Cuenco: Canada’s immigration backlash is far from populist

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Useful distinction although over emphasizes important of Laurentian elite as this general view is common to all regions:

As the United States and Texas state governments clash over the Mexican border, a very different kind of immigration crisis is taking place elsewhere in North America. Unlike in the divided US, Canada is supposed to be one of the world’s most solidly pro-immigration societies. More than just another self-satisfied Justin Trudeau facade, this attitude has been attested to by historically high levels of public support.

However, an unfolding shift in public sentiment may now change that. Amid a housing crunch and soaring costs of living, Canadians are turning against the prospect of welcoming more immigrants. And the Trudeau government has slowly started to bend under this pressure.

But unlike the rest of the West, Canadians are not advancing this argument via populist rabblerousers or angry mass protests. Instead, Canada’s turnaround is being led by cadres of respectable, credentialed and, for the most part, small-l liberal experts and commentators, who are making the case for immigration reduction in terms that are academic and utilitarian, rather than emotive and atavistic. And, while there has been a rise in populism in recent years, within the Conservative Party and elsewhere, these forces have been unable or unwilling to capitalise on anti-immigration sentiment.

This unique set of circumstances has led to a distinct form of restrictionism, a “polite backlash”, with stereotypically Canadian characteristics. Being driven by educated elites, it plays out in the rarefied spaces of establishment opinion, where opposition to Ottawa’s temporary migrant policies (which has seen more explosive growth than the permanent stream) has materialised.

For instance, the editorial pages of the newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, have recently featured pleas for “aggressive action to reduce the number of temporary migrants”, along with warnings that businesses “should not be subsidised through the import of cheap labour”. Similar sentiments were heard in the CBC’s nightly news program, which hosted a debate on the question: “Housing crisis vs. immigration: Is it time to slow things down?” Twitter, meanwhile, abounds with commentary by housing experts calling for Ottawa to “substantially reduce the number of visas for both international students and [foreign workers]”. A respected former Bank of Canada governor likewise criticised the fixation on juicing up growth through immigration, which retarded productivity: “On a per-person basis, the economy has been shrinking.”

These objections to the status quo amount to what the Globe describes as “practical concerns about the current pace of immigration, not ideological opposition” to immigration itself, which most (if not all) of these thought leaders continue to support in principle. We are seeing that rare thing: a pragmatic, context-driven response among segments of Canada’s expert class that also matches recent shifts in public opinion.

Because data from the country’s major polling firms, collected over the last few months, all show overwhelming support for cutting immigration numbers as a response to cost-of-living challenges: “68% agree — Canada should put a cap on international students until the demand for affordable housing eases” (Ipsos-Reid); “An increasing proportion of Canadians [61%] want Canada to accept fewer immigrants in 2024” (Nanos Research); “Canadians… believe that immigrants are contributing to the housing crisis (75%) and putting pressure on the health care system (73%)” (Leger). This convergence of views across large swathes of Canadian society has proved unignorable.

Last week, Trudeau’s minister for immigration, Marc Miller, announced cuts to the country’s intake of international students, which has seen exorbitant growth in the last year, and now accounts for a staggering 1 million people, or 2.5% of Canada’s population. (To put the figure in perspective: this means that Canada is hosting almost as many international students as US institution, despite the US population being roughly nine times bigger.) This comes after Statistics Canada figures revealed that “as many as 1 in 5 study permit holders in Canada are not actually studying at the institutions to which they have been accepted”, demonstrating how education has become a back door to the job market.

The new policy will see international undergraduate visas capped at 360,000 in 2024, a one-third reduction from last year, and a rationing of these visas among the provinces, along with changes to the “Post-Graduate Work Program”, widely regarded as a pathway to permanent residency for students. Beyond policy details, this volte-face amounts to an admission of a longstanding truth: the existing system has served as a cash cow for tuition-hungry schools and rent-hungry landlords, as well as a source of cheap labour for employers. The new changes are expected to offer some temporary relief to runaway rents prices (though economists disagree by how much).

Though these changes don’t go far enough for some (including this author), at the very least, it is a signal that Trudeau’s Liberals are willing to act on a problem they ignored for so long: it represents a meaningful, if modest, policy victory for the polite backlash and its arguments for numbers reduction.

Conversations among thought leaders, however, have so far been largely limited to the temporary resident stream. It will be a measure of the experts’ and the government’s determination to correct course once they start considering cuts to the permanent resident stream, currently set at roughly 1.5 million newcomers by 2026. This is one case where public opinion is ahead of them, since the polling data indicates that most Canadians also want these targets to be scaled back as well. In any event, it is important to understand the deeply entrenched nature of the status quo that prompted this polite backlash, for even Miller’s moderate reforms have invited a backlash of its own from the powerful interests whose income has been threatened by the announced cuts.

The outcry is loudest from higher-education institutions, especially in Ontario, the largest province and epicentre of the crisis. These institutions stand to lose the most as they have relied excessively on international tuitions to compensate for their chronically underfunded budgets. This in turn is the fault of the Tory provincial government of Doug Ford, which carried out the budget cuts and had been aware of this over-reliance on foreign students but nonetheless persisted in letting it fester. It also maintained a lax approach to the growth of dubious for-profit “strip mall colleges”, which attracted large shares of international students. Ford’s government, therefore, shares responsibility with Trudeau’s for the severity of the problem, with parties of the Right and the Left found equally complicit.

Meanwhile, the Century Initiative, an influential business-linked group that advocates for immigration maximalism, issued an anodyne statement on the cuts, appearing to assent to them but nonetheless arguing for the 1.5 million permanent resident targets to be retained — even though these are precisely the numbers that must be cut if Ottawa is serious about easing affordability. What is likely to follow is a protracted debate between two segments of expert opinion on the future of immigration, one that will largely take place within the bounds of elite discourse, confirming the closed nature of political decision-making in Canada. As John Ibbitson put it in his account of the country’s “Laurentian elite”: “On all of the great issues of the day, this Laurentian elite debated among themselves… But much of the debate was held behind closed doors: in faculty clubs, the hallways of legislatures, in dining rooms in [tony neighbourhoods like] Toronto’s Annex, Ottawa’s Glebe, Montreal’s Outremont.”

But the progress of this debate still begs the question: what happened to Canada’s populists, who ought to be challenging the elite conversation from outside the system? For some reason, they have counted themselves out of the immigration issue. Federal Tory leader Pierre Poilievre is a case in point: widely described as populist in style and outlook, he is Trudeau’s arch-foe. But he has avoided criticising the government’s immigration targets in any substantive way (a few recent vague comments about matching immigration numbers to housing construction notwithstanding). Even more strangely, he has sought to gain favour with the international students, meeting with themand trying to turn them against Trudeau, claiming they’d get a better deal under him. This is an incredibly naïve and dangerous proposition that will simply give the students false hope for a path to residency, when in fact such expectations should be lowered, not raised. This poor judgement on Poilievre’s part suggests he won’t be any more serious on immigration than Trudeau’s government.

Further to the Right, the People’s Party has, in the past, been incredibly vocal about the need to restrict immigration. But after failing to re-enter parliament multiple times, its leader Maxime Bernier has faded into obscurity. On the Left, the New Democratic Party, nominally the party of organised labour, has abdicated the issue as well, even though as recently as 2014 it led the charge to limit low-skill immigration in the name of defending working-class jobs and wages. Only in Quebec are restrictionist parties still prevalent, but this has more to do with its idiosyncratic language politics than with material economic factors.

A populist revolt over immigration is therefore unlikely in Canada. But the country might have won something better: the expert-driven push to control immigration, with its emphasis on policy over passion, may prove to be a more effective and rational approach to the challenge than the theatrical (but toothless) populisms of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders and the rest. Canadians should hope that it succeeds in restoring balance to the system eventually, because should the polite backlash fail to do the job, the next backlash will be anything but.

Source: Canada’s immigration backlash is far from populist

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Cuenco: Trudeau’s cynical immigration racket

2023/08/05 Leave a comment

Bit of a rant with some valid critiques of both major political parties and the institutions and people that support them:

When Canada’s population hit the 40 million mark earlier this summer, it was celebrated as a milestoneand a “signal that Canada remains a dynamic and welcoming country”, in the words of the country’s chief statistician. The Washington Post, among other foreign observers, cited this as evidence that “Canada is booming like it never has before”. It failed to mention, however, the recent closure of Roxham Road on the New York-Quebec border, an entry point for many thousands of irregular refugee border crossings since 2017.

These two policies — the population-growth plan and the border-crossing closure — may seem antithetical, but they are very much related. Together, they illustrate Ottawa’s distinctive approach to immigration. Notwithstanding the progressive rhetoric of its leaders, Canada has actually been quite proactive at restricting most uncontrolled migration through its “bureaucratic wall”, while ensuring through a highly selective strategy (which includes the lauded “points system”) that the majority of the newcomers who do arrive through controlled channels are, relatively speaking, well-off, well-educated and hailing from middle-class backgrounds.

In this way, Canada has been able to scoop up “the best and the brightest” from all over the world, which explains why immigration has historically always been a popular policy. In fact, this arrangement has been so politically stable that a viable anti-immigration party has yet to emerge at the national level, bucking the trend in other Western democracies.

Yet there are reasons to believe that a reckoning is in store — though not because Canadians’ cultural attitudes to immigrants have soured, as has happened in most European nations. Indeed, they are more likely to think of surgeons rather than Salafists when they look at who’s coming through their migration streams. If a countermovement against the status quo is to come, it will stem from a single factor: there will be nowhere for newcomers to live.

This may sound like a strange thing to say for the world’s second largest country by landmass, but most Canadians live in a handful of cities and, amid a global housing crisis, Canada ranks as among the absolute worst nations in the developed world for affordability. It has the highest household debt and, astonishingly, the lowest number of housing units per 1,000 people in the G7. Needless to say, the housing bubble has greatly reduced Canadians’ quality of life and made already pricey metropolises such as Toronto and Vancouver impossible to live in for those who are not already solidly affluent. And it shows: homelessness has exploded and sprawling tent cities are now a distressingly common sight. With circumstances as dire as this, how did policymakers in Ottawa figure it would be a good idea to welcome 1.5 million new residents by 2025?

A big part of the answer is that it’s all going according to plan. For the main overriding (if unsayable) goal of Canadian policymaking across all levels of government is to do everything possible to boost real estate values and rental prices rapidly and radically for the benefit of established homeowners and investors — and to the detriment of everyone else.

This cleavage, a primarily economic rather than a cultural or identitarian one, pits older home-owning Canadians from the Boomer and Gen X cohorts against struggling Millennials and Gen Zs; landlords against renters; long-settled immigrants against those fresh-off-the-boat: in other words, the insiders against the outsiders.

And it is clear where the loyalties of Canada’s political classes lay. The Nimby orthodoxy favoured by the insiders is evident in everything from steep development charges baked into municipal regulations — which make the cost of building houses prohibitive — to lazy, sticking-plaster solutions such as rent relief schemes, which simply funnel money into landlords’ pockets while doing nothing to address the underlying problems of housing undersupply. Once viewed in relation to this out-in-the-open conspiracy — the Great Canadian Racket — the government’s immigration targets, as well as its student visa policy, start to make sense.

For this purpose, Canada specifically wants prospective immigrants who are financially endowed, not penniless refugees; and it is able to draw in those candidates through its selective policy controls, whether they’re coming in as immigrants or as international students with enough funds to cover exorbitant rents and tuition fees.

The plight of international students is particularly tragic. Bright-eyed applicants to Canadian institutions from India and elsewhere are lured in with promises of a first-world education, only to be suckered into overpriced degrees while being cooped into horrendous housing conditions and forced to compete for menial gig work. Though Canada is not alone in experiencing this kind of steady glut of foreign entrants to its universities, it’s been conspicuous in its refusal to consider the extent of the exploitation involved — unlike in Britain, for instance, where authorities seem at least to have acknowledged the issue. While Canada has set about poaching high-skilled foreign workers from the US, a Toronto international student was found living under a bridge. Ottawa’s response to this and other horror stories seems to be: come on in!

This careless approach of importing boatloads of wealth-bearing immigrants to juice up the economic growth numbers, driving up rents for everyone and lowering the cost of labour, has been referred to by one housing policy commentator as “human quantitative easing”, an appropriately Orwellian-sounding name. Canada’s embrace of it has led to a perverse contradiction whereby its official monetary policy — namely, successive rate hikes to tame inflation (meaning increasingly costly mortgage payments for new homeowners) — is being offset by its unofficial “Human QE” policy, which, of course, exerts an inflationary effect.

If there is one ray of hope, it is that the immigrants and students themselves are beginning to rise up. Because of the genteel, middle-class character of many of these newcomers, they often have amour-propre — a keen sense of one’s own worth. The words of a Punjabi architect who decided to move back home are emblematic: “I respect myself too much to stay [in Canada].”

The ruling Liberals have all but abdicated moral responsibility on the issue, with Trudeau going from lofty rhetoric about “housing is a human right” to declaring that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility”. And though carrying a kernel of truth at an abstract, technical level, his words nonetheless struck many as offensively tone-deaf. After all, Trudeau’s willingness to confront the provinces on issues such as carbon pricing merely highlights his studied indifference on housing.

This negligent stance is reinforced by members of the government caucus, such as ex-housing minister, Ahmed Hussen, who recently insisted that housing “is not a political issue” after purchasing his second rental unit; and Vancouver MP Taleeb Noormohamed, who made millions buying and flipping houses. In any event, the Trudeau Liberals are cruising towards a well-earned defeat at the polls.

The bad news for Canadians is that the alternative, the Conservative Party of Pierre Poilievre, is no better. Much like Hussen and Noormohamed, Poilievre is a card-carrying member of the investor-rentier oligarchy (private investment is, of course, key to funding more construction but this class has gone about it in all the wrong ways, presiding over the hyper-financialisation of new and existing supply). The Conservative “plan” is apparently based on pushing cities to build more homes with carrots and sticks; and though phrased in colourful populist language (“Fire the gatekeepers!”), it is essentially a weak mirror image of Trudeau’s feckless initiatives. Poilievre’s bluster about fining cities that fail to comply — which Ottawa may not even have the power to do — would almost certainly just result in municipalities retaliating by jacking up fees and charges even more to pay the new fines.

Furthermore, Poilievre shows no sign of breaking with the status quo on immigration, refusing to contradictTrudeau’s immigration targets. There are two possible reasons for this, both of which could be true. The first is that Poilievre fears being tarred as “Trump North” and doesn’t want to risk losing the Conservatives’ long-cultivated relationship with multicultural communities (the subject of an admiring 2014 essayby Rishi Sunak) — even though the young people in those same communities are suffering just as much from housing scarcity and would greatly benefit from a slowdown in the rate of new arrivals. The second is that Poilievre is an anti-statist libertarian who worships at the altar of Milton Friedman, the US monetarist who helped make the case for immigration maximalism, when he argued it would supercharge growth and kill the welfare state. It could just be that Poilievre genuinely believes, on ideological grounds, that such heedless immigration targets are a good idea.

Canada faces a perfect storm: a population bomb and a housing crunch, both the consciously engineered products of national policy. Staving off disaster will require heroic leadership to chart needed course corrections on housing, immigration and student visas, while acknowledging the hard political trade-offs that need to happen: the insiders must incorporate the interests and demands of the outsiders, or trigger a complete social breakdown. In the past, Canada’s storied Laurentian elite excelled at this kind of astute brokerage politics and built a nation with it, but their courage and vision have now given way to the reign of cowardice and mediocrity.

Source: Trudeau’s cynical immigration racket

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