative government deals with pressures from the business community and provincial governments:

Part of Pierre Poilievre’s plan to deal with Canada’s housing crisis will be to cap immigration. The Conservative leader said if he wins the next election, he’ll bring sanity back to Canada’s immigration system.

Poilievre was speaking with reporters ahead of Parliament’s return from the summer break. He said that when MPs return to Ottawa next Monday, he will try and defeat the government and force an election as soon as possible.

If he wins the election, he promises across-the-board changes on immigration.

“We will cap population growth so that the housing stock always grows faster than the population,” Poilievre said.

In the middle of a housing crisis, at a time when we are bringing in more than 1 million people per year, his statement sounds like common sense. While Poilievre said exact numbers would come before the next election, he said this policy idea is really about math, not immigration.

“We’re building like 240,000 homes, that’s like a 1.4% increase in our housing supply. You can’t grow the population faster than that, unless you’re going to have worse housing shortages,” he said.

“Under Trudeau and the NDP, we’ve been growing the population by almost 3%, but we grow the housing stock by 1.4%. No wonder we’re running out of homes.”

He also said he’d scale back the international student program.

“We’re going to bring home the international student system we had before Justin Trudeau. Which was a modest number of young people who were extremely promising could come here and study, and if they excel, they followed the law, they learned English or French, they could join the Canadian family,” Poilievre said.

He noted stories showing more than 20 international students living in the basement of one home in Brampton as an example of how off the rails the program has become the last few years. There were just over 350,00 foreign students in Canada when the Trudeau Liberals took over in 2015, but more than 1 million last year.

It’s not just the housing market that is also being impacted by the massive swell in immigration, both permanent and temporary. The most recent unemployment report from Statistics Canada showed unemployment growing from 6.4% in July to 6.6% in August, and a big part of that was population growth driven by immigration.

We added 96,400 people to the working age population, meaning those 15 and older. That’s a massive number in just one month, but it’s been going on like this for the last couple of years.

While there were some new jobs added, they were mostly part-time and didn’t keep pace with population growth. There were 44,000 full-time jobs lost last month, and we added 60,000 people to the unemployment rolls.

Statistics Canada has been warning about this for more than a year, noting time and again that job growth is not keeping pace with population growth.

“Given this pace of population growth, employment growth of approximately 50,000 per month is required for the employment rate to remain constant,” the agency warned a year ago.

We haven’t been hitting those numbers, and that’s why our unemployment rate has gone from 5% to 6.6%.

“That’s not even a question of whether you support or not immigration, it’s a question of whether you support mathematics,” Poilievre said when speaking about the housing crunch, but it applies to the impact on the job market as well.

Last April, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that we were bringing in people faster than we could absorb them. Since he made those comments, we’ve added more than 500,000 people to Canada.

How does it make sense to keep immigration levels where they are when we are facing a housing shortage, a housing affordability crisis due to a lack of housing and growing unemployment.

It simply doesn’t and to carry on isn’t fair to anyone.

The Trudeau Liberals made this mess; they don’t seem to be in a hurry to fix it. Maybe it’s time to give Poilievre a turn.

Source: LILLEY: Poilievre promises to cap immigration, tie it to housing

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

LILLEY: Security screening tarnished by accused terrorist’s citizenship quest

2024/08/30 Leave a comment

Understandable that this case provokes these questions. No screening system is perfect after all and likely the high numbers and resulting workload increase the risk. The one bit of good news is that his citizenship could be revoked given misrepresentation at both the Permanent Resident and citizenship approval stages.

Lilley is correct in that this will likely raise questions with Gazan refugees:

When Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi first tried to come to Canada, he was rejected. That was the right answer and I wish it had stayed that way, but sadly he was not only let in but granted citizenship.

“This is the way that the investigative and national security system should work,” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in his opening statement before a Commons committee on Wednesday.

LeBlanc was appearing before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, where it was revealed that Eldidi, now accused of plotting a potential terror attack, was screened by our intelligence agencies a half-dozen times. That fact alone is a damning indictment of our system and calls into question how secure our screening is as we bring in thousands of people from Gaza, an area ruled by the Hamas terrorist group.

Eldidi is the father portion of the father-son duo arrested at the end of July on terrorism-related charges. Among the charges Eldidi is facing is one for aggravated assault, contrary to Sec. 83.2 of the Criminal Code.

That section is specific to committing an indictable offence “for the benefit of, at the direction of or in association with a terrorist group.” The accusation is Eldidi was the star of a 2015 ISIS terror and torture video, in which he allegedly performed unspeakable acts on another man.

That this allegation wasn’t unearthed by our security services before he was granted citizenship has led to many questions. The Trudeau government, though, has spent the last month dodging those questions, but less than an hour before Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc showed up to testify, a chronology of events was released.

Eldidi first tried to come to Canada in late 2017, but was denied a visa because he was deemed a “potential non-genuine visitor.” That assessment seems to have been accurate because Eldidi wasn’t just looking to visit Canada from Egypt, he was looking to claim asylum here.

In January 2018, after submitting new information to Canadian officials, Eldidi was granted a “temporary resident visa” and was allowed to enter Canada. He arrived in the country that February via Pearson airport and in June 2018 claimed asylum.

In both his initial visa application (which was rejected) and the secondary one (which was approved), Eldidi was subject to security screening including biometrics, such as fingerprints.

After his asylum claim was made, Eldidi was subjected to biometrics and security screening again.

“Application was reviewed and a favourable recommendation was provided by security screening partners,” the government’s chronology said.

If hearing “biometrics” as a screening tool makes you feel better, it shouldn’t; it just means that we didn’t find his fingerprints in an existing database.

Eldidi worked the system to quickly move from asylum claimant to getting a work permit, then permanent resident status and finally citizenship in May. Then in June, security officials who had approved him at every step began monitoring him after a tip from our allies in France that something was up.

In July, Eldidi and his son Mostafa were arrested and accused of an alleged terror plot aimed at Toronto’s Jewish community.

Asked time and again about the failure to stop a man who allegedly starred in an ISIS torture video from entering the country, LeBlanc refused to say it was a failure. Clearly it was, though Liberal MPs on the committee tried to portray his arrest as a success.

Sure, the cops stopping an alleged terror attack before it happens is a good thing, but we are supposed to have layers of security to stop those who were allegedly involved in terrorism from coming here and getting citizenship.

Right now, the Trudeau government is in the process of bringing in thousands of people from Gaza. They are trying to assure the public that there is no threat thanks to “biometrics” and “security screening.”

Based on what you have heard about the Eldidi case, do you still feel confident or secure?

Source: LILLEY: Security screening tarnished by accused terrorist’s citizenship quest

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

LILLEY: Islamic hate preacher now on tour across Canada

2024/08/26 Leave a comment

Sigh….:

Imagine a controversial Christian preacher from the U.S. who tells his followers that Muslims are our enemy being allowed to tour this country.

Would the Trudeau government allow such a preacher to conduct a lecture tour if he taught that all Muslims are liars who cheat, and that homosexuals are animals?

It’s doubtful — but if it did happen, there would be outrage and demonstrations outside of the tour locations.

Right now, though, there is a Muslim preacher who holds these very views, except about Jews, touring Canada. Assim Al-Hakeem, an Imam based in Saudi Arabia, has already visited Calgary, Milton, Mississauga and Hamilton, and will be in London on Saturday, Montreal on Sunday and Vancouver next Tuesday.

There haven’t been any protests but it’s not clear if that is because Imam Al-Hakeem says protests are banned in Islam, one of many bizarre views this preacher holds. He also believes women should not share workplaces with men and that they should always be covered.

He’s now spreading his message of hate across Canada, a place he calls a “Kafir” country — meaning infidel.

“May Allah liberate it from the oppressors and our enemies, the Jews,” Al-Hakeem said in a recent broadcast discussing the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Though based in Saudi Arabia, Al-Hakeem broadcasts online worldwide to a mostly English-speaking audience. When it comes to Jews, he sees them not only as enemies of Islam but as constantly conspiring against Islam.

“We acknowledge that through history the Jews collaborating with the hypocrites had many conspiracies against Islam,” Al-Hakeem said while discussing the Illuminati and Freemasons. “The collaboration and the fingerprints of the Jews, the hypocrites, and the Rafidah is evident.”

Is this the language and thinking we want being spread in Canada at a time when anti-Semitic attacks against Jews have skyrocketed? Is this what we want being preached in the same week that more than 100 Jewish schools, hospitals, community centres and synagogues were targeted with bomb threats?

Watching Al-Hakeem’s videos and reading his writings, it is clear that this man is an Islamic supremacist. He says that Muslims cannot take up the citizenship of Kafir countries, he was specifically talking about Canada, and that the laws of Kafir countries aren’t to be followed.

In another video, he describes how when Islam comes to your country you have two options, submit to Islam or pay the jizyah tax, and if you won’t accept either of those, then Muslims will fight you. As he says Muslims will fight you, he makes a knife across the throat motion with his hand.

The Trudeau government has done plenty to keep out people with less offensive views than this man, but Imam Al-Hakeem gets to enter freely, tour the country and not be harassed.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Tommy Robinson, a British national, was arrested and had his passport confiscated while on a speaking tour of Canada. He was essentially harassed over his views, which are often described as anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant.

With Al-Hakeem, we have a man who calls Canada a Kafir country, teaches that Muslims don’t need to obey Canadian laws, and has said vile things about Jews, homosexuals and women, yet he is free to tour and preach his hatred.

Source: LILLEY: Islamic hate preacher now on tour across Canada

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

LILLEY: Trudeau changed foreign workers program at your expense

2024/08/16 Leave a comment

Valid critique with some humour:

The Trudeau Liberals are channeling Captain Louis Renault as they react in shock to problems with Canada’s temporary foreign worker program. Movie fans will know Captain Renault as the corrupt police chief in Casablanca.

After Captain Renault barges into Rick’s Cafe — more of a nightclub and casino — Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, walks up and asks on what grounds his establishment is being shut down.

“I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here,” Captain Renault says.

“Your winnings sir,” says a card dealer handing money to Renault, who thanks him and continues his bust.

The Liberals are Captain Renault, guilty of gambling in the illegal casino and now threatening to throw everyone out. It was the Trudeau Liberals who changed the rules to ramp up Canada’s temporary foreign workers program and now they are promising to punish anyone abusing it, using the rules they changed.

“Abuse and misuse of the TFW program must end,” Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault said last week.

“Bad actors are taking advantage of people and compromising the program for legitimate businesses. We are putting more reforms in place to stop misuse and fraud from entering the TFW program.”

The number of people coming in under the TFW program has been ramping up for years, especially under the Trudeau Liberals. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who was employment minister in 2015, called this out during a recent news conference.

“Trudeau has destroyed our entire immigration system, and he has expanded our temporary foreign worker program by well over 200% at a time when we’re losing jobs,” Poilievre said during an event at Stelco Steel in Hamilton last Friday.

Poilievre noted that when he was responsible for that program there were only 60,000 people admitted under the TFW program but now that number is near 200,000.

“On top of that, you have international students who are effectively temporary foreign workers who came under the wrong stream.”

There was a time, let’s call it 2014, when Justin Trudeau was leader of the third party in Parliament, that he railed against this program. Trudeau said the Harper government was allowing the program to drive down wages of Canadians.

“The government has allowed the temporary foreign worker program to become a force that drives down wages across the country and takes advantage of vulnerable people from abroad,” Trudeau said in April 2014.

Even as recently as this past April, Trudeau was saying that out of control immigration was hurting wages.

“Increasingly, more and more businesses are relying on temporary foreign workers in a way that is driving down wages in some sectors,” Trudeau said five months ago.

If only he knew someone who could do something about this!

He truly is Captain Renault, shocked that there is gambling going on and pocketing his winnings at the same time.

It was Trudeau who changed the rules in April of 2022 to allow a massive deregulation of the program. Under the changes announced then, seasonal industries could hire under the TFW for the full year while the cap on an employer having only 10% of their workforce come from the TFW program was lifted to 20% in most industries but higher in others.

The feds raised the cap to 30% for manufacturing, food and accommodations, hospitals and nursing homes. They also got rid of a stipulation that if unemployment was above 6% then TFW approval would not be granted.

“This was a deliberate move by the federal government to suppress wage growth for low-income Canadians, and increase the number of temporary workers, who have much weaker labour rights than permanent residents,” Mike Moffat posted on X last week.

Moffat is an academic and self-styled progressive who has advised the Trudeau government and worked for the Canada 2020 think tank that is closely tied to the PM. That’s what makes Moffat’s criticism sting so much for the Liberals.

That and the fact that he pointed out these changes were announced less than two weeks after the coalition deal with the NDP was announced.

The Trudeau Liberals say they are there for the little guy, the middle class and those working hard to join it. If actions speak louder than words then that is clearly not true, by the PM’s own admission, his policies are driving down wages for low-income Canadians.

Now he’s claiming he’s shocked, don’t believe him.

Source: LILLEY: Trudeau changed foreign workers program at your expense

Op-ed from Moffatt:

Moffatt: Justin Trudeau’s government radically transformed Canada’s temporary foreign worker program. Young people and low wage workers are paying the price

If you know a young person who struggled to find a summer job they are not alone. This has been the worst summer on record for youth employment outside of the pandemic. Many factors — from a weak economy to a population boom of young people — are at play with one of the largest being the federal government’s 2022 decision to deregulate the low-wage stream of the temporary foreign worker program.

On April 4, 2022, a mere 13 days after the Liberals and NDP signed their Supply and Confidence Agreement, the federal government announced arguably the largest deregulation of the Temporary Foreign Worker program in Canadian history. The program’s low-wage stream, which allows employers not in the agricultural industry (they have a separate stream) to bring in workers and pay them wages under the provincial median (currently $28.39 in Ontario), was radically transformed. The government removed the rule that employers could only bring in workers in some low-wage occupations if the local unemployment rate was less than six per cent allowing firms in areas of high unemployment to access the program. Companies had been limited to having only 10 per cent of their workforce be low-wage temporary foreign workers; this was raised to 20 per cent. In seven sectors, including accommodation and food services, this was raised to 30 per cent.

Mike Moffatt is the Senior Director of the Smart Prosperity Institute and co-host of the podcast The Missing Middle.

Source: Justin Trudeau’s government radically transformed Canada’s temporary foreign worker program. Young people and low wage workers are paying the price

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

LILLEY: Trudeau fails to deal with out-of-control immigration

2024/07/24 Leave a comment

Repeats the same mistakes that Passifume made in ignoring drops in web interest, processed applications, and drop in April and May. But fits his narrative of the government doing nothing when in fact Minister Miller has starting trimming.

But agree, of course, on the overall numbers of permanent and temporary migrants being too high and the government being too timid in bringing them back to more reasonable levels:

We’ve already admitted more foreign students into Canada than we did in the same time period last year.

In the middle of a housing crisis.

At a time when health systems across the country struggle to hire enough doctors and nurses to care for the population that is already here.

What’s worse, we aren’t just increasing the number of foreign students, we are also increasing immigration on all fronts and even the number of people claiming asylum in Canada is up over last year. If you thought you heard the Liberal minister in charge of all of this say something about capping numbers, you’d be right.

The problem is, he hasn’t done that yet even as his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has admitted the problem.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration, whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students, in particular, that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb,” Trudeau said at the beginning of April.

What’s been done since then?

Nothing.

As National Post first reported, between Jan. 1 and May 31, the Canadian government approved 216,620 study permits compared to 200,205 during the same period in 2023. For those keeping track, 2023 was a record year for foreign student admissions into Canada with more than 680,000 permits granted last year.

In January of this year, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said the system was being abused.

“Enough is enough,” Miller said. “Through the decisive measures announced today, we are striking the right balance for Canada and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system while setting students up for the success they hope for.”

If that balance is coming, the numbers aren’t showing it.

Meanwhile, from January through May we took in 30,785 compared to 28,980 in the same period for 2023. Our immigration target for permanent residents in 2023 was 465,000 and we brought in 471,550.

A decade ago we were bringing in what was then considered a historic high of just over 250,000 per year and this year we will likely bring in double that.

Now, when you add all the different ways we bring people in, it’s a staggering figure. According to the Statistics Canada’s population clock which tracks growth in real time, our current population as of writing is 41,481,200.

On Dec. 19, 2023 when I wrote about our growing population, the clock stood at 40,720,342 meaning we’ve added 760,858 people in seven months or an average of 109,000 per month.

Again, all in a housing crisis and a health-care crisis.

Bringing in people on scale, faster than we can absorb them to use Trudeau’s terminology, means housing costs rise and health care wait times grow longer. Then there is the economic impact of such massive and uncoordinated growth.

A recent report from The Royal Bank found that Canada’s per-capita household spending is down, and that per capita GDP growth has declined in six of the last seven quarters.

“Canada’s economy might not be in recession but it feels like one,” the report stated.

Our population growth is masking the weaknesses in the Canadian economy.

“Surging population growth has prevented outright declines in Canadian gross domestic product, but per-person output is falling, and the unemployment rate is rising like it usually only would be during a recession,” RBC said.

So, we have a housing crisis, that is being made worse by a lack of supply and increased demand due to immigration, but that immigration is also masking a recession that would be taking place if it weren’t for all the consumer spending of newcomers.

Meanwhile, unemployment is rising in large part because we add more people to the workforce each month. StatsCan has been warning for the last year that population growth is outstripping job growth.

It’s a fine mess we find ourselves in, one created entirely by the policies of the Trudeau government.

Source: LILLEY: Trudeau fails to deal with out-of-control immigration

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

Lilley: Trudeau extending Canadian citizenship to grandchildren and illegals

2024/05/27 Leave a comment

Different take from Lilley in the Toronto Sun than Selley in the National Post. Agree with Lilley that there are alternative methods such as greater use of ministerial discretion for hardship and statelessness cases, rather than casting a broader net:

….On the issue of extending birthright citizenship, the Liberals made it sound like they had no choice, blaming a court decision last December. The truth is, it was a lower court ruling they didn’t appeal because as they stated clearly in their news release they liked it.

“The Government of Canada did not appeal the ruling because we agree that the law has unacceptable consequences for Canadians whose children were born outside the country,” the news release stated.

The court ruling was in response to a number of families who challenged a law which stated that you could only pass on citizenship to a Canadian born outside of the country by one generation. With this change, grandchildren of Canadian citizens will be extended full Canadian citizenship.

This isn’t standard practice in the United States, Britain, France, Italy or a number of peer countries, which with rare exception cap passing on citizenship to the first generation born outside of the country.

Yet when a number of families, some with stories similar to mine, challenged Canada’s citizenship laws, Justice Jasmine Akbarali found the law to be unconstitutional. In her ruling she found that the law violated section 6 mobility rights and section 15 equality rights.

In one of the cases, two Canadians who had moved to Switzerland to work and had a child while there, sued in the off chance that in the future their daughter also moves abroad and has a family that they could pass on citizenship. That’s deciding a case and overturning a law based on a hypothetical, something judges love doing but isn’t a serious way to determine court cases.

In another case, a man born in the United States to a Canadian mother got married and started a family while living in Asia. He wanted to pass on the citizenship to his child, but the law didn’t allow it.

When he moved back to Canada with his family, his daughter applied for and was granted Canadian citizenship.

Bottom line is that in all the cases before Justice Akbarali there were solutions, like applying for citizenship, that didn’t involve watering down our rules. She decided the first generation cut off was arbitrary.

But if a one generation rule is arbitrary, what’s to say a future court won’t find the second generation cut off arbitrary. Parliament must choose a cut off at some point, otherwise, why have citizenship, why have borders, why have rights and privileges open to citizens and not others.

This was a bad court ruling and it has now been followed by a bad government policy. It extends automatic citizenship to people who have little to no connection to Canada and cheapens the value of our citizenship.

Knowing now that the Trudeau Liberals want to extend citizenship to people in the country illegally, their moves shouldn’t be surprising.

The only question left is how far will the Liberals go in terms of devaluing what it means to be Canadian?

Source: Trudeau extending Canadian citizenship to grandchildren and illegals

Filed under C-71, Citizenship Tagged with

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