Delacourt: Is Canada’s housing crisis about to take a very dark turn?

2023/09/05 Leave a comment

I am less concerned than Delacourt given that it is possible to discuss levels of permanent and temporary migrants and their impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure without being xenophobic. After all, both immigrants and non-immigrants are affected and with the exception of the PPC, all parties understand the need to be careful.

In the case of the Conservatives, it is partly the fear of being labelled as racist or xenophobic by the Liberals but of greater importance is the 51 ridings in which visible minorities are the majority, many who are immigrants themselves.

As I argued in Has immigration become a third rail in Canadian politics?, I believe it is possible to have such a discussion and would argue that we court greater risks by not having this discussion. But we shall see:

If politicians in this country are going to be seized with housing in the coming months — as they are all promising — they’re going to have to learn to tread carefully around the minefield of immigration.

Blaming immigrants for the housing crisis in Canada is something that all political parties say they’re keen to avoid, yet there have already been risky remarks on that score, across the board. And there will probably be more.

New Housing Minister Sean Fraser embarked into that perilous territory a few weeks ago when he said Canada might need to crack down on universities attracting foreign students without the means to house them properly.

Fraser, to be clear, said he wasn’t blaming the students and indeed stressed: “we have to be really, really careful that we don’t have a conversation that somehow blames newcomers for the housing challenges.”

That didn’t stop Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre from accusing Justin Trudeau’s government of whipping up resentment against immigration.

“I think Justin Trudeau would love Canadians to blame immigrants for the housing crisis that he has doubled. But immigrants are just following the rules that he put in place. So how can we blame them and not him?” Poilievre told reporters.

Meanwhile, Ontario Premier Doug Ford continues to pin the housing crisis in his province — not to mention his Greenbelt scandal — on the desperate need to accommodate Ottawa’s abrupt increase to the number of newcomers to Canada.

“I didn’t know the federal government was gonna bring in over 500,000 (newcomers),” Ford said at a testy news conference this week.

“I didn’t get a phone call from the prime minister saying, ‘Surprise, surprise. We’re dropping these many people in your province and by the way, good luck, you deal with them.’”

To hear Ford tell it at that news conference, most of the unhoused people in his province are people who weren’t born in Canada. He talked of a phone call he got from a new Canadian in danger of losing his house and about the refugees and asylum seekers sleeping in church basements.

As my Queen’s Park columnist colleague Martin Regg Cohn put it, “if tolerance is truly his goal, the premier is playing with rhetorical fire … It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn being blown from Ford’s bully pulpit.”

Much has been made over recent years about how Canada has avoided the anti-immigration backlash that has arisen during the Brexit debate, not to mention Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016 in the U.S.

It is a testament to tolerance in this country, most certainly, as well as to the fact that political success has often hinged on who best can attract the cultural communities in Canada. That was part of Stephen Harper’s big break from opposition to power and then a majority from 2006 to 2015, and it was the flirtation with anti-immigrant sentiment (barbaric cultural practices) that helped get the Conservatives booted from power.

Little wonder, then, that Poilievre walks quickly backward from any argument with the Liberals over immigration numbers. The current Conservative leader hasn’t minded lifting a few pages from Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada — globalist conspiracies included — but he hasn’t joined the “no mass immigration” chorus of the Bernier crowd.

Trudeau was asked at the cabinet retreat last month in PEI whether he was worried about the housing crisis taking a dark turn into anti-immigration sentiment. He said the housing crisis also includes a labour shortage; that for every suggestion that Canada doesn’t have enough homes, there is the reply that Canada doesn’t have enough people to build them. “That’s why immigration remains a solution.”

Most Canadians, or at least many of them, would say it’s possible to have a political debate this fall about housing without reopening a conversation into how many is too many when it comes to newcomers.

But the foreign interference fixation, which dominated political debate in the first half of this year, bodes ill for that kind of optimism. At many points in that debate, one could well have concluded that Chinese interference was the only kind of meddling we should be worried about. Some Chinese Canadians expressed justified concern that the whole foreign meddling conversation was going to make any kind of political involvement from them suspect. I continue to wonder why there wasn’t similar outrage being voiced about Russian meddling or even Americans messing around in Canadian politics.

This is all to say that when political debates get intense, as the housing one is shaping up to be, it can create collateral cultural damage. Right now, all the politicians are saying they can keep anti-immigration talk out of the housing crisis. We’ll see whether they’re up to that this fall.

Source: Is Canada’s housing crisis about to take a very dark turn?

Filed under Immigration, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Watt: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

2023/08/21 Leave a comment

But given the time lags involved in building new houses, even assuming the federal government provides funding, most municipal zoning restrictions are relaxed and service fees reduced where appropriate, any concrete results in terms of “shovels in the ground” will take a few years.

In other words, after the election. The federal and provincial (save Quebec) government fixation on increasing immigration, temporary and permanent, while largely ignoring the impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure, will deservedly come back to haunt the Liberal government if no change occurs to planned permanent immigration levels and unrestricted temporary migration (students and workers):

The revamped Liberal cabinet retreats to Prince Edward Island this week while their party languishes in polling and the Conservatives surge. Underestimate Trudeau at your peril, perhaps, but something seems to have become particularly challenging.

While it is difficult to put your finger on just what that something is, it has become clear that much of that something is Canada’s housing crisis.

Apart from the PM himself, perhaps no one feels the heat on the way to Charlottetown more than Sean Fraser, the new housing minister. Fraser got this job because the Liberals have embarked on a strategy to tie immigration (Fraser previously led this portfolio) inexorably to housing, supposedly using newly arrived skilled labour to build the houses we desperately need.

All well and good, but it doesn’t seem Canadians are having any of it. The problem is, most Canadians aren’t convinced this works — and with house prices swelling, interest rates rising, and immigration continuing exponentially, I fear by combining these issues so closely the Liberals risk sparking a major backlash against their record-setting immigration plans.

Fraser has outlined his answer to the conundrum: add more supply through incentives to local governments and increase immigration rates to, in part, provide the labour required for this.

The new housing minister tackles this after the prime minister bluntly argued, “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility.” On cleanup duty, Fraser later stated the federal government should be more active in developing and enacting housing policy, as it once was.

This, of course, is the right approach. Nevertheless, Fraser’s major challenge will be convincing Canadians that high immigration levels are good when many can’t afford homes.

This week, videos of Canadians tearily lamenting the cost of living went viral. The narrative that, after eight years in office, this government has left many — the very ones they promised to fight for — behind is beginning to set like cement.

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has taken the government to task on housing with brutal effectiveness. He has managed to own this rhetorical stance while still supporting immigration — making the disconnect between the Liberal’s immigration policy and inaction on housing even harder to ignore.

Under Fraser’s oversight, immigration increased exponentially but integration remained plagued with accreditation issues and failed to correspond with housing supply: the national housing strategy has only resulted in just over 100,000 homes. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation determined 5.8 million more are needed over the next decade. In 2022, our population grew by over a million.

The Bank of Canada also acknowledged recently that immigration drives up housing demand. As the problem becomes more acute, this is where people will focus — not on the “mirage of economic prosperity” immigration otherwise contributes to.

The Liberals, if they are to have any hope of winning the next election, must convince Canadians immigration is in their near-term interests and that it will result in more houses being built. That’s a tall order when voters are being priced out of even the remotest dream of owning a home. It’s a disconnect that also dissuades immigrants from wanting to come here in the first place.

By failing to acknowledge this and rectify the integration issues in our immigration system so newcomers can positively contribute to the housing supply, the Liberals risk allowing the social cohesion they so value to fray. And when that starts, the uniquely Canadian support for significant levels of immigration will fray with it.

That would be a terrible shame. No one needs a lecture on the fundamental role immigration has played in our past and the crucial role it will play in our future — much less that it is simply right.

What isn’t right is an approach to this issue driven by complacency and inaction rather than by a fundamental commitment — not just to policy statements but to actually building new homes.

Source: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

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SHEPHERD: Poilievre repeatedly refuses to offer his own immigration target numbers

2023/08/19 Leave a comment

Don’t normally post articles from “True” North but of interest that they are criticizing Conservative leader for not commenting or engaging on immigration targets.

Personally, I have some sympathy for his refusing to comment given that any reduction might well be portrayed as anti-immigration or even racist by the Liberals and NDP (which or course it would not be as I have argued elsewhere):

Immigration Minister Marc Miller hinted recently that he may soon announce an increase in Canada’s immigration targets. The usually outspoken Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre seemingly has nothing to say about that.

“Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at,” Miller said earlier this month. “But certainly, I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.”

Officially, Canada plans to bring in 465,000 permanent residents this year, 485,000 next year, and 500,000 by 2025.

But don’t be fooled: we also invite in hundreds of thousands of additional residents every year, such as temporary foreign workers and international students, so our population actually grew by 1.05 million in 2022 even though we have a below-replacement fertility rate of 1.40 births per Canadian woman.

Canada’s exorbitantly high immigration numbers are straining the housing supply, the healthcare system, and social services such as food banks.

Many journalists, myself included, have been asking Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre what his immigration targets would look like if he becomes prime minister.

In a July press conference for ethnic media, blogger Darshan Maharaja asked Poilievre whether reducing immigration targets could help relieve the demand side of Canada’s housing crunch.

“In order for housing to become affordable at current rates of immigration we need to build six million homes by 2030,” Poilievre answered. “Right now we’re on track to build about 1.4 million homes. So we have to choose, either we’re going to build more homes or we’re going to have a big problem.”

“We gotta build, we gotta build now,” Poilievre said.

When I asked Poilievre’s office whether he would keep Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration targets, and what he thinks about immigration minister Marc Miller possibly increasing the targets this fall, I received no answers to my questions and was instead sent a link to a CPAC video.

“My common sense policy on immigration will be driven by the number of vacancies that private sector employers want to fill, the number of charities that want to sponsor refugees, and the families that want to reunite quickly with loved ones,” Poilievre stated in the video during a stop in Ottawa.

“What’s wrong with the 500,000 target in your mind?” another journalist asks Poilievre.

“I think what’s wrong is Justin Trudeau’s incompetence… I’ll make sure we have housing and healthcare so that when people come here they have a roof overhead and care when they need it.”

People who would have been hesitant to say it out loud even a year ago are now admitting it: our high immigration levels make it more difficult for Canadians to house themselves.

Even individuals with full-time employment can’t keep up with the average rent of $2,000 per month ($3,000 in Vancouver), and end up living out of their vehicles at highway rest stops.

Immigration is now becoming a ballot issue for voters who historically may have only ever expressed support for our system. According to a poll commissioned by Bloomberg News, 68% of Canadians believe Trudeau’s immigration targets negatively impact the housing market.

So, yes, Poilievre should be offering up a quantitative figure to let us know where he really stands on the matter, instead of always deflecting with calls to ‘build, build, build.’

Until he does, we can only conclude that the Conservative party does, in fact, agree with Trudeau’s immigration targets.

With no opposition or critique of Trudeau’s immigration levels from any political party in the House of Commons, there will be no acknowledgment that Canada’s immigration plan actually does not work to counteract an aging population and workforce. Because immigrants themselves age and most come with dependents, parents, and grandparents, immigration does notultimately address the problem of replacing retirees.

Deeper questions arise once you know these facts: do our high immigration targets exist solely so that banks have an endless supply of debtors, landlords an endless supply of renters, and corporations an endless supply of workers who are less aware or assertive of their rights?

I await Poilievre’s answers and numbers.

Source: SHEPHERD: Poilievre repeatedly refuses to offer his own immigration target numbers

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Clark: Go big or go home on housing, Mr. Trudeau

2023/08/16 Leave a comment

As well as “going smaller” on immigration given the increased pressure and demand on housing:

Maybe it was just a coincidence that the new federal Housing Minister, Sean Fraser, told the press he’d be taking the train to an announcement in Burnaby, B.C., on Monday.

But Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had been talking about building housing next to train stations in a social-media video he posted Saturday that garnered over two million views and won plaudits from housing experts.

That made Mr. Fraser’s arrival on the SkyTrain to talk about housing seem a little late. That’s a recurring problem for the Liberals.

The biggest, loudest, most obvious political issue in Canada is the high cost of housing. Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been slow to see it build. And they still haven’t matched the public’s angst with governing ambition.

That’s baffling, if only because of the politics. Mr. Poilievre has been banging the housing issue like a drum for a year and half, striking a chord with couples who can’t afford a house and folks facing skyrocketing rents. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is now making it his theme in tour stops, too. And housing is a top-of-mind concern for many in cities and suburbs – and that’s core Liberal electoral geography.

Mr. Trudeau likes big policy initiatives in areas like child care or clean energy, yet he has sounded pretty ambivalent about housing lately. A few weeks ago, he backed into a vague answer about Ottawa’s plans with an assertion that much of the problem is in provincial jurisdiction, not federal.

But it should be obvious that Mr. Trudeau has to expand the scale of federal housing policy to another level.

Former Liberal policy adviser Tyler Meredith argues Mr. Trudeau should go big: by bringing the federal government back into funding large-scale development of affordable housing, creating tax incentives for residential building, adjusting infrastructure programs and policies in areas such as immigration and banking. Then, he suggests, the PM should call provincial premiers to a national housing summit.

Mr. Meredith wants to see the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation put tens of billions of dollars into developing affordable housing, noting that can be done without a major impact on Ottawa’s budget deficit or net debt, because Ottawa will own the buildings as an asset. It doesn’t have to be a landlord: It might lease those houses to non-profit organizations.

Policy thinkers have already proposed a number of solid, relatively low-cost ways to change the tax system to provide incentives to build – and acting on such things now should be a no-brainer.

One is eliminating the GST on purpose-built rental housing, which should seem like a good idea to Mr. Trudeau because it was in his 2015 Liberal election platform. Another, proposed by economist Mike Moffat and former Stephen Harper adviser Ken Boessenkool, working with the Smart Prosperity Institute, is more generous tax treatment for depreciation of residential buildings. Those two measures would cost the treasury relatively small sums.

Both the Liberals and the Conservatives have proposed using infrastructure spending as a lever to get municipalities to permit more building. Mr. Poilievre has called for Ottawa to withhold funds from cities that don’t approve housing projects quickly, while the Liberals have created a $4-billion “housing accelerator fund” to encourage towns to speed up the process.

And it’s pretty clear money will talk: Municipalities will be reluctant to lower the costs they charge to developers unless someone – Ottawa or the provincial government – replaces the revenue.

Mr. Meredith also thinks the Prime Minister should call premiers to a national housing summit, because a lot of the obstacles are at the provincial or municipal level, from building rules and permits to fees. Provinces are responsible for municipal governance.

Usually, prime ministers are wary of such summits as premiers tend to come to them with demands. But the cynical political calculation could be different for a prime minister launching major federal housing initiatives and inviting premiers to join the mission. It could shift some of the political pressure to act back to the provinces.

At any rate, Mr. Trudeau has reached a point where he has little time to catch up to the urgency many Canadians feel. The alternative is to roll out small initiatives and argue his government has done enough, and that means missing the train on the country’s hottest political issue.

Source: Go big or go home on housing, Mr. Trudeau

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Long way home: Blamed for affordability crisis, Liberals look to pivot on housing

2023/08/15 Leave a comment

But a real pivot has to include both immigration and housing….

Chris Burke and his fiancée have been less than a year away from buying their first home for the past three years.

Saving for a down payment was the first challenge. Now, rising interest rates have kicked home ownership down the road again, stalling the couple’s plans to get married and have children.

“Any gains we make towards purchasing a house, we’re watching the goalposts move further and further away,” the 31-year-old Ottawa resident said.

Feeling “stuck,” as Burke put it, is a sentiment shared by many young Canadians who are increasingly pessimistic about their home ownership prospects.

For the federal Liberals, the growing discontent with the state of the housing market is becoming a political threat.

“I’m a former Liberal voter,” Burke said. “I certainly wouldn’t be voting for them this time around.”

Experts say the housing crisis poses a great risk to the incumbent government in the next election if it doesn’t take drastic action soon.

“This has become probably the most important both economic and political problem facing the country right now,” said Tyler Meredith, a former head of economic strategy and planning for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

“And especially given the significant emphasis the government has put on immigration and the relationship between immigration and the housing market, there is a need to do more.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has taken direct aim at the Liberals for the state of the housing market, highlighting the dramatic increases in home prices, rents and even interest rates.

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, the national average price of a home sold was $709,000 in June 2023, up from $455,000 in Oct. 2015, when the Liberals first came to power.

And the cost of getting a mortgage has soared, following a series of aggressive interest rate increases by the Bank of Canada in response to rising inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rent prices have also skyrocketed, with some cities seeing double-digit increases over the last year.

Trudeau has tried to deflect for the housing crisis, recently saying there are limits to what the federal government can do.

“I’ll be blunt as well: housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility,” Trudeau said during a housing announcement in Hamilton on July 31.

“It’s not something we have direct carriage of. But it is something that we can and must help with.”

His remarks were quickly blasted by Poilievre, who reminded people of earlier promises Trudeau had made on housing.

“(Trudeau) held a news conference … to tell you all he’s not responsible for housing. That’s funny, because eight years ago, he promised he was gonna lower housing costs,” Poilievre said in a news conference the next day.

Most experts agree that Ottawa isn’t solely responsible for the problem. But many say the federal government could still be doing more to alleviate the shortage of housing at the root of the affordability crunch.

The Canada Mortgage Housing Corp., the national housing agency, warned last year that the country needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to restore affordability.

If the current pace of building continues, then only 2.3 million homes will have been added to the housing stock by then.

There are several things experts say the federal government could be doing, such as better calibrating its immigration policy with housing and reforming tax laws to incentivize rental developments. It could also push local governments to get housing built faster.

The federal government has been hearing from stakeholders and housing experts on these potential solutions, as rumblings grow about a focus on housing in the coming fall economic statement and next year’s budget.

A senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss matters not yet made public, says the Liberals plan to take steps over the next year to get other levels of government, the private sector and the not-for-profit sector to build more homes.

Trudeau’s recent cabinet shuffle might be an early sign that the federal government plans to prioritize housing. The prime minister appointed one of the stronger communicators and a rising star on the Liberal bench, Sean Fraser, to take on housing and infrastructure as one, amalgamated file.

“The prime minister said something to the effect of, ‘I’ve got a big job for you to do,'” Fraser said in an interview.

Fraser said he hopes to help restore a housing market closer to the one he grew up with in small-town Nova Scotia: one where having a job was enough to buy a home.

“It might take a bit of time for us to solve the housing challenges that are before us,” he said. “But man, is it a challenge we’re solving.”

That challenge includes overcoming jurisdictional issues. Many of the policy levers that could help spur more housing development are at the provincial and municipal levels of government.

Urban planning, zoning laws and red tape are the purview of local governments, which have decision-making powers that can help or hinder housing development.

Ben Dachis, associate vice-president of public affairs at the C.D. Howe Institute, says the predicament the Liberals find themselves in speaks to the “insidious nature of consistent federal overreach.”

“The cautionary tale is that the federal government needs to stick with jurisdiction,” Dachis said.

But housing expert Carolyn Whitzman has a different take. The University of Ottawa adjunct professor says the federal government can’t turn its back on Canadians in the middle a crisis.

“The federal government: it’s where the buck stops,” Whitzman said.

“If housing and climate change are the crises that they’re certainly treated (as), the federal government is going to have to put on its big kid pants and actually deal with it.”

Source: Long way home: Blamed for affordability crisis, Liberals look to pivot on housing

Related article: Canada ‘absolutely’ can’t build more houses without more immigrants, minister says

Canada’s housing crisis “absolutely cannot” be solved without the aid of new immigrants who bring their skills here, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told reporters on Friday

“The federal government is making housing more affordable and bringing in the skilled workers required to build more homes,” Miller said in Montreal.

“Without those skilled workers coming from outside Canada, we absolutely cannot build the homes and meet the demand that exists currently today.”

Miller was asked by reporters if he was considering slashing Canada’s immigration targets, which are currently at historic highs, in response to a recent Bank of Canada report that new immigrants are adding to housing demand.

The minister said he was not.

“People coming to this country are resourceful. When they bring capital, they are able to acquire houses,” he said.

“If people are asking us to slash, what does that mean? Does that mean slashing the skilled workers that we need to actually build those houses? Slash family reunification, which can be devastating for the mental health and well-being of the families that are already here?”

Canada aims to welcome 451,000 new immigrants in 2024.

By 2025, the number is expected to go up to 500,000 new immigrants in one year.

Miller said around 60 per cent of new immigrants to Canada are economic migrants, many of whom are the kind of skilled workers needed to build more housing. Family reunification visas account for around 20 per cent of those migrating. The rest, he said, are refugees and asylum seekers.

“We have a humanitarian duty towards people that are fleeing war and persecution,” Miller said.

Last week, a spokesperson from Miller’s office told Global News that fulfilling Canada’s labour shortages is one of his key priorities, and a key goal of the government’s immigration targets.

“Strategies like Express Entry, and the historic Immigration Levels Plan, which is largely made up of economic migrants, are a great asset to our nation as they will directly help combat the ongoing labour shortage. This is especially true when it comes to the housing sector,” Bahoz Dara Aziz, press secretary to the immigration minister, told Global News.

“With provinces like Ontario needing 100,000 workers to meet their housing demands, it is clear that immigration will play a strong role in creating more homes for Canadians.”

The federal government increased its immigration targets in November 2022, and Miller has suggested those targets may need to keep rising.

The construction industry is short tens of thousands of workers, and experts say a coming wave of retirements could make the problem worse.

Meanwhile, Canada is millions of homes behind what’s needed to reach housing affordability this decade.

The job vacancy rate in construction is at a record high with around 80,000 vacancies in the industry,  CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal said in a recent note.

Those vacancies, which push up building costs and impede productivity, come at a time when the residential construction industry is under pressure to meet the demands of a growing population.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. forecasts a need for 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than the country is currently on track to build.

The number of new homes built, however, has been in decline, from just over 271,000 in 2021 to 260,000 in 2022. And in May this year, the annual pace of housing starts dropped 23 per cent month over month, leading the CMHC’s chief economist to predict that just 210,000 to 220,000 new homes will be built by the end of the year.

Last week, the federal government launched a separate stream of entry for newcomers with work experience in skilled trades.

“It’s absolutely critical to address the shortage of skilled trades workers in our country, and part of the solution is helping the construction sector find and maintain the workers it needs,” Miller said in a statement, making his first major announcement as Canada’s new immigration minister.

“This round of category-based selection recognizes these skilled trades workers as essential, and I look forward to welcoming more of these talented individuals to Canada.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said that by welcoming people in skilled trades such as carpentry, plumbing and welding, Canada can help its construction sector attract skilled workers.

But there remain questions about how the government can ensure those bringing the skill set to work in construction actually end up working in the sector and are able to navigate the certifications processes across the country.

Source: Canada ‘absolutely’ can’t build more houses without more immigrants, minister says

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Poilievre says Canada’s immigration system is broken, sidesteps target cut questions

2023/08/05 Leave a comment

Not surprising that he ducked the levels question as he would be tarred as xenophobic. But his relentless focus on housing, and the increased discussion on the link between high levels of immigration and housing availability and affordability, are increasingly untenable.

Suspect if he had the political courage to advocate for a pause at current levels to allow housing and healthcare to start catching up (or not falling further behind), he might gain some political support in both immigrant and non-immigrant communities.

But I’m not a political strategist!

Canada’s immigration system is broken, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre charged Tuesday, as he sidestepped questions about whether he would change current targets.

Appearing before reporters on Parliament Hill, Poilievre criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent comments on housing and pledged to speed up entry for immigrants skilled in the building trades.

The federal government has set a target of welcoming 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025, although some worry about the pressure that could add to the country’s housing crisis, driven by what experts agree is a supply shortage.

Ottawa has defended its ambitious target as necessary given the labour shortage and thousands of job vacancies that employers continue to experience since the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered widespread lockdowns.

Poilievre slammed the Liberal target as driven by Trudeau’s “ideology,” but he did not answer repeated questions about whether he would consider reducing the number.

He said a Conservative government would base its immigration policy on the needs of private-sector employers, the degree to which charities plan to support refugees and the desire for family reunification.

“I’ll make sure we have housing and health care so that when people come here they have a roof overhead and care when they need it,” he said Tuesday.

“I’ll make sure that it’s easier for employers to fill genuine job vacancies they cannot fill.”

Statistics Canada reported last month the country is facing a little more than 781,000 job vacancies.

Poilievre’s comments come as the Conservatives try to increase their support in newcomer communities in some of the country’s largest cities and suburbs, selling the party as pro-immigration.

The Tories have struggled to rebuild such support since losing government in 2015, when they campaigned on a pledge to set up a tip line for so-called “barbaric cultural practices.”

A review of the party’s 2021 election loss called for recruitment of more diverse candidates and better outreach to cultural communities.

Besides appearing at numerous ethnic media roundtables, attending different cultural events and meeting with various business groups, Poilievre has championed cost-of-living issues in his outreach, from a lack of affordable housing to high food prices.

Rather than discussing immigration targets, the Conservative leader has focused on the system’s shortcomings.

His opponents, however, have been carefully watching his position. The federal NDP attacked Poilievre back in May for supporting a Bloc Québécois motion that condemned the government’s immigration goals for not properly considering their impact on the French language in Quebec, as well as housing, schools and health-care.

In his outreach, Poilievre has also honed in on concerns about the number of international students to die by suicide since the pandemic, with more relying on food banks.

He has promised to speed up licensing processes for doctors and nurses who come to Canada, saying Tuesday the Conservatives would ensure “that immigrants who come here as professionals get a chance to work in their profession.”

He also took aim at new Housing Minister Sean Fraser, who served in the immigration portfolio before the recent cabinet shuffle.

Calling Fraser “the worst immigration minister in Canadian history,” Poilievre blamed him and Trudeau for refugee claimants sleeping on Toronto’s streets due to a lack of spaces in the city’s shelter system.

The federal government recently announced it would give the city almost $100 million to help find housing.

Source: Poilievre says Canada’s immigration system is broken, sidesteps target cut questions

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Ifill: The curse of unserious politicians

2023/07/20 Leave a comment

Interesting mix of self-awareness in terms of her positions/identity/branding and obliviousness of how some of her critiques (e.g, “ludicrous solutions,” “misinformation”) can also be applied to her along with many politicians, not just the arguably more egregious example of Pierre Poilievre:

I’m back as the award-winning journalist and economist you’ve come to love or hate, but can never dismiss. In my fourth year of this column, I will continue to regale you with news stories and political and policy analysis from an intersectional feminist lens, which also includes analyses of equity and power. I’m not your friendly gender-based analysis plus co-ordinator who is only interested in the check-box exercise of performative policy analysis done by the federal public service. No, policy and politics need to be done differently for the times we are in and beyond.

We are not a homogenous society, and post-pandemic, we need better tools to determine how we’re heterogenous and how to deliver public services to disparate communities. Politics continues to be a white man’s game, and policy decisions continue to be made by people who lead homogenous lives and lifestyles of privilege. If we are not centring the vulnerable and marginalized—i.e. those without power—we’re doing politics and policy wrong. The results of that are growing chasms of inequalities that will upend society and polarize our politics, which one can observe is already happening.

Unfortunately, in these serious times we are besieged by unserious people who have been instrumental in the memeification of politics and political discourse. And this is dangerous.

In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins defined a meme: “Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.” However, an internet meme does not mutate according to evolutionary standards of random change and Darwinian properties; it is made to deliberately be manipulated through the creativity and purpose of the creator. In both instances, the resulting effect would be to go viral.

For the 2018 Ontario provincial election—the one in which the Ontario NDP could not capitalize, and the Ontario Liberals collapsed—much of the success of the Progressive Conservatives had been predicated on the success of Ontario Proud, a meme factory. It was given credit, though without much evidence, by Ontario news media for its alleged success in dethroning Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal party. It did so through the creation of memes and other online content, as reported by the Toronto Star: “It unabashedly promoted Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives in last spring’s Ontario election, using social media to create viral videos and memes that mercilessly mocked Wynne before shifting to attack the NDP once polls showed the premier’s party cratering.”

In contrast, its sister organization, Canada Proud, has not been able to scale this effect nationally. The organization wanted to replicate its success for then-Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, only we all know how that turned out. More recently, founder of Ontario Proud and Canada Proud, Jeff Ballingall, was the digital director of councilman Brad Bradford’s ignominious run for mayor of Toronto. Ballingall’s candidate ended that run with only 9,254 votes, or 1.3 per cent. In the June 26 election, Bradford made himself into a caricature with his insistence on filming himself holding a Jamaican patty all under the auspices of his digital director.

Unfortunately, meme culture has ushered in the rise of unserious people. People who can’t be taken seriously every time they open their mouths because what they propose are ludicrous solutions to important problems, and thereby wasting our collective time. Typically, their brand of unseriousness is coupled with misinformation and based on irrelevant contextualization, bigotry, and general asininity. Imagine how far we could’ve gotten on climate change policies had we not been held back by unserious people. Imagine how far along we’d be as a society if we didn’t have these time-wasters holding us back. It’s maddening and frustrating.

The most unserious person in Canadian politics is Pierre Poilievre. After revealing himself to be a capable politician, through his victory speech after his Conservative leadership win last fall, one would think he would’ve continued along that trajectory. But unserious people can’t be serious for long. Instead of building political capital, he squandered it by reducing himself to his own meme, much like Bradford. His showing at Calgary’s Stampede, which showcased a new look—one without glasses, pumped up, and photographed alongside homophobes—demonstrated the lengths Conservatives will go to alienate the general voting public. They will then whine and complain about imaginary media bias against them when all Canadians can see throughout social media is their latest bigoted attack. What’s dangerous about this is the platforming and integration of bigotry, misinformation, and general farcical nature of Poilievre’s brand of politics. He’s not here to solve problems, like a serious person committed to the betterment of all in this country. In contrast, he’d rather sully his assumed intellect for the next viral moment like the shallow, unctuous man he’s shown the Canadian public he is.

Source: The curse of unserious politicians

Filed under Government, Politics Tagged with , ,

Statements by Prime Minister and NDP leader on Canadian Multiculturalism Day, No statement by Conservative leader Leader

2023/06/28 Leave a comment

For the record, starting with the PM:

“Today marks Canadian Multiculturalism Day, an opportunity to reflect on and embrace the idea that no matter our background or where we come from, we are all Canadian. Communities across Canada weave our identity through a tapestry of languages, traditions, and faiths.

“Canada was the first country in the world to officially recognize multiculturalism as a fundamental value in 1988 by adopting the Canadian Multiculturalism Act as a guiding principle for our country. The Act aims to foster a society where everyone can thrive and where our diverse cultures and heritage, including Indigenous languages, customs, history, and practices, are celebrated.

“Our work is far from over to truly build a country where racialized people, Indigenous Peoples, and religious minorities can live free from systemic racism and discrimination. That is why the Government of Canada is renewing Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy and creating a new Action Plan on Combatting Hate. The new strategy will build on the work we began in 2019 to remove systemic barriers and promote equal opportunity for all Canadians, including our commitment to implementing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, the Mental Health of Black Canadians Fund, and our National Housing Strategy.

“As we celebrate Canadian Multiculturalism Day, we celebrate Canadians of all backgrounds, and we recommit to fostering an inclusive and welcoming society, where everyone has equal opportunity. Let’s stand together, united in our commitment to upholding the principles of fairness and equity for all.”

Source: Statement by the Prime Minister on Canadian Multiculturalism Day

By the NDP leader:

“On Canada’s Multiculturalism Day, we celebrate the strength and beauty of our diverse nation. On this day, we come together to recognize and appreciate the rich tapestry of cultures, languages, and traditions that make Canada a truly remarkable place to call home. This is a day to honour our commitment to inclusivity, respect, and understanding that have shaped our society and fostered an environment of acceptance and harmony.

As Canadians, we take pride in our multicultural heritage. We understand that our diversity is not a challenge to be overcome, but rather a tremendous asset that fuels progress. By embracing different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds, we can learn from one another, grow together, and build a stronger and more prosperous society.

Today, let us celebrate the contributions of the countless individuals and communities who have enriched the Canadian mosaic. Whether they arrived here generations ago or recently, each person brings their unique talents, knowledge, and perspectives, contributing to the vibrant fabric of our multicultural nation.

Multiculturalism Day is also a reminder that more work is required to ensure equality and inclusivity for all. It is an invitation to engage in meaningful conversations, promote intercultural dialogue, and foster connections that transcend boundaries.

By working together, we can create a society where every person feels valued, respected, and empowered in our country. On behalf of all New Democrats, we wish you happy Multiculturalism Day, Canada!”

Source: NDP Statement on Multiculturalism Day

No statement by the Conservative leader, who did issue a statement for Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Clark: Three Conservative MPs who saw no evil until after lunch

2023/03/02 Leave a comment

Good analysis and depressing reality that Pierre Poilievre is overly beholden to the more extreme elements in the party. And Max Bernier is already fundraising off this “discreet” repudiation of the AfD by Poilievre:

If you’re not familiar with the policies of the Alternative for Germany, the party represented by MEP Christine Anderson, you’re not alone. But the three Conservative MPs who met her for a long lunch last week didn’t get there by accident.

That is not to say the three MPs are racist. Leslyn Lewis, Colin Carrie, and Dean Allison aren’t known as that at all. They are the Conservative Party’s unofficial conspiracy caucus.

So when the Conservative Party issued a statement that said the three didn’t know Ms. Anderson’s views, and later two organizers of the three-hour lunch said the MPs knew a lot about who they were meeting, well, both of those things might be sort of true.

It’s easy to find out the AfD stands for anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and xenophobic views, because it can be quickly discovered on the internet, in newspapers or videos, or from many sources. But it also seems very possible that these three read about it and didn’t believe it.

Mr. Carrie apparently didn’t believe COVID-19 vaccines were safe, so, according to a Conservative source, he was one of the four MPs who did not go the Commons in person in the fall of 2021. Mr. Allison apparently didn’t believe public health officials who said the veterinary anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin wasn’t proven for treating COVID-19, and he gave a presentation about it to a group of Tory MPs. Last year, Ms. Lewis falsely claimed a then-undrafted World Health Organization treaty would give the WHO power to dictate all of Canada’s health care decisions in a pandemic. The three wink at the theory that the World Economic Forum is a cabal to control Canada and the world.

And guess what? Ms. Anderson shares a lot of their views about vaccine mandates and globalists. They saw her as an ally, and apparently chose not to see the rest. She tells people she is not xenophobic or anti-Muslim, although she doesn’t really eschew those sentiments. “I do not have problems with Muslims. I have a problem with Islam. I do not consider Islam to be a religion,” she told the right-wing website Rebel News.

Prominent AfD figures have played down the Holocaust and Nazi era, and spoken of immigrants as invaders. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs raised concerns about the three MPs meeting with Ms. Anderson. The AfD tends to target Muslims with its policies, but they include banning kosher meat and “non-medical” circumcision. Its politicians aren’t the advocates of freedom they claim to be.

So Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre did the right thing when he issued a statement to reporters who asked that criticized Ms. Anderson’s views as “vile.” That’s unequivocal. The party issued a statement saying the three MPs had not known about her views. Mr. Carrie took the extra step of tweeting that he regretted his mistake and will do better.

That didn’t settle it, however. Mr. Poilievre didn’t put his statement on his or the party’s social media or website, and critics accused him of try to keep it low-key with his own base.

But he probably got more criticism from the right – and Mr. Carrie got a helping of it, too – from people who accused him of backing down in the face of criticism from the media. Rebel News ran a piece that said Mr. Poilievre “panicked” and threw his MPs to the “media wolves.” They didn’t feel the Conservative Leader stood up for principle, but rather that he caved.

That is a message to Mr. Poilievre that he will pay a political price on his right wing if he distances the Conservative Party from extremists like the AfD. And, by the way, the People’s Party is waiting there.

It’s worth noting Ms. Anderson’s AfD evolved into what it is because of how it dealt with extreme elements.

Alternative for Germany came out in 2013 as an anti-European Union splinter from conservative parties, but its first leader, Bernd Lucke, quit in 2015 complaining the party was taken over by xenophobic elements under new leader Frauke Petry. In 2017, Ms. Petry lost a power struggle with the more extreme far right wing of the party, and later quit the party, too.

So if there’s a vein of folks in the Conservative Party that doesn’t want to see the extremism of some who claim to be allies, they should be warned. There is a line. If you choose not to see it at your lunch table, it just gets closer.

Source: Three Conservative MPs who saw no evil until after lunch

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

Close Roxham Road border crossing within 30 days, Poilievre urges

2023/02/23 Leave a comment

Could we not have some more serious discussion of solutions rather than simplistic Conservative virtue signalling and, for that matter, simplistic Liberal virtue signalling?

Ironically, arguments that Canada is “broken” apply particularly in the case of immigration and thus no need for cheap points:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling for the federal government to close the Roxham Road border crossing within 30 days amid a rising influx of migrants entering Quebec irregularly and spurring calls from Quebec leaders who say their communities cannot keep up with the pace.

Speaking to reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday, Poilievre laid the blame for the surge of migrants squarely at the feet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who he accused of encouraging irregular crossings at Roxham Road and not addressing a backlog of refugee claims.

The Conservative leader argued that Trudeau had already demonstrated Roxham Road could be closed without violating the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, and urged the government to do so again — failing to mention the entire border was shut down during that time.

“If we are a real country, we have borders. And if this is a real prime minister, he is responsible for those borders,” he said.

The Safe Third Country Agreement requires asylum seekers arriving in Canada or the U.S. to make their claim in the first country they arrive in and forbids them from first arriving in one country and then making a claim in another. However, migrants who cross the border between official posts can claim asylum after they are intercepted by police as they are already on Canadian soil.

Poilievre’s comments come as Quebec Premier Francois Legault this week called on Trudeau to make the Roxham Road crossings a top priority for next month’s meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and to renegotiate the agreement.

He reportedly told Trudeau in a letter on Sunday the pact has pushed asylum seekers to Roxham Road, and that a renegotiated treaty should apply to all entry points.

On Tuesday, the Globe and Mail published an English-language letter by Legault where he said the number of would-be asylum seekers entering Quebec “has exploded,” pushing the province’s social services to their limits. The premier also pitched other provinces to take in some of those migrants.

The public letter did not include concerns reportedly expressed by Legault in his letter to Trudeau that the influx of migrants is threatening the French language in Montreal, or his request for more money to pay for the costs of caring for asylum seekers.

Federal statistics show that more than 39,000 people claimed asylum after they were intercepted by the RCMP crossing Canada’s land border into Quebec in 2022, compared with only 369 in the rest of the country.

In total, around 64 per cent of all asylum claims in Canada in 2022 were made in Quebec.

Last year’s numbers were a sharp increase from 2021, when 4,095 migrants were intercepted on Quebec’s southern border.

Poilievre did not offer specifics about how to address the immigration backlog — currently sitting at more than 910,000 applications — but did say money can be redirected from policing the irregular crossing to bolstering the legal immigration system, which he said would help reduce wait times.

“We probably have the best immigration system in the entire world. But Trudeau is breaking it,” he said.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said in a statement to Global News that proposing to close Roxham Road within 30 days “without advancing a plan to manage the consequences will not solve the problem” and would only promote more irregular border crossings elsewhere.

“The ideas put forward by Pierre Poilievre are not only reckless, but they lack depth and understanding,” Fraser said.

“As Canada works to navigate a global migration crisis, it is our responsibility to implement real, long-term solutions.”

Fraser acknowledged that Quebec has faced “immense pressure” and said Ottawa has transferred thousands of migrants elsewhere in Canada since last June.

A spokesperson for Fraser’s office clarified that to date, those transfers have been to Ontario, but a “pan-Canadian” approach is in the works.

“We are continuing to work with other provinces and municipalities to identify communities that have the capacity to accommodate additional asylum claimants as we work toward a long-term solution,” Fraser said in his statement.

The minister also encouraged people who want to enter Canada to consider other ways to enter the country.

Source: Close Roxham Road border crossing within 30 days, Poilievre urges

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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