Des experts se sentent ignorés par le ministère de l’Immigration

2024/03/30 Leave a comment

More on this sorry episode although unclear how widespread these perceptions shared among IRCC staff (but not unique…):

Une personne employée au sein d’IRCC, n’était pas surprise de ce développement. Elle voit le travail de fonctionnaires ignoré depuis des années quand leurs conclusions ne vont pas dans le sens des plans du gouvernement.

Nous donnerons à cette personne le nom fictif de Marie. Francopresse a accepté de protéger son identité, parce qu’elle craint des répercussions au travail.

Un travail qui dérange

Selon elle, la plupart des fonctionnaires n’oseraient jamais aller contre le courant : «Dès que tu dis un peu la vérité, fearless advice, dis ce que tu penses, c’est fini.»

Elle voit donc peu de gens qui osent présenter des points de vue divergents dans la fonction publique. «Il n’y a rien de pire dans une démocratie.»

Elle doute d’ailleurs que même les avertissements émanant de fonctionnaires se rendent toujours au bureau du ministre de l’Immigration.

«Je pense que plusieurs sous-ministres et sous-ministres adjoints croient que leur mission est de protéger [le ministre]. Ils empêchent que des choses soient écrites ou s’assurent que ça ne monte pas pour pouvoir dire “le ministre n’était pas au courant, donc il a continué sa mauvaise idée, mais il ne le savait pas”.»

La vérité étouffée

Selon Andrew Griffith, directeur général à IRCC de 2009 à 2011, un certain degré de tension est normal, même bénéfique.

«La bureaucratie est censée offrir des conseils sans peur en fonction de son analyse et de son expertise et le niveau politique doit apporter sa perspective», explique-t-il.

Mais la transmission des conseils à travers l’échelle bureaucratique est floue, prévient-il. La parole est habituellement plus franche chez les directeurs, mais «plus haut, les sous-ministres adjoints et les sous-ministres sont moins directs en fonction de leurs efforts à répondre aux besoins politiques».

«C’est probablement là que réside la majeure partie de la frustration liée à l’ignorance de l’expertise», précise M. Griffith.

C’est au sein même de la fonction publique que l’information semble bloquer, corrobore Marie. «Les politiciens préfèreraient éviter de faire des erreurs, mais ils se sont entourés de hauts fonctionnaires opportunistes, ambitieux, peu compétents qui étouffent la vérité.»

«Les hauts fonctionnaires qui pensent seulement à leur carrière sont le pire problème, la pire plaie. Les ministres peuvent influencer leur carrière, alors ils s’autocensurent, censurent les autres et s’entourent de gens peu compétents ou qui leur ressemblent», poursuit-elle.

Manque d’expertise chez les cadres supérieurs

Dans le rapport d’un examen effectué par l’ancien sous-ministre d’IRCC, Neil Yeates, ce dernier parle de tensions à IRCC qui seraient «exacerbées par la forte baisse d’expertise en matière d’immigration parmi les [sous-ministres adjoints] et les [directeurs généraux]».

Selon lui, cette baisse d’expertise est relativement nouvelle et crée un «manque de crédibilité vis-à-vis des employés de première ligne et des gestionnaires» qui connaissent bien la Loi sur l’immigration et la protection des réfugiés.

«Qui voudrait d’une douche froide?»

L’immigration a toujours été très politisée, fait remarquer Andrew Griffith. «Là où les choses se sont gâtées, c’est dans l’encouragement de l’immigration à grande échelle qu’a défendu l’Initiative du siècle, diverses organisations commerciales [et d’autres] sans qu’aucun d’entre eux, jusqu’à trop tard, ne commence à dire : “Attendez une minute, il va y avoir des implications à cela. Avons-nous les capacités d’absorption pour tous ces immigrants?”»

Il ne croit pas que l’argument selon lequel il faut hausser les seuils d’immigration afin de remédier au vieillissement de la population ait été assez remis en question. Surtout lorsque l’on considère le nombre de démographes qui ne partageaient pas cette analyse.

Plusieurs économistes ont aussi critiqué cette approche, dont Mikal Skuterud, professeur d’économie à l’Université de Waterloo, en Ontario. Il a l’impression que parmi tous les experts en immigration, ce sont surtout les économistes qui sont ignorés.

«Qui voudrait d’une douche froide? Pourquoi voudraient-ils nous parler si on ne leur donne pas les réponses qu’ils veulent?», demande-t-il.

Le gouvernement avance que l’augmentation de l’immigration permet la croissance économique, «mais pour l’économiste, ce n’est pas vraiment honnête».

«Pour l’économiste, la croissance économique vient de l’augmentation du PIB par habitant, explique-t-il. Et rien ne prouve que l’augmentation de l’immigration fasse croitre le PIB par habitant.»

En fait, dans les dernières années, celui-ci a chuté. «Les économistes avaient donc raison, mais ils ont été complètement ignorés sur cette question», déplore Mikal Skuterud.

«Je ne pense pas que l’identité de la personne qui transmet le message soit importante, tant que le message est conforme aux objectifs du gouvernement», ajoute-t-il.

Étant lui-même immigrant, le professeur aimerait pouvoir dire qu’une hausse de l’immigration améliorera le sort économique de tous. «C’est une très belle histoire à vendre, mais c’est juste faux, martèle-t-il. Ce n’est pas si simple.»

Les affaires, ce n’est pas l’économie

Christopher Ragan, professeur en économie à l’Université McGill, à Montréal, était membre du Conseil consultatif en matière de croissance économique mis sur pied par le gouvernement libéral en 2016 et présidé par Dominic Barton, ex-directeur de la firme McKinsey et cofondateur de l’Initiative du siècle.

«Je ne voyais aucune raison à l’époque, et je n’en vois aucune aujourd’hui, de penser que l’augmentation de l’immigration puisse être le pivot d’une stratégie de croissance. Du moins, pas le type de croissance qui devrait nous intéresser. J’ai mené ce combat au sein du Conseil et j’ai perdu», a déclaré l’économiste sur X en janvier 2024.

Sa position n’a pas été retenue dans les rapports du Conseil, probablement parce qu’«un consensus entre 12 personnes n’arrivera jamais», déclare-t-il en entrevue avec Francopresse.

«Le gouvernement perçoit mal l’immigration et son rôle dans la croissance générale et je crois que le Conseil y est pour quelque chose», assure-t-il.

Christopher Ragan était l’un des seuls économistes au sein de ce conseil : «La plupart étaient des gens d’affaires, ce qui est problématique pour un conseil sur la croissance. […] Leur point de vue est important, mais ils n’ont généralement pas beaucoup de compétences en termes de politiques.»

«Je pense que le gouvernement a aussi écouté le lobby des affaires qui a demandé plus d’immigration, en particulier d’immigration temporaire, pour remplir des pénuries de main-d’œuvre, parce qu’ils préfèrent embaucher des immigrants que d’augmenter les salaires», se désole-t-il.

Source: Des experts se sentent ignorés par le ministère de l’Immigration

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Analysis: Canada’s immigration creates ‘mirage’ of economic prosperity, TD report predicts higher interest rates and an affordability crisis 

2023/07/27 Leave a comment

A number of good articles questioning current immigration policies, given their impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure. While the change in immigration minister from one with an Atlantic perspective in favour of more immigration to a Quebec minister, more attuned to some of Quebec concerns on levels, may or may not indicate a shift from the “more is merrier” approach to a more intelligent approach that factors immigration impacts on housing, healthcare and infrastructure. We shall see.

Certainly ironic to see Minister Fraser shuffled to housing where he will have to address some of the problems he exacerbated:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has fueled economic growth and plugged gaps in the labor market by ramping up immigration, but now new arrivals are straining public services and contributing to an overheating economy, economists say.

Since taking power in 2015, Trudeau has brought in an estimated 2.5 million new permanent residents, driving the population above 40 million.

Canada’s population grew at its fastest pace since 1957 last year, placing it among top 20 fastest growing countries in the world, Statistics Canada said, in part offsetting the effects of aging residents who are retiring and adding to healthcare costs.

In large part thanks to immigration, Canada has matched the United States with an average GDP growth of just over 2% over the past decade, well above the 1.4% G7 average, according to Marc Ercolao, an economist at TD Securities.

But problems caused by rapid immigration are beginning to show. First of all, the Bank of Canada struggled to pin down the impact of the newcomers as it tried to cool economic growth.

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem has said immigration adds to both supply and demand, but the overall effect has increased the need for higher interest rates. While immigrants helped ease a labor shortage, they added to consumer spending and housing demand.

“If you start an economy with excess demand (and) you add both demand and supply, you are still in excess demand,” he said about immigration earlier this month after hiking rates to a 22-year high of 5.0%.

The more concrete problems are the growing strains on transit, housing and healthcare, issues that have begun to dog the federal government as municipal and provincial leaders increase calls for more funding to address them.

“If we want to do more immigration, fine, but let’s have a suite of policies” that increase infrastructure investment for “transit, housing, healthcare… schools,” said Chris Ragan, director of the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University in Montreal and an adviser to the Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in 2009-10.

“Our communities and our economy are made stronger every day by people who chose to move to Canada,” said a spokesperson for the Finance Ministry.

Most “will contribute to Canada’s economic prosperity and… help address the labor shortages”, the spokesperson said.

‘MIRAGE’

Earlier this month, under pressure from Toronto’s new mayor, Trudeau’s government pledged nearly C$100 million ($76 million) to the city to help house refugees who had been sleeping on the street.

One-fifth of Canadians in the publicly funded healthcare system do not have a family doctor, the Angus Reid Institute research firm said last year. In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, an average driver lost 118 hours in traffic in 2022, up 60% on the year and the third-highest in North America, data analytics firm Inrix says.

While immigration adds to annual GDP, per capita GDP has grown only 2.4% since the first quarter of 2016 compared to 11.7% for the United States. That means Canadians’ wealth, or their standard of living, is rising more slowly than in the U.S.

“The Canadian economy on a per-capita basis is flat on its back,” said David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Rosenberg Research. Through population growth “you can create this mirage of economic prosperity, but in the end that’s what it is, a mirage,” he said.

Source: Analysis: Canada’s immigration creates ‘mirage’ of economic …

TD report predicts higher interest rates and an affordability crisis 

If Canada’s population boom continues at its current frantic pace, interest rates will face upward pressure and the massive influx of people will significantly worsen affordability for homebuyers and renters, a new report from TD Bank warns.

And the bank’s economists are calling on the federal government to restore “balance” to its immigration policies.

Over the past 12 months Canada’s population surged by 1.2 million, driven by higher annual targets for permanent immigration but also a swell of non-permanent residents such as temporary foreign workers and international students.

That rapid growth has helped employers fill job openings and propelled Canada to become the fastest growing economy in the G7, but it is also causing “dislocations in other segments of the economy,” including the housing market, health care, social services and infrastructure, that threaten to undo the benefits, the report’s authors warn.

The population jump caught economists off guard, raising the question of whether it will be repeated. Based on the pace of TFW program usage and study permits in 2023 so far, TD said Canada’s population is likely to increase by another one million people this year.

If that happens, the gap between housing supply and demand would grow to 500,000 units through 2025, the report said, adding that even with aggressive policies in place to boost home construction, supply would not keep up.

The result would be an erosion in affordability for buyers and renters, a situation that would be made worse by the upward pressure a persistent high-growth immigration strategy would put on interest rates, the report said.

According to TD, if Canada’s population boom continues, the neutral interest rate – which is sometimes described as the Goldilocks level of interest that neither stimulates economic demand nor holds it back – will need to rise by 50 basis points, or half a percentage point, compared with under earlier assumptions about how Canada’s population growth would unfold.

“The implication is not only do you have a higher run rate on interest rates, but when you get into the position of cutting interest rates it would put a higher floor for how low you would go,” Beata Caranci, chief economist at TD and one of the report’s authors, said in an interview.

“The Bank of Canada is trying to push a boulder up the hill when it comes to inflation, because as it increases interest rates, the sheer size of the population keeps generating demand that outstrips supply.”

For its part, the Bank of Canada has said little about whether therapid population growth is affecting monetary policy, though earlier this month, after the bank raised its key overnight rate by another 25 basis points to 5 per cent, Governor Tiff Macklem said on balance the effect is “probably roughly neutral.”

On the one hand, immigration has reduced pressure on the labour market and eased costs for employers, he said, while on the other, “these new entrants in the economy, they’re also new consumers, they’re renters, they’re new homebuyers, so it’s also adding to demand.”

Ms. Caranci said a jump in population like Canada has witnessed wouldn’t be such a problem if there was a similar surge in productivity; however, the country’s track record on that front is not promising. And what she called the “government guarantee” that it will bring in new workers to fill labour gaps only reduces the incentives companies have to invest in technology that would make them more efficient.

Rather than view immigration as the “be-all and end-all solution” to Canada’s aging work force, the TD report urged policy makers to focus on reforms that would remove barriers to the work force for people already here, giving the example of how flexible work arrangements and the expansion of daycare has lead to a big jump in the number of mothers with young children taking jobs.

Measures aimed at making medical and engineering credentials more transferable would also allow recent immigrants who are underemployed to fill critical gaps in the labour force, it added.

“If the purpose was to put a stop-gap in what was an extreme shortage of labour revealed by the pandemic, at some point you have to take your foot off the gas and let the supply side catch up,” Ms. Caranci said.

“If you don’t, the benefits of that population increase will erode over time. Someone has to do the math here that we have a system that can accommodate everybody.”

Source: TD report predicts higher interest rates and an affordability crisis

Lastly, Diane Francis in the Financial Post:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s push to increase immigration to unprecedented levels is damaging Canada’s health-care system.

The numbers reveal the problem. Last year, Canada welcomed 492,984 new immigrants, all of whom will eventually be issued health cards, entitling them to medical benefits for life. This year, another 465,000 immigrants are set to arrive, plus another 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

Between 2016 and 2021, the Trudeau government admitted a record of over 1.3 million permanent immigrants into the country, all of whom will require medical services. This has put a significant strain on large urban areas such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, which have borne the burden of the influx because they are where the lion’s share of immigrants settle. Toronto and Vancouver, in particular, already suffer from health-care shortages and unaffordable housing prices.

The feds set immigration targets with little regard for skills, the burden placed on social welfare systems or the impact on housing costs. The result is that many hospitals are reaching their limits. Doctors and nurses are in short supply, Canadians face long wait times for specialists and elective surgeries and millions lack a family physician.

Since I began pointing out the connection between deteriorating health care and high immigration levels last year, little has changed. Recently, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser responded with an embarrassingly inadequate policy fix, announcing that Ottawa would fast-track immigration approvals for 2,000 health-care professionals.

This is not nearly enough. Financial Accountability Office of Ontario projects that Ontario alone will be short 33,000 nurses and personal support workers by 2028, despite provincial initiatives to boost graduates.

Canada’s immigration levels are disproportionate to other developed nations, taking in about four times as many immigrants as the United States on a per capita basis. To make matters worse, Ottawa’s screening is inept. Despite the staggering immigration numbers, the federal government has failed to address the shortage of skilled labour across the country by recruiting qualified tradespeople.

This push to significantly increase the population was concocted at a weekend gathering in 2011 in Muskoka, Ont., led by Dominic Barton, who served as global managing director of McKinsey and Co. before becoming Canada’s ambassador to China for a time, and former BlackRock Inc. honcho Mark Wiseman. They created a Toronto-based lobbying group called the Century Initiative, which believes Canada’s population should reach 100 million by 2100.

The group estimates that, given sagging birth rates, reaching their arbitrary goal of 100 million would require Canada to accept at least 500,000 immigrants a year, if not more. This has now become our official immigration policy, with the Trudeau Liberals targeting around half a million new immigrants per year.

The Century Initiative hopes to create “mega-regions,” increasing the population of the Greater Toronto Area from 8.8 million in 2016 to 33.5 million by the end of the century, the population of Metro Vancouver from 3.3 million to 11.9 million and the National Capital Region from 1.4 million to 4.8 million.

Seven years of this foolish Liberal immigration policy has placed a significant strain on the health-care system and housing market. And Canada is going to make matters worse by admitting upwards of 753,000 international students this year, which will further increase the cost of rentals.

A CIBC report last year said that the admission of huge numbers of newcomers in 2022, including an estimated 955,000 “non-permanent residents,” represents “an unprecedented swing in housing demand in a single year that is currently not fully reflected in official figures.”

This unbridled immigration is placing a burden on Canada’s struggling health-care system and housing market. It is irresponsible.

Source: Diane Francis: Immigration pushing housing, health care to the breaking point

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