A new generation of judges is redefining what Canada’s top courts look like 

2025/01/02 Leave a comment

Really good and thorough analysis of judicial appointments under the Liberal government. My 2016 analysis of the Harper government appointments referenced. Legacy achievement of the Liberals and their first minister of justice, Wilson-Raybould. The next needed analysis would be to assess their impact on jurisprudence and decisions, a much harder task.

Likely that there will be a contrary shift under the likely Poilievre government in terms of process, appointments and transparency (i.e. FCJAC reports):

…A decade ago, and forever before that, a clear majority of judges on Canada’s most important courts were white men. That began to change after the federal government’s 2016 reshaping of the judicial hiring process, which in part focused on increasing diversity.

Now, among 1,180 federally appointed judges, 47 per cent are women, 6 per cent are racialized and 2 per cent are Indigenous, according to data compiled by the Office of the Commissioner of Federal Judicial Affairs in 2024. It is the first time the agency has compiled statistics on the varied backgrounds of all judges who decide the biggest cases.

Underrepresentation remains an issue, especially among Indigenous and racialized people, but recent gains are significant. In unofficial data from 2016, compiled by a former senior federal civil servant [me!] in Policy Options magazine, 30 per cent of judges at the time on federally appointed benches were women, 2 per cent were racialized and 1 per cent were Indigenous…

Up until 2016, the top judicial ranks were dominated by white men, chosen by Liberal and Conservative governments alike. From 2007 through 2015, when Stephen Harper was prime minister, two-thirds of 701 appointments were men, according to earlier data on gender from Federal Judicial Affairs. For several years, almost all new judges appointed by Mr. Harper’s government were white, a 2012 Globe story reported.

The federal Conservative Party did not respond to requests for comment.

In the new data compiled by Federal Judicial Affairs, with numbers as of February, 2024, the shift under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is distinct….

Source: A new generation of judges is redefining what Canada’s top courts look like 


Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Globe editorial: A Trudeau government trademark: Act now, mop up later

2024/12/06 Leave a comment

Cutting and accurate for the most part:

…This is what happens when politicians devote themselves to generating talking points and social-media content instead of making sound policy. Good governance requires serious planning and execution, something obviously lacking in this late-stage Liberal government.

Source: A Trudeau government trademark: Act now, mop up later

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Dispatch from the Front Lines: Peace, order and really bad governmenting [sic, immigration]

2024/11/19 Leave a comment

Hard to disagree “The upshot of all this is that Canada’s immigration system is no longer the prized coconut of old. Today, it’s more like a post-Halloween pumpkin — rotten all the way through.:”

…Eight years later, it is all in tatters. After letting in record numbers of immigrantspost-pandemic, the federal government has lost almost complete control of who comes into the country, and who stays. Unsurprisingly, for the first time in a quarter century, popular opinion has turned sharply against our still-high immigration levels. And a populist policy backlash is brewing in the form of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives or, worse, Donald Trump’s MAGA crazies. 

And so after nine years of smugly lecturing the world and their fellow Canadians about their superior virtue, it seems to be slowly dawning on the Liberals just how badly they have screwed things up. But as night follows day, as sunshine follows rain, as the Leafs lose in the first round of the playoffs, everything the Liberals do to fix the problem only makes things worse. 

In October, the government turned on a dime and realised that maybe their target of 500,000 newcomers per year for the next two years might be a bit more than the system could take. So they cut that figure by about a fifth, targeting 395,000 permanent residents in 2025, with that number dropping to 365,000 by 2027. 

This came after an announcement earlier in the year that Ottawa would be capping international student visas, which come with a highly prized post graduate work permit. While there was no guarantee this would lead to permanent residency, the promise that this would be the case was pretty much implicit. Come here and study, stick around and work, bring your family over and stay — that was the Canadian dream for hundreds of thousands of foreign students, encouraged ad nauseaum by federal politicians. But in September, Ottawa announced that it would not be renewing the work permits for current permit holders, with 200,000 of those set to expire by the end of 2025. 

Anyone think those 200,000 former students are going to just pack up and head home next year? Don’t make us ell oh ell. 

Indeed, count us amongst the ranks of the completely unsurprised when it was reported this week that so far this year, 14,000 people here on international student visas had filed refugee claims between January 1 and September 1 of this year. It was already a record, surpassing the 12,000 asylum claims filed in 2023. And the final 2024 number will be almost an order of magnitude higher than the 1,800 such claims that were filed in 2018. 

Immigration minister Marc Miller was quick to denounce these as largely false claims, filed in bad faith by students advised to do so by unscrupulous consultants. Well, maybe. But hey, if they are false claims, the feds can always just deny them and send these fraudsters home, no?

Well, no. Because in addition to losing control of the immigration system, Ottawa has also lost control of the refugee claimant system. As the Globe writes in an excellent editorial this weekend, when the Liberals came to power in 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants was a hair under 10,000 claims. Today, there are well over a quarter of a million (!!!) pending cases, and the IRB is losing ground every day, not gaining. The wait for a refugee hearing is now in the ballpark of four years, during which claimants are entitled to both work and study. And on the off chance Ottawa denies your claim four years from now, what are the odds you will actually get put on a plane and sent home? Almost zilch. The result is a vicious cycle where the more claims that are made, the longer they will take to be processed, which raises the incentive for making a claim, and so on. 

The upshot of all this is that Canada’s immigration system is no longer the prized coconut of old. Today, it’s more like a post-Halloween pumpkin — rotten all the way through.  

It’s not clear what is to be done about this, short of simply closing the border for a few years until we get things under control. One possibility would be for Canada to declare something like immigration bankruptcy: Every non citizen in the country on a certain date, regardless of the status as a student, immigrant, or refugee claimant, gets permanent residency. After that, visa requests and refugee claims get processed as they come in under a new set of hard and transparent rules.

More than likely, though, the Liberals will keep muddling along, making the problem worse and worse and worse as they continue to play whack a mole with each new unintended side effect of their ad hoc policy making. You can be sure the Trump people are paying close attention….

Source: Dispatch from the Front Lines: Peace, order and really bad governmenting

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Yakabuski | Réparer ses dégâts

2024/09/03 Leave a comment

Strongly worded and valid:

S’il y a une critique qui revient sans cesse à propos du gouvernement du premier ministre Justin Trudeau, c’est qu’il met trop l’accent sur les annonces et pas assez sur la mise en oeuvre des programmes qui en découlent. C’est un gouvernement qui néglige de façon quasi systématique les conséquences inattendues de ses initiatives, se concentrant plutôt sur le message qu’il souhaite envoyer à certaines clientèles politiques visées. Il ne semble pas apprendre de ses erreurs, ou, quand il le fait, il est trop tard pour réparer les dégâts déjà causés.

La preuve de cela demeure sa gestion du système canadien d’immigration. Faisant jadis l’envie du monde entier, ce système était fondé sur des critères de sélection précis permettant au Canada de classer des demandeurs pour que seuls les plus qualifiés parmi eux obtiennent la résidence permanente, peu importe leur pays d’origine. Les libéraux avaient déjà commencé à déroger à ce principe avant la pandémie en créant des exceptions pour certaines catégories d’immigrants. À partir de 2021, toutefois, le gouvernement Trudeau a complètement chamboulé le système en rehaussant les seuils d’immigration permanente et temporaire afin de doper la croissance économique et de combler la pénurie de travailleurs dans certains secteurs de l’économie.

Non seulement le Canada allait accepter davantage de résidents permanents — en fixant une cible de 500 000 en 2025 —, mais ces derniers allaient de plus en plus provenir de bassins de centaines de milliers de résidents temporaires déjà basés au pays grâce à l’expansion massive des programmes fédéraux des travailleurs étrangers temporaires et d’éducation internationale. Les critères de sélection établis avaient été contournés pour favoriser ceux qui avaient déjà une expérience de travail au Canada, même s’il s’agissait d’un emploi à bas salaire ne requérant ni de compétences précises ni de diplôme de niveau supérieur. Mais en procédant ainsi, Ottawa pouvait se vanter d’accélérer l’octroi des permis de résidence permanente et de répondre aux demandes de main-d’oeuvre des employeurs.

Or, on sait ce qui s’est passé depuis. La crise du logement n’est que la pointe de l’iceberg, la conséquence la plus visible de cet abandon par les libéraux des principes qui avaient guidé tous les gouvernements fédéraux précédents en matière d’immigration depuis plus de cinq décennies. Le taux de chômage des jeunes de 15 à 24 ans s’est établi à 14,2 % en juillet, selon Statistique Canada, une hausse de 3,6 points de pourcentage depuis un an et le niveau le plus élevé depuis 2012. Chez les jeunes hommes, le taux de sans-emploi a grimpé à 16 %. La situation est encore pire chez les jeunes immigrants qui sont au Canada depuis moins de cinq ans, dont le taux de chômage s’est élevé à 22,8 % en juillet, en hausse de 8,6 points de pourcentage depuis le même mois en 2023. L’économie canadienne a beau continuer de croître, la création d’emplois demeure bien en deçà de l’augmentation de la population en raison de l’immigration permanente et temporaire. Qu’arriverait-il si jamais une récession ou un ralentissement économique prononcé frappait le pays ? Une « tempête parfaite ».

Cette semaine, le gouvernement Trudeau a enfin annoncé son intention de resserrer les critères d’admissibilité du Programme des travailleurs étrangers temporaires, pas dans un lointain avenir comme il l’avait plusieurs fois suggéré, mais à partir du mois prochain. Entre autres, la durée des permis sera réduite à un an plutôt que deux, et la proportion maximale de travailleurs temporaires au sein d’une même entreprise sera de nouveau à 10 % plutôt qu’à 20 %. Mais avec près de 2,8 millions de résidents non permanents au pays, plus du double du nombre de 2021, des experts s’attendent avec raison à ce que des milliers d’entre eux choisissent de vivre dans la clandestinité plutôt que de quitter le Canada lors de l’expiration de leur permis de séjour. Après tout, la plupart d’entre eux sont venus au Canada sur une base temporaire en espérant obtenir la résidence permanente par la suite, grâce aux changements de critères d’admissibilité introduits par les libéraux en 2021. Or, le ministre Marc Miller a laissé entendre cette semaine qu’Ottawa examine aussi maintenant la possibilité de réduire les seuils d’immigration permanente.

Le ministère de l’Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada et l’Agence des services frontaliers du Canada (ASFC) sont déjà aux prises avec un fardeau de travail qui dépasse l’entendement. Ils n’ont ni l’effectif ni les ressources pour s’assurer que tous ces travailleurs étrangers temporaires et tous ces étudiants internationaux quitteront le pays dès l’expiration de leur permis. Et on peine à croire que les libéraux, aussi dépensiers soient-ils, vont rehausser le budget de l’ASFC pour déporter tous les nouveaux sans-papiers qui ne quitteront pas volontairement le Canada. Le gouvernement est déjà accusé d’avoir fermé les yeux sur l’exploitation des travailleurs étrangers temporaires par certains employeurs sans scrupule. Procéder à la déportation de milliers d’ex-travailleurs étrangers temporaires forcés de vivre dans la clandestinité lui vaudrait d’être affublé de l’étiquette « trumpiste ».

Le recul du gouvernement Trudeau cette semaine ne sera pas suffisant pour remettre le système d’immigration canadien sur les rails avant plusieurs années et fera gonfler les rangs des sans-papiers au pays, avec toutes les répercussions sociales et économiques que cela implique. Il est difficile d’imaginer que ce scénario du pire surviendra dans un pays qui faisait autrefois l’envie du monde en matière d’immigration.

Source: Chronique | Réparer ses dégâts

Computer translation

If there is a criticism that comes up constantly about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, it is that it puts too much emphasis on the announcements and not enough on the implementation of the resulting programs. It is a government that almost systematically neglects the unexpected consequences of its initiatives, focusing instead on the message it wishes to send to certain targeted political clienteles. He doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes, or, when he does, it’s too late to repair the damage already caused.

Proof of this remains its management of Canada’s immigration system. This system was once envied by the whole world, was based on specific selection criteria allowing Canada to classify applicants so that only the most qualified among them obtain permanent residence, regardless of their country of origin. Liberals had already begun to derogate from this principle before the pandemic by creating exceptions for certain categories of immigrants. Starting in 2021, however, the Trudeau government completely turned the system upside down by raising the thresholds for permanent and temporary immigration to boost economic growth and fill the shortage of workers in certain sectors of the economy.

Not only would Canada accept more permanent residents — with a target of 500,000 in 2025 — but Canada would increasingly come from pools of hundreds of thousands of temporary residents already based in the country through the massive expansion of the federal temporary foreign worker and international education programs. The established selection criteria had been circumvented to favour those who already had work experience in Canada, even though it was a low-wage job requiring neither specific skills nor a higher-level diploma. But by doing so, Ottawa could boast of accelerating the granting of permanent residence permits and responding to employers’ demands for labour.

However, we know what has happened since then. The housing crisis is just the tip of the iceberg, the most visible consequence of this abandonment by the Liberals of the principles that had guided all previous federal governments on immigration for more than five decades. The unemployment rate of 15-24-year-olds stood at 14.2% in July, according to Statistics Canada, an increase of 3.6 percentage points in a year and the highest level since 2012. Among young men, the unemployment rate rose to 16%. The situation is even worse among young immigrants who have been in Canada for less than five years, whose unemployment rate was 22.8% in July, up 8.6 percentage points since the same month in 2023. The Canadian economy may continue to grow, but job creation remains well below population growth due to permanent and temporary immigration. What would happen if a recession or a pronounced economic slowdown ever hit the country? A “perfect storm”.

This week, the Trudeau government finally announced its intention to tighten the eligibility criteria for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, not in the distant future as it had repeatedly suggested, but starting next month. Among other things, the duration of permits will be reduced to one year instead of two, and the maximum proportion of temporary workers within the same company will again be 10% instead of 20%. But with nearly 2.8 million non-permanent residents in the country, more than double the number in 2021, experts rightly expect thousands of them to choose to live in hiding rather than leave Canada when their residence permits expire. After all, most of them came to Canada on a temporary basis in the hope of obtaining permanent residence afterwards, thanks to the changes in eligibility criteria introduced by the Liberals in 2021. However, Minister Marc Miller suggested this week that Ottawa is also now considering the possibility of reducing permanent immigration thresholds.

The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) are already struggling with a workload beyond comprehension. They do not have the staff or the resources to ensure that all these temporary foreign workers and all these international students leave the country when their permit expires. And it is hard to believe that the Liberals, no matter how spendthrift they are, will increase the CBSA budget to deport all the new undocumented who will not voluntarily leave Canada. The government is already accused of turning a blind eye to the exploitation of temporary foreign workers by some unscrupulous employers. Deporting thousands of former temporary foreign workers forced to live in hiding would ear him the “Trumpist” label.

The Trudeau government’s retreat this week will not be enough to get Canada’s immigration system back on track for several years and will swell the ranks of undocumented people in the country, with all the social and economic repercussions that this entails. It is difficult to imagine that this worst-case scenario will occur in a country that was once the world’s desire for immigration.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

The Liberals strike a blow for government secrecy

2024/05/25 Leave a comment

Sigh, but so endemic of all governments in undermining ATIP:

…A system predicated on the notion that everything but the most classified government documents and data ought to be public has become a tool for Canadians governments to do what they instinctively do best: hoard information.

Let’s be blunt about why they do this: to keep information out of the hands of citizens, because an informed citizenry is an empowered citizenry. Governments aren’t so much jealously squirreling away information as they are sucking the lifeblood out of the democratic system.

Mr. Trudeau came to power vowing to set a sunny example by making information open by default to all Canadians. Then he discovered what every new prime minister discovers: that the default preference in Canada’s halls of power is to keep voters in the dark.

He could still restore his reputation on this issue. He should allow the independent review of the system and restore the Commissioner’s funding. It’s not too late for the Prime Minister to live up to what are still very good ideals.

Source: The Liberals strike a blow for government secrecy

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Keller: The Liberals broke the immigration system at high speed. They’re repairing it by baby steps

2024/03/27 Leave a comment

Hard not to agree:

…In all of this, the Trudeau government is caught in a bind of its own making. It found, to its evident delight, that sharply ramping up the number of people arriving on notionally temporary permits was easy. To govern is to choose, but the government discovered that the less choosing it did – and the more rubber-stamping of visas it encouraged – the easier governing appeared to be.

It is now discovering that unwinding things, even a little, is more difficult. It will be lobbied heavily to eviscerate its modest promises, and to quietly reverse this course reversal.

That is also where Liberal predilections reside. They didn’t just break the immigration system. They broke it with great enthusiasm. And their repair job is still mostly blueprints, drawn up haltingly and under the duress of public opinion.

Compared with Europe and the United States, Canada has long had a wider immigration door, but also far more control – an aspect of the “order” in peace, order and good government – over who enters. That is what underpinned public support for immigration.

And controlling the door was important because once somebody gets into Canada, whether as a temporary worker, student or even tourist, it isn’t easy to get them to leave. Not if they don’t want to. Ottawa decides who gets in but has much less control over, or information about, how many people whose visas have expired, and who are no longer legally allowed to reside in Canada, nevertheless remain.

In the months and years to come, that is likely to be the final aftershock of Liberal immigration policy.

Restoring sense and sanity to the system won’t be easy. Breaking is easier than repairing.

Source: The Liberals broke the immigration system at high speed. They’re repairing it by baby steps

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Globe editorial: Ottawa’s next immigration emergency [asylum claimants]

2024/01/30 Leave a comment

Similarly, a pattern in the Globe’s coverage of and commentary on immigration with the needed critical eye:

A pattern has emerged in Liberal immigration policy over the past year: Ignore mounting evidence of trouble, dismiss rumbles of criticism and, finally, take the smallest possible action to avert an all-out calamity.

There was abundant evidence for months that the pace of new arrivals, particularly temporary migrants, was putting unacceptable strain on housing in big cities and other social infrastructure. But it was not until November that the Trudeau government took the tentative step of tamping down the growth in permanent immigration – misleadingly referred to as “stabilizing” by the government. Even with the change, permanent immigration targets will rise this year and next, with an extra 55,000 people admitted over that two-year span.

Last week, there were half-measures to curb the eye-popping growth in the ranks of international students, with Immigration Minister Marc Miller announcing a two-year cap on international study visas. But that cap is being imposed with visas already at historically high levels.

…

In the first 11 months of last year, 128,690 people made asylum claims in Canada, more than double the number in the prepandemic year of 2019. Claims from Mexican nationals in 2023 accounted for 17 per cent of the total, nearly double their proportion in 2019….

source: Ottawa’s next immigration emergency

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Keller: The Liberals broke the immigration system. But better is always possible

2023/11/01 Leave a comment

Particularly scathing commentary in the Globe, calling for lowering of permanent resident levels but silent on temporary residents:

This week, when it releases its new immigration targets, the Trudeau government has an opportunity to begin rethinking immigration policy.

For the past eight years, the Liberal plan has been about sharply and steadily increasing permanent immigration, while enabling even sharper increases in temporary immigration – with the two interconnected streams powered by huge jumps in the number of foreign students.

Why? The government’s reasons are a combination of faith and politics.

Faith that accelerating the country’s population growth will somehow spark higher per-capita economic growth and higher living standards – a faith belied by economic theory and evidence.

The Liberals also wanted to politically anchor themselves to the left of the Conservatives on the issue, and perhaps plant the seeds of a nascent wedge. This even though the Conservatives, who never miss an opportunity to attack the Liberals over so much as a misplaced comma, have always studiously avoided criticizing Liberal immigration plans.

The Liberal approach to immigration is having major economic consequences, many of them negative. Yet for years, there has been no national conversation critical of the Liberal approach. The topic is taboo. That’s what happens with issues of faith.

So let’s talk about what a rational immigration system would look like: It would start with acknowledging that the long-standing principles, goals and methods of the Canadian immigration system, created long before the Trudeau government came into office, are sound.

The key principle is that immigration should be designed to benefit Canada economically. The main goal should be choosing immigrants who offer the greatest benefit to Canada, by being mostly more educated and more skilled than the average Canadian, and thus likely to be more productive and earn higher wages. The right method for selecting these economic immigrants is the points system.

A government that wanted maximum benefits for Canada would have taken the above and doubled down. Instead, the Liberals have spent the past eight years watering it down.

In so doing, the Liberals have undermined the country’s long-standing pro-immigration consensus. Recent polls suggest that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Canadians want lower levels of immigration.

But that does not make Canadians “anti-immigration.” It just means they’re questioning the Liberal government’s immigration policy. Canadians are no more anti-immigration than someone who declines dessert after a hot-dog-eating contest should be accused of suddenly having become anti-food.

Last week in Toronto, a shared bed for rent was advertised for $900 a month. Not a room in a shared apartment. A shared bed in a shared room. Half of a 60-inch-wide mattress. Yours for just $10,800 a year.

This is happening in one of the world’s most bonkers housing markets, where a record shortage of places to live is meeting an immigration policy that celebrated a record of more than a million people coming to the country last year. This year’s numbers are likely to be higher; in the first six months of 2023, the temporary-resident stream alone brought in nearly 700,000 people.

This is happening even as the Bank of Canada’s high-interest-rate policy is trying to slow inflation by reducing economic activity, with one of the main transmission mechanisms being discouraging borrowing for new housing construction.

An immigration policy based on faith says there’s no connection between a sudden population surge and the price of rent. Basic arithmetic has other ideas.

Ottawa should lower its immigration targets, at least for the next few years. The current target for 2025, half a million new permanent immigrants, is nearly double the level of 2015.

Canada was not anti-immigration in 2015. Canada was not anti-immigration under the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Pierre Trudeau, when immigration was even lower. And Canada will not be anti-immigration next year if, in response to facts not faith, immigration is a bit less than this year.

Next step: Ottawa has to get back to properly using the points system to select the most highly skilled, highly educated and highly remunerated economic immigrants.

What has instead happened under eight years of Liberal government is that the temporary-immigration stream has exploded. Most of the people in that stream are coming to flip burgers, stock shelves and deliver food. Big business loves this endless supply of minimum-wage workers. The rest of us should be less enthused.

One of Canada’s biggest problems, and a growing drag on our living standards, is low productivity growth. Canadian businesses don’t invest enough in new technology and innovation – the things that spell more goods and services produced for each hour of work. A bottomless barrel of low-wage labour further discourages Canadian business from making those capital investments.

And a lot of low-wage labour is arriving through the booming student visa stream – which has been quietly converted from a selective program for luring the best and brightest to a no-limits scheme allowing universities and especially colleges to, in effect, sell Canadian citizenship. This, too, has to be scaled back and smartened up.

Better is always possible, as someone once said. Hint, hint.

Source: The Liberals broke the immigration system. But better is always possible

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Breguet: It’s time to reduce immigration

2023/09/14 Leave a comment

But will they? Despite all the signals on possible changes, any pivot may be too hard a political reversal for the government and its NDP partner to make.

But Breguet makes a convincing case, as it is the only short-term measure that can show seriousness on housing and other related files.

And I continue to believe that given these issues affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike, this may be less of a third rail then appears:

How could the Trudeau government interject new political life into itself? It could switch its position on immigration. I’m not talking about going PPC or [Quebec Premier Francois] Legault, but a significant pivot from ongoing increase to the country’s immigration in-take target and its general “century initiative” rhetoric.

This isn’t such a far-fetched idea. We’ve seen recent glimpses when government raised the prospect of a possible cap on the number of international students, a group that has ballooned massively in recent years to reach 900k recently, and is believed, at least by some, to put significant pressure on rents and housing prices. 

While the Liberals have, at times, given the impression that they don’t take the housing crisis seriously and are inclined to double down on satisfying their increasingly mortgage-free boomer base, we must also recognize that the Liberal Party of Canada has historically been remarkably good at adapting and pivoting when needed. They read the room much better than the Conservatives and New Democrats. 

So, if they decide to get more serious on the housing file, they’ll need to confront the fact they can’t build enough (or, more precisely, incentivize provinces and cities to build) to make a meaningful difference on prices before 2025. They could however pivot on immigration and have results quickly. 

It might start with reducing the number of international students. But the government’s track record on immigration and built-in strengths could enable it to go further by reducing the number of permanent residents (including points-based immigrants and refugees) without the risk of people questioning its commitment to immigration and diversity. 

It’s hard to know how much such a policy pivot would affect housing demand and in turn prices but it may not matter per se. Politics, of course, is ultimately about optics. The government would look like it’s trying to get to the root of the housing crisis. The Conservatives, by contrast, appear afraid of their own shadows with anything related to immigration. 

The prime minister might therefore gamble that his name and decades of good-faith support for immigration and multiculturalism would allow him to pivot without alienating voters from cultural and visible minorities—something that the Conservatives likely cannot afford, especially after the 2015 election. The Liberals in short may have the political maneuverability to counterintuitively run to the right of the Conservatives on immigration. 

Polls have shown people are ready to support a reduction in immigration levels. A well-crafted message centered on helping the housing market could succeed and take this topic away from Poilievre who currently enjoyed a de facto monopoly on it in the past couple of years. 

Bryan Breguet, Too Close to Call founder and pollster

Source: It’s time to reduce immigration

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Cryderman: Liberals are late to housing, and time is running out

2023/09/04 Leave a comment

Arguably, already run out given time lags in increasing supply and likely reluctance by government to freeze or reduce levels of permanent and temporary residents:

Whether talking about shacks or sidesplits, Pierre Poilievre has owned the housing affordability file from the time he became Conservative leader one year ago. This is not because he has all the answers, or warms hearts with his words. It’s because he gives the issue the time and weight it deserves.

After a cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island where housing was the key focus, it appears the Liberals are finally grasping the practical and political urgency of the situation, as Mr. Poilievre long has. They are listening to what people have been saying in the country’s largest cities for years – and is now being said from Charlottetown to Kingston to Kelowna: The cost and scarcity of housing in Canada is bonkers.

At least in words, there appears to be greater recognition of that from newly minted Housing Minister Sean Fraser. He has added shifts of tone on housing since the Liberal cabinet shuffle in July.

He’s saying reasonable things such as: Maybe the federal governmentshould be more thoughtful about its international student program that has seen “explosive growth” and driven up housing costs in postsecondary communities. And it should start to use the power of the $4-billion Housing Accelerator Fund, first promised by the Liberals two years ago, with some political gusto.

In an interview with The Globe, Mr. Fraser added something new to the list: that his government has put a new focus on housing affordability for the middle class.

“This is now not just a crisis for low-income families,” Mr. Fraser said.

“This is a crisis for seniors who are looking to retire under very different circumstances than existed even a few years ago. It is a crisis for students who cannot find a place they can afford to live within an hour commute of the campus. And it is a crisis for young people who are seeking to get into the market who often have two people working in the household, and still can’t afford a place to live.

“It’s not reasonable for us to maintain an exclusive focus, or even a primary focus, that only speaks to low-income social housing.”

This reflects the truth that rents are up across the country, as demand grows and higher interests weigh on pocketbooks. Where I sit in Calgary, relatively affordable by other big city standards, rents are up an average of 16 per cent, year-over-year. The typical price of a home in the country is more than $760,000. The Canadian public is not going to be particularly patient in waiting for the 5.3 million homes economists say the country needs to build by 2030 to solve the affordability crisis.

Mr. Fraser said Canada is looking at a total capital spend that could exceed a trillion dollars to hit that housing target – “not an amount of money that most people can conceive of.” This will have to come both from the private and public sectors.

But it’s needed, not only in the real world, but also in the political sphere. Young people, according to recent polls, are increasingly disenchanted with the governing party. Some believe the Liberals aren’t doing enough on climate change, a concern exacerbated by a summer of wildfires. But economic anxiety about out-of-control costs, especially on housing, is likely an even bigger reason.

Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research, told CTV the Liberals’ popularity is down overall but plummeting among younger voters, the demographic that’s helped Prime Minister Justin Trudeau win past elections. The latest Nanos polling shows the Liberals in third place among Canadians aged 18 to 29 years old with 16 per cent support, compared with the Conservatives and the NDP with 39 per cent and 31 per cent respectively.

Polls are just a snapshot in time, but the trend isn’t good for the incumbents. Although the election is likely two years away, the problem requires complicated solutions and time is not on their side.

Mr. Fraser refutes Conservative claims that the Liberals weren’t paying attention or were negligent as the housing situation worsened. The last two years have been exceptional, he said. “What’s happened in the last couple of years in particular is there has been a shift in the housing continuum in terms of where the intense need is.”

As the former immigration minister, Mr. Fraser appears keenly aware his current and past portfolios have some overlap. He speaks of not decreasing immigration to address housing pressures, but becoming more thoughtful about it.

The country needs new people and workers, and has a moral imperative to welcome refugees. But the Liberals have boosted Canada’s immigration and non-permanent resident numbers to historic levels – and sometimes undercount those who are here. Canada’s ranks are growing quickly, and a BMO analysis earlier this year said that for every 1 per cent of population growth, housing prices typically increase by 3 per cent.

“The people we want to bring in want to stay for the rest of their lives. Let’s plan for it. And then let’s target the people who can improve the quality of life that not only their family gets to enjoy in Canada, but to improve the quality of life for Canadians who’ve lived here for generations, by addressing some of these social challenges – in particular around housing and health care.”

Even before Parliament resumes on Sept. 18, Mr. Fraser said he intends to act by “actually leveraging the federal spending power to incentivize change at municipal levels.” In short order, there will be an announcement on the municipalities that will receive help through the vaunted Housing Accelerator Fund.

BMO has also raised concerns about “an investor class” that’s increasingly dominating the real-estate market, as opposed to the people who actually live in the homes. Mr. Fraser said investors have a key role to play in creating housing units, but he is worried about homes being held by investors that remain vacant.

Ottawa will soon change the financial equation for home builders to get more units built, he added in the interview. Although the minister wouldn’t go into specifics, economists have said it’s time to waive or defer the sales tax developers incur for purpose-built rentals to incentivize new building.

All and all, Mr. Fraser said Canadians should expect to see aggressive action by the federal government to get more homes built, across the housing continuum. The question is not only whether this large task can be accomplished but also whether the Liberals, late to urgency on this issue, can catch up to the Conservatives on the political front.

Source: Liberals are late to housing, and time is running out

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

← Older posts