Taube: Why Justin Trudeau is turning against immigration

2024/04/10 Leave a comment

From a conservative and largely partisan perspective:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in a state of desperation. His minority Liberal government has been polling behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives for the better part of two years. They’re down in most opinion polls by 15 to 18 points, and only have the support of 23 to 26 per cent of the Canadian electorate. His left-leaning policies have turned off many Canadians, including fellow Liberals. His standing in the international community barely has a pulse. His personal popularity numbers continue to plummet.

How is Trudeau still in power? Because he signed a three-year work-and-supply agreement with Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats – who are also struggling mightily in the polls – that doesn’t expire until June 2025. Without this, his goose would have been cooked.

The PM obviously wants to remain in power, as most political leaders do. He and his senior advisors have been throwing imaginary darts in every conceivable direction to gain an advantage. Nothing has worked to date.

Trudeau and the Liberals, who realise the clock is ticking rapidly, are now taking the most desperate step of them all: abandoning long-held political narratives with a flick of the wrist.

Here’s a recent example. Trudeau told reporters at an April housing announcement in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia that Canada’s level of temporary immigration needs to be controlled. 

‘Whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular,’ he said, these groups ‘have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb…To give an example, in 2017, 2 per cent of Canada’s population was made up of temporary immigrants. Now we’re at 7.5 per cent of our population comprised of temporary immigrants. That’s something we need to get back under control.’

There’s nothing illogical with this assessment. Except for one critical point – the reason why temporary immigration has turned into a significant economic problem in Canada is specifically because of the policies of Trudeau and the Liberals. 

The ex-drama teacher seemingly forgot that little nugget of information during his announcement. Perhaps he was caught up in the moment. But let’s provide him with a few gentle reminders. 

The Trudeau Liberals took power in 2015. In 2017, they announced that Canada would take in one million immigrants over a three-year period. In 2018, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen announced a further hike of 40,000 immigrants for 2021, bringing the yearly total to 350,000, or roughly 1 per cent of Canada’s population.   

No one denies that hard-working immigrants, who arrive by legal means, have played a vital role in building and shaping Canada and other western democracies. Generosity of spirit is a good thing, too.

Nevertheless, how did Trudeau plan to pay for this massive wave of immigration? How would he deal with issues related to housing, jobs, taxes and ensuring Canada’s economic engine could handle this influx of new immigrants? 

Sunshine and lollipops, it seems.

Trudeau’s Canada also let in refugees at a fairly rapid pace compared to the country’s total population. This included 25,000 Syrian refugees in a short two-month window in 2015, a time frame which was correctly described as ‘problematic’ by the president of the Canadian Immigrant Settlement Sector Alliance. There were also issues with Haitians coming illegally across the US-Canada border in 2017. It turned into a huge political controversy. The right-leaning Conservatives and left-leaning NDP both questioned this surge, albeit for different reasons. 

As for temporary foreign workers, Trudeau’s narrative has been all over the map. The Hub noted in a January piece that Trudeau criticised then-prime minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives for growing the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP). As Trudeau wrote in a 2014 op-ed for the Toronto Star, ‘by 2015, temporary worker entries will outnumber permanent resident entries. This has all happened under the Conservatives’ watch, despite repeated warnings from the Liberal Party and from Canadians across the country about its impact on middle-class Canadians: it drives down wages and displaces Canadian workers.’ In his view, the Conservatives needed to ‘scale it back dramatically.’

What did Trudeau do to correct this as Prime Minister? The exact opposite. Temporary work permits increased from slightly over 310,000 in 2015 to almost 800,000 in 2022. Both of Canada’s temporary labour migration streams, the TFWP and International Mobility Program, have gone up since 2017 – with an enormous spike in 2022. Early data for 2023 shows another increase is forthcoming.    

Trudeau could have prevented all of this from happening if he had actually paid attention to Canada’s rising immigration levels and refugee claims. He didn’t. And this has been a defining feature of his mediocre and ineffective leadership. 

Source: Why Justin Trudeau is turning against immigration

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Michael Taube: Leave it to Trudeau to destroy his party’s reputation on immigration

2023/11/08 Leave a comment

Overly partisan but not without some valid criticisms. And Taube leaves out the bigger issue of the larger number of temporary residents:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration plan is broken. His Liberal government may not have admitted it in so many words, but their recent actions speak quite clearly.

After steadily increasing the number of newcomers over the years, Ottawa has announced it will cap the number of permanent residents it accepts at 500,000 in both 2025 and 2026. It’s finally dawned on the Trudeau Liberals that there needs to be an economic reset. Canada’s housing market is too expensive and our health care system is overloaded — and the impact of costly temporary resident programs is too often overlooked.

From a historical perspective, the decision to put a forthcoming freeze on immigration is certainly interesting. For the first time in a long time, the Liberals will likely be viewed in a more negative light when it comes to Canada and its immigration policies.

The Liberals were consistently put on a high pedestal by many generations of newcomers due to their seemingly positive approach to immigration. The fact that former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, a Liberal, committed one of the worst immigration-related atrocities in Canadian history, turning away 900 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany aboard the MS St. Louis in 1939, and oversaw the disgraceful internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, was largely (and conveniently) forgotten.

As for Conservative prime ministers like Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper, who both supported immigration from a personal standpoint and as a means to enhance the country’s economic engine, they never received nearly the same amount of praise and adulation for their efforts.

In particular, Pierre Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister was consistently viewed in the most positive light by most Canadian newcomers. He could do no wrong when it came to immigration. Yet, here’s the historical irony. This Liberal leader actually oversaw a significant decline in total immigration numbers.

According to Bob Plamondon in his book, The Truth about Trudeau, Canada had 183,974 immigrants when he was first elected in 1968, or roughly one per cent of the population. When Trudeau left politics in 1984, the immigration rate dwindled to 0.3 per cent.

“These reductions did not reflect an anti-immigrant policy per se, but flowed out of a choice made by the Trudeau government in response to a weaker economic climate and higher unemployment,” Plamondon wrote.

His assessment was that “holding the line on immigration is exactly the opposite of what Trudeau is known for,” and it’s entirely accurate. That’s not what most Canadians know or want to remember about him, however.

They would rather focus on the elder Trudeau’s decision to introduce the Canadian multiculturalism policy in 1971 that touted personal and cultural freedom for ethnic minorities.

“A policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework commends itself to the government as the most suitable means of assuring the cultural freedom of Canadians,” he told the House of Commons on Oct. 8, 1971. “Such a policy should help to break down discriminatory attitudes and cultural jealousies … It can form the base of a society which is based on fair play for all.”

They also remember when he brought in a new Immigration Act in 1976 with fondness. The act supported economic and cultural policies for newcomers, the need for diversity and promoting non-discrimination against newcomers. Government and the volunteer sector would work together to help new immigrants adapt to our country, and refugees became a distinct group of immigrants protected under Canadian law.

Many immigrants therefore viewed the elder Trudeau as a political saviour and their champion. Criticism of his leadership and policies was often ignored or disregarded. When it came time to vote, most would enthusiastically select the candidate with the word “Liberal” next to his or her name.

But what the elder Trudeau giveth, the younger Trudeau taketh away.

The younger Trudeau’s government has hiked Canada’s immigration numbers far more than most western democratic governments — and his own father’s. When he was first elected in 2015, Canada’s target for permanent residents was below 300,000. We’ll be at 485,000 in 2024 and at 500,000 in 2025.

“Make no mistake. This is a massive increase in economic migration to Canada,” then-immigration minister Sean Fraser told the Canadian Press in 2022. “We have not seen such a focus on economic migration as we’ve seen in this immigration levels plan.”

It was a massive increase, but to what end?

The younger Trudeau’s poor reputation on the international stage has tarnished Canada’s reputation as a welcoming country to newcomers; this is a result of, for instance, icy relations with G20 leaders, problems with India (costumes and otherwise), older instances of blackface and more. Trudeau also paid plenty of lip service to Syrian and Afghan refugees in past years — in practice, however, refugee resettlement has dropped overall from 76,000 in 2023 to below 73,000 in 2025.

Furthermore, the Trudeau government’s decision to ignore the affordability crisis until just recently has made Canada a tough environment for newcomers, who now have trouble finding work, paying rent and feeding their families.

Whereas the elder Trudeau and other Liberal prime ministers regularly built voter confidence with new immigrants, the younger Trudeau has developed into a leader who tries to desperately grab immigrant votes at all costs. Based on his economic mismanagement and forthcoming freeze on newcomer numbers, that political farce won’t be happening for much longer.

Source: Michael Taube: Leave it to Trudeau to destroy his party’s reputation on immigration

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