Keller: Mark Carney is already struggling with Justin Trudeau’s immigration legacy

2025/11/12 Leave a comment

Captures the challenge and the resulting disruption well:

…The challenge is that for three years the Trudeau government opened the door to what was effectively an unlimited number of notionally temporary immigrants. They came “temporarily” with the aim of staying permanently. (And who can blame them?) They paid tuition to a fly-by-night college and accepted minimum wage jobs in the hope of parlaying that into citizenship.

In the year 2000, there were 67,000 people holding a temporary work permit. By the end of 2024, there were 1,499,000. 

In 2000, there were 123,000 student visa holders. By the end of 2023, there were more than one million.

Between 2011 and 2015, the number of refugee claims made in Canada averaged about 17,000 a year. Last year, there were 190,000. This year, claims are on pace to hit 110,000.

In 2015, there were 10,000 people in Canada who had applied for refugee status and were awaiting a decision. The figure is now 296,000….

Source: Mark Carney is already struggling with Justin Trudeau’s immigration legacy

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Carney says temporary foreign worker program needs a ‘focused approach’

2025/09/12 2 Comments

Not much new in terms of messaging:

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday the temporary foreign worker program needs a “focused approach” that targets the needs of specific sectors and regions.

Carney’s comments came as he outlined the government’s plans for the fall during an address to the Liberal caucus at their annual retreat in Edmonton.

The prime minister said the government’s plan to return immigration rates to “sustainable levels” includes reducing the number of non-permanent residents to “less than five per cent” of the total population.

Temporary workers and international students made up 7.1 per cent of Canada’s population as of April 1, according to Statistics Canada.

“Now, it’s clear that we have to work to continue to improve our overall immigration policies, and the temporary foreign worker program must have a focused approach that targets specific strategic sectors and needs in specific regions,” Carney said in his speech to caucus.

“So we’re working on that. Setting those goals, adjusting and working to ease the strain on housing, public infrastructure and our social services while we build that strong economy.”

At a press conference in Brampton, Ont., on Tuesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre once again called on the government to scrap the temporary foreign worker program due to high youth unemployment, which hit 14.6 per cent in July.

Poilievre said immigrants are not responsible for housing and employment challenges and instead blamed the government. 

“They’ve allowed massive abuses of the international student, temporary foreign worker and asylum claims system, with rampant fraud that happened right under their nose. And as a result, our youth can’t find jobs or homes,” Poilievre said.

”(Carney’s) allowing corporations to bring in a record number of temporary foreign workers this year at a time when youth employment numbers are their worst in three decades.”

Government data show the number of temporary foreign workers coming to Canada decreased significantly in the first six months of the year. About 119,000 temporary workers arrived in the first half of 2025, down from more than 245,000 in the first half of 2024.

The government’s current target for temporary workers is to admit about 368,000 this year and 210,000 next year.

Before Carney’s speech, former immigration minister Marc Miller said “you can’t just scrap” the temporary foreign worker program and accused Poilievre of trying to whip up “anti-immigrant sentiments.”

“We need immigration whether we like it or not in this country,” Miller said….

Source: Carney says temporary foreign worker program needs a ‘focused approach’

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Keller: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs 

2025/09/11 Leave a comment

Nice reminder of previous comments (Trudeau did the same in 2014):

…Prime Minister Mark Carney used to get this. Back in 2013, when he was governor of the Bank of Canada, he told a parliamentary committee that “one doesn’t want an overreliance on temporary foreign workers for lower-skill jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages but also that firms improve their productivity.”

He added that temporary foreign workers should be for “those higher-skilled gaps that do exist.” 

In plain English, he said that bringing in highly skilled people to fill high-wage jobs was good for Canada, but allowing business easy access to lots of temporary foreign workers for entry-level jobs was a recipe for suppressing the wages of low-wage Canadians, and discouraging companies from raising productivity through labour-saving technologies. 

That was the right answer. It was also a good foundation for future immigration policy.

But last week, Mr. Carney said the opposite. Pushing back against Conservative criticism, he said that “when I talk to businesses around the country … their number one issue is tariffs, and their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers.”

Mr. Carney, please rediscover your 2013 answer. Aside from being economically sound, it is immeasurably more politically saleable. Just ask British Columbia Premier David Eby.…

Source: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs

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The Functionary: New clerk expectations

2025/06/21 Leave a comment

More notes of caution but I wish them well:

…But are they too alike? That’s the worry. Both bring a Goldman Sachs-style mindset with big ambition that prizes speed and outcomes, which could drive them to barrel ahead — not listening, not slowing down, ignoring red flags.

Would deputies raising alarms about a Phoenix-style pay disaster get heard? Or would they be dismissed as risk-averse and stuck in public-service inertia?

As one long-time deputy minister said:

“Neither Carney nor Sabia has worked in the parts of government that actually deliver services. Finance manages crises — it doesn’t build systems. Fixing immigration or modernizing service delivery isn’t about reacting fast. It’s about designing complex programs, managing risk, and building IT that actually works. That’s not their wheelhouse.”

Goldman pace, Ottawa reality. The kind of style that works at Goldman Sachs — where there’s a deep bench of talent ready to step in — doesn’t translate easily to the public service, where replacements aren’t so easy to find or groom. Burnout here carries real risks, and losing top talent isn’t as simple as hiring the next in line.

Tellier and Sabia also came up in a different era. Barking orders and command-and-control leadership were the norm in the 1990s. But that style is now widely seen as outdated.

These days clerks prioritize wellness and mental health. And many public servants are tired. They haven’t a breather since the pandemic. There’s been Trump’s trade war, the federal election, two government transitions, and new crises keep coming – wars, fires.

Can the public service handle a hard-driving, two-year push for massive changes – with the chaos of layoffs? And can Carney stay focused to get his big things done?

The new guard is, well, older. Carney and his lieutenants — Sabia, chief-of-staff Marc-André Blanchard, and principal secretary David Lametti — are all white, male Boomers or Gen Xers leading a millennial-dominated public service that’s 58-per-cent women. 

Many public servants have only ever worked under the Trudeau government, where wellness, DEI, values and ethics, and work-life balance were top priorities. Money flowed and the public service grew. Gears are now shifting to high performance, speed, outcomes, spending and job cuts. That’s a culture shift.

The real leadership test may be less about what gets done — and more about how.

Source: New clerk expectations

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Theo Argitis: Canada’s great immigration experiment is ending 

2025/06/20 Leave a comment

Good take:

For nearly the first time in our history, Canada’s population growth has come to a near standstill. Remarkably, the state of things is such that we are celebrating this as a policy success and long-overdue correction.

Statistics Canada released its quarterly population estimates, showing the country grew by 20,000 people in the first three months of this year. That’s the third weakest quarterly increase in data going back to 1946—and less than one-tenth the average quarterly gain over the past three years.

Four provinces and one territory—Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and Yukon—actually posted population declines.

The numbers reflect the dramatic reversal of policy late last year by the former Trudeau government, when it abruptly tightened permit approvals for international students and foreign workers after overseeing record immigration levels since 2021.

Under the plan, the intake of new permanent residents, or what the government calls immigrants, would be lowered from 485,000 in 2024 to 365,000 by 2027.

The number of non-permanent residents living in Canada—which had increased five-fold since 2015 to more than 3 million—would be cut by about one million over two years.

That post-pandemic rush of newcomers exacerbated housing shortages, strained public services, and disrupted the job market. It was perhaps the worst policy error of the past two decades, and in need of correction.

But, ironically, the sharp reversal in policy is now creating its own problems, impacting everything from demand for cell phones and banking services to funding for universities and colleges.

The whole episode has been a mass social experiment that will be studied for years.

“You’re going to see a ton of research on this, no question, because it’s like this little experiment here in Canada that no other country has done to this extent,’’ said Mikal Skuterud, a labour economist at the University of Waterloo and director of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum. “And there’s all kinds of dimensions to how this impacted the economy.”

The latest numbers suggest the government’s curbs are beginning to work. While still elevated, the number of non-permanent residents has started to decline—down almost 90,000 from its peak in September. The number of permanent residents, or immigrants, is now running at an annual pace closer to 400,000, down from nearly half a million.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has essentially adopted the Trudeau plan, which if successful will keep the current population steady at about the current 41.5 million level over the next two years. It would mark the first time since Confederation in 1867 that the country saw zero population growth.

Yet when viewed over the full horizon, the curbs will simply bring the average population growth rate for the decade back to about 1.3 percent, which is much closer to historical norms. We’re simply correcting a major policy anomaly.

Looking back, it’s too early to know for certain what effect the population surge had on wages and joblessness, according to Skuterud, who notes that younger Canadians, in particular, may have borne the brunt of it, given they tend to compete with newcomers for entry-level jobs.

What’s less in dispute is how the immigration surge lowered average living standards.

The evidence suggests that looser entry requirements over recent years brought in lower quality workers. Because of this, the economy failed to grow in line with population. The size of the pie didn’t grow fast enough to keep up with the number of people trying to take a slice.

The end result was the erosion of public confidence in immigration, which could linger in Canadian politics for years.

This is particularly true among younger Canadians, who now appear more open to curbing immigration levels. For many, tighter labour markets and more affordable housing—not higher population numbers—are the priority. Slower immigration supports those goals.

So, how did the government misjudge the situation so badly? And is there a lesson here for the Carney government?

Part of the problem stemmed from the unique distortions of the pandemic. The government overestimated labour shortages and then overcompensated by opening the immigration floodgates.

But there was also a broader miscalculation. Trudeau emerged from the pandemic with renewed ambitions and a belief that he had an expanded mandate to pursue transformative change, including on the immigration front.

Ambition, however, has a way of outpacing reality. And overshooting is always a risk when leaders grow too confident in their ability to enact change.

Carney is now putting forward an ambitious agenda of his own. Whether he’ll draw any lessons from Canada’s great immigration experiment remains to be seen.

Source: Theo Argitis: Canada’s great immigration experiment is ending

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The Functionary On PM Carney’s Work Style

2025/06/11 2 Comments

Another interesting assessment of Carney’s management style:

“For too long, when federal agencies have examined a new project, their immediate question has been ‘why?’ With this bill, we will instead ask ourselves ‘how?’” he said.

That’s a signal.

He expects the public service to change how it works: less process, more results. Less caution, more action. Fewer barriers, more execution.

The bill also creates a Major Projects Office — a single federal point of contact to help priority projects through assessment and permitting.

It’s a tall order: a major cultural shift from administration to execution. From gatekeepers to doers. Public servants managed to do it during the pandemic, when rules loosened and they were galvanized by the mission to protect the health of Canadians.

But this time around it won’t be easy. As one long-time deputy minister put it, this is about a “client-focused approach to delivery” for a system built on managing risk and compliance.

“This legislation is a test for us to prove we can deliver. People are excited, but we’ll have to work really hard to do it,” said a senior bureaucrat not authorized to speak publicly.

“How do we streamline our processes to be more efficient? How do we actually think about the national interests of the country while recognizing environmental and Indigenous rights? That culture shift is a different way of thinking and focuses on execution.”….

Ready or not, Carney demands answers
Word has spread fast that Carney doesn’t suffer weak briefings. He’s known to cut them short when officials can’t answer his questions — and to call people out when they’re unprepared.

The stories get retold, maybe reshaped — it is Ottawa, after all — but the message has landed: come ready or don’t come at all.

Everyone’s heard a version: Carney meets with a senior bureaucrat who can’t answer a question. He stops the briefing cold and in so many words tells them to come back when they know their file. Ouch.

The risk in that kind of exchange? Officials might start pulling their punches — and stop speaking truth to power.

Carney brings a “toughness,” as one senior bureaucrat told me. He expects the clerk and deputy ministers to know their files cold. No vague answers. No promises to follow up. He wants clear answers in the room. “He digs and digs,” said one official. “People will just have to adjust and be ready for that.”

Source: The Functionary On PM Carney’s Work Style

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Yakabuski: Le parti de la Charte

2025/04/07 Leave a comment

Right signal on pre-emptive use of the Charter:

…Lorsqu’on lui a demandé si son gouvernement avait l’intention d’intervenir devant la Cour suprême du Canada dans l’éventualité où cette loi se trouverait devant le plus haut tribunal du pays, M. Carney a répondu par l’affirmative. « Mon gouvernement a un malaise avec l’utilisation [préventive] de la “clause nonobstant” », a-t-il affirmé à propos de la disposition de dérogation enchâssée dans la section 33 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés. « L’enjeu est [de savoir si] on a des droits ici au Canada ou non. Un droit est un droit. Si on utilise trop souvent la “clause nonobstant” de manière [préventive], on dit qu’on n’a pas de charte des droits ici au Canada. C’est une question pour la Cour suprême. Ce n’est pas plus compliqué que cela. »

Or, la Cour suprême s’apprête déjà à examiner la question du recours préventif à la disposition de dérogation dans le dossier de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État québécois, la loi 21. Cette cause sera entendue bien avant que toute contestation de la loi 96 puisse arriver devant le plus haut tribunal du pays.

S’il s’oppose uniquement à l’utilisation préventive de cette disposition, pourquoi M. Carney souhaite-t-il intervenir dans le dossier de la loi 96 si la question doit être, selon toute probabilité, réglée avant même que la Cour suprême n’accepte d’examiner ce texte législatif ? Est-ce que le chef libéral aurait plutôt sauté sur l’occasion de se prononcer sur la loi 96 afin d’envoyer un signal affirmant qu’il entend défendre la minorité anglophone du Québec ? Lui seul le sait.

Ce qui est toutefois clair, c’est qu’un gouvernement fédéral mené par Mark Carney chercherait à éliminer la capacité des gouvernements provinciaux à recourir préalablement à la disposition de dérogation. Ce n’est pas un détail. Le délai entre l’adoption d’une loi provinciale et le moment où la Cour suprême détermine si elle viole la Charte canadienne des droits peut s’étendre sur plusieurs années. La loi 21 fut adoptée en 2019, et on ne sait toujours pas ce qu’en pense le plus haut tribunal du pays.

En interdisant aux provinces de recourir de manière préventive à la disposition de dérogation, la Cour suprême imposerait une limite fondamentale à la souveraineté des provinces dans leurs champs de compétence. C’est ainsi que le constitutionnaliste Guillaume Rousseau qualifie la proposition de M. Carney de « radicale ». Une loi québécoise « pourrait être suspendue pendant six ou sept ans, en attendant un jugement de la Cour suprême, et ce, même si cette loi vise à régler un problème immédiat », a écrit Me Rousseau dans une chronique publiée cette semaine dans Le Journal de Montréal.

Professeur à l’Université de Sherbrooke, Me Rousseau a été nommé le mois dernier coprésident du nouveau Comité d’étude sur le respect des principes de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État sur les influences religieuses par le gouvernement caquiste. C’est un fervent défenseur de la souveraineté parlementaire du Québec. Il n’en demeure pas moins qu’il soulève une question importante sur la pertinence de la disposition de dérogation si on interdit son utilisation préventive — surtout au Québec, où la suspension d’une loi linguistique pendant plusieurs années (en attendant que la Cour suprême détermine son sort) pourrait avoir une incidence non négligeable sur le déclin du français.

« Nous sommes le parti de la Charte, et nous allons intervenir à la Cour suprême dans les cas qui [pourraient] venir », a déclaré le chef libéral la semaine dernière lorsqu’il a été interrogé pour la première fois sur la loi 96. Qu’on se le tienne pour dit : le Québec a beau être « incroyable » aux yeux de M. Carney, il n’a pas l’intention de le laisser faire.

Source: Le parti de la Charte

… When asked if his government intended to intervene before the Supreme Court of Canada in the event that the law was before the highest court in the country, Mr. Carney answered in the affirmative. “My government is uncomfortable with the [preventive] use of the ‘notwithstanding clause’,” he said about the exemption provision enshrined in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “The issue is [to know if] we have rights here in Canada or not. A right is a right. If we use the “notwithstanding clause” too often in a [preventive] way, we say that we do not have a charter of rights here in Canada. This is a question for the Supreme Court. It’s not more complicated than that. ”

However, the Supreme Court is already preparing to examine the issue of the preventive recourse to the derogation provision in the file of the Act respecting the secularism of the Quebec State, Bill 21. This case will be heard long before any challenge to Bill 96 can come before the highest court in the country.

If he opposes only the preventive use of this provision, why does Mr. Does Carney wish to intervene in the file of Bill 96 if the matter must, in all likelihood, be settled even before the Supreme Court agrees to examine this legislative text? Would the Liberal leader have rather jumped at the opportunity to vote on Bill 96 in order to send a signal stating that he intends to defend Quebec’s English-speaking minority? Only he knows.

What is clear, however, is that a federal government led by Mark Carney would seek to eliminate the ability of provincial governments to use the waiver provision beforehand. It’s not a detail. The time between the adoption of a provincial law and the time when the Supreme Court determines whether it violates the Canadian Charter of Rights can extend over several years. Law 21 was adopted in 2019, and we still do not know what the highest court in the country thinks of it.

By prohibiting the provinces from making preventive use of the waiver provision, the Supreme Court would impose a fundamental limit on the sovereignty of the provinces in their fields of jurisdiction. This is how the constitutionalist Guillaume Rousseau describes the proposal of Mr. Carney of “radical”. A Quebec law “could be suspended for six or seven years, pending a Supreme Court judgment, even if this law aims to solve an immediate problem,” wrote Me Rousseau in a column published this week in Le Journal de Montréal.

Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke, Me Rousseau was appointed last month as co-chair of the new Study Committee on Respect for the Principles of the Act on the Secularism of the State on Religious Influences by the Caquist Government. He is a fervent defender of Quebec’s parliamentary sovereignty. Nevertheless, it raises an important question about the relevance of the derogation provision if its preventive use is prohibited — especially in Quebec, where the suspension of a language law for several years (pending the Supreme Court’s fate) could have a significant impact on the decline of French.

“We are the Charter party, and we will intervene in the Supreme Court in cases that [may] come,” the Liberal leader said last week when he was first asked about Bill 96. Let’s take it for said: Quebec may be “incredible” in the eyes of Mr. Carney, he has no intention of letting him do it.

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Geoff Russ: Mark Carney can’t be trusted to get immigration under control

2025/03/31 Leave a comment

Example of any number of articles and commentary by Postmedia columnists warning that the appointment of Mark Wiseman, and to a lessor extent, Marco Mendocino, mean that PM Carney will continue the same high immigration policies of Trudeau. IMO, too early to tell, whether he would continue or expand the restrictions of former Minister Miller, or not. But certainly Wiseman’s appointment could be interpreted as such:

Donald Trump and his tariffs will not be the only key issue that determines who will be prime minister after April, 28. Canada has been plagued by a diverse set of problems for years, all of which will be remembered by voters on election day, including immigration.

Prior to Trump’s election and his decision to threaten Canada, one of the biggest controversies in Canada was the abrupt end of an uncontested pillar in Canadian political culture — immigration. It crumbled as if struck by a sledgehammer after just a few years of the Trudeau government’s careless mass-immigration policies.

The numbers laid bare illustrate Canada’s resulting issues of scarcity. Simply put, Canada is not built to sustain half a million newcomers per year.

Stephen Harper’s government admitted roughly 250,000 permanent residents per year between 2006 and 2015. The Trudeau wave saw those numbers increasing from Harper’s pre-2015 levels, to an average around 334,000, with four years (2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023) exceeding 341,000, at a time when Century Initiative, lobby group that advocates for dramatically higher immigration levels, was at the height of its influence in Ottawa.

In 2018, representatives of the Initiative lamented that Canada’s annual intake of about 310,000 people per year would only increase the population to 53 million by 2100, and called for an increase to 450,000 to reach the goal of 100 million.

Created by former McKinsey executive, Dominic Barton and former BlackRock executive Mark Wiseman, Century Initiative publicly endorsed the Trudeau government’s moves to take in 500,000 new immigrants per year by 2025.

However, the scheme rapidly lost all political currency as the population influx rocked Canada. Immigration-driven demand for housing and services vastly outstripped the supply of both, resulting in a palpable decline in affordability and access to health care, schooling and social services.

Between 2015 and 2024, Canada’s ranking in the Human Development Index plummeted from 9th to 18th, while the country fell behind Italy in the average growth of real GDP per capita.

Western governments since the Great Recession have tried to claim that large-scale immigration is an unambiguous economic benefit. Given the state of the economies of Canada, Germany, and others that embraced mass immigration, immigration has not been a silver bullet to remedy slow growth and stagnation.

Immigrants themselves are not at the root of Canada’s long-standing problems. However, it is also clear that increasing their numbers in such a deliberate fashion failed to make Canada more competitive or improve the lives of its citizens.

There has not been a meaningful increase in the numbers of engineers, physicians, and software developers. In essential services like health care, the ratio of family doctors in relation to the general population has actually worsened. Rather, Canada has imported hundreds of thousands of unskilled international students who stock shelves, deliver food, and flip hamburgers for minimum-wage.

On the other hand, academic institutions have become dependent on this new class of economic immigrant, who often enters the country on a student visa to attend suspect career colleges while paying exorbitant international student fees.

This is not an economic climate that breeds dynamism or healthy growth. Canada needs to be a top choice for highly-skilled immigrants, which means having attractively affordable housing and quality services, neither of which have been rapidly deteriorating.

Even if the restrictions on foreign credentials are loosened in Canada, few trained doctors or dentists from India or South Africa will pick Toronto over Dallas as long as the latter offers substantially higher paycheques and cheaper housing.

In-fact, just 46 per cent of immigrants are now choosing to receive Canadian citizenship, compared to 72 per cent in 1996. Last fall, Ipsos found that just over one quarter of all newcomers plan on leaving Canada within two years, with many citing the lack of affordability. This they have in-common with younger Canadians, many of whom are resigned to bleak and leaner lives than those enjoyed by their parents.

It is therefore concerning that Mark Carney has brought on Century Initiative co-founder Mark Wiseman as an advisor, whose name is ironic considering the results of his lobby group’s ideology. Canadians do not want Century Initiative-inspired ideas anymore, with nearly 60 per cent of residents polled last summer wanting substantially less immigration.

Unlike Europe, where mass-immigration has resulted in a slew of cultural and social clashes between asylum seekers and the established population, the pushback to immigration in Canada still mostly stems from economic factors, particularly housing.

Nonetheless, Wiseman’s presence on the prime minister’s team is political poison. He once even publicly endorsed pushing the Century Initiative’s agenda, even if it caused outrage in Quebec.

For many Québécois, their future is a major source of concern as their demographic place in North America shrinks. The prospect of more mass immigration could be the landmine that blows up Carney’s current run of goodwill in Quebec.

Without Quebec, Carney has little hope of winning a majority government, and even a parliamentary plurality is uncertain. Within hours of Wiseman’s involvement being announced, both the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois went on the attack, in both official languages.

Pierre Poilievre himself attacked the Century Initiative as striving to “bring in people from poor countries in large numbers, to take away Canadian jobs, drive wages down and profits up,” and that Canada should only admit people who can be actually housed and employed

Wiseman’s role will harden the perception that Carney is merely feigning a Liberal shift back to the centre under his leadership. It was a misstep that undercuts Carney’s credibility on immigration caps, which he has nominally pledged to maintain until housing is expanded.

To their credit, the Liberal government significantly scaled back the annual immigration numbers in Trudeau’s final months as PM, if only due to public backlash. A new leader, and Trump’s blustering, has gifted the Liberals a huge opportunity to reinvent themselves as the defenders of the country, while sidestepping hard questions about their thus far poor record in government.

Mark Carney is saying and promising all the right things to pull the Liberals back towards the centre and a genuine pro-growth agenda, earning him plaudits across the political spectrum, even from conservatives. However, if he continues to surround himself with the same crew of advisors and cabinet ministers who sailed Canada into a lost decade, can Carney truly be the captain to right the ship, least of all on immigration?

Source: Geoff Russ: Mark Carney can’t be trusted to get immigration under control

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Todd: This should be the first Canadian election that focuses on migration

2025/03/28 Leave a comment

I suspect, however, that it will not given that immigration, like so many other issues, is drowned out by the existential crisis of the Trump administration. But yes, appointments by PM Carney provide a hook to raise the issue and cite the excessive influence of the Century Initiative in past government policy before former immigration minister reversed course. As I have argued before, his changes provide space for immigration policy discussions without being labelled as xenophobic or racist.

Skuterud’s comments on rotating immigration ministers is valid and unfortunately former minister Miller was shuffled out by PM Carney:

A controversial appointment put migration in the headlines on the same weekend that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a snap election.

The investment fund manager and former head of the Bank of Canada, who won the Liberal leadership contest two weeks ago, became the subject of news stories focusing on how he has chosen Mark Wiseman, an advocate for open borders, as a key adviser.

Wiseman is co-founder of the Century Initiative, a lobby group that aggressively advocates for Canada’s population to catapult to 100 million by 2100. Wiseman maintains Canada’s traditional method of “screening” people before allowing them into the country is “frankly, just a waste of time.” The immigration department’s checks, he says, are “just a bureaucracy.”

Wiseman believes migration policy should be left in the hands of business.

The appointment of Wiseman is an indication that Carney, a long-time champion of free trade in capital and labour, is gathering people around him who value exceptional migration levels and more foreign investment, including in housing.

Carney denied a charge by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre that bringing in Wiseman “shows that Mark Carney supports the Liberal Century Initiative to nearly triple our population to 100 million people. … That is the radical Liberal agenda on immigration.”

Carney tried this week to distance himself from the Century Initiative, telling reporters Wiseman will not be advising him on migration.

For years, migration issues have been taboo in Canada, says SFU political scientist Sanjay Jeram.

But the Canadian “‘immigration consensus’ that more is always better” is weakening, Jeram says. Most people believe “public opinion toward immigration has soured due to concerns that rapid population growth contributed to the housing and inflation crises.” But Jeram also thinks Canadian attitudes reflect expanding global skepticism.

Whatever the motivations, Poilievre says he would reduce immigration by roughly half, to 250,000 new citizens each year, the level before the Liberals were elected in 2015. The Conservative leader maintains the record volume of newcomers during Trudeau’s 10 years in power has fuelled the country’s housing and rental crisis.

Carney has said he would scale back the volume of immigration and temporary residents to pre-pandemic levels, which would leave them still much higher than when the Conservatives were in office.

What are the actual trends? After the Liberal came to power, immigration levels doubled and guest workers and foreign students increased by five times. Almost three million non-permanent residents now make up 7.3 per cent of the population, up from 1.4 per cent in 2015.

Meanwhile, a Leger poll this month confirmed resistance is rising. Now 58 per cent of Canadians believe migration levels are “too high.” And even half of those who have been in the country for less than a decade feel the same way.

Vancouver real-estate analyst Steve Saretsky says Carney’s embracing of a key player in the Century Initiative is a startling signal, given that migration numbers have been instrumental in pricing young people out of housing.

Saretsky worries the tariff wars started by U.S. President Donald Trump are an emotional “distraction,” making Canadian voters temporarily forget the centrality of housing. He says he is concerned Canadians may get “fooled again” by Liberal promises to slow migration, however moderately.

Bank of Canada economists James Cabral and Walter Steingress recently showed that a one per cent increase in population raises median housing prices by an average of 2.2 per cent — and in some cases by as much as six to eight per cent.

In addition to Carney’s appointment of Wiseman, what are the other signs he leans to lofty migration levels?

One is Carney’s choice of chief of staff: former immigration minister Marco Mendicino, who often boasted of how he was “making it easier” for newcomers to come to the country. Many labour economists said Mendicino’s policies, which brought in more low-skilled workers, did not make sense.

By 2023, the Liberals had a new immigration minister in Marc Miller, who began talking about reducing migration. But Carney dumped Miller out of his cabinet entirely, replacing him with backbench Montreal MP Rachel Bendayan. Prominent Waterloo University labour economist Mikal Skuterud finds it discouraging that Bendayan will be the sixth Liberal immigration minister in a decade.

New ministers, Skuterud said, are vulnerable to special interests, particularly from business.

“It’s a complicated portfolio,” Skuterud said this week. “You get captured by the private interests when you don’t really understand the system or the objectives. You’re just trying to play whack-a-mole, just trying to meet everybody’s needs.”

Skuterud is among the many economists who regret how record high levels of temporary workers have contributed to Canada being saddled with the weakest growth in GDP per capita among advanced economies.

Last week, high-profile Vancouver condo marketer Bob Rennie told an audience that he pitched Carney on a proposal to stimulate rental housing by offering a preferred rate from the Canada Mortgage Housing Corp to offshore investors.

We also learned this week that Carney invited former Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson to run as a Liberal candidate. Robertson was mayor during the time that offshore capital, mostly from China, flooded into Vancouver’s housing market. When SFU researcher Andy Yan brought evidence of it to the public’s attention, Robertson said his study had “racist tones.” Two years later, however, Robertson admitted foreign capital had hit “like a ton of bricks.”

It’s notable that Carney, as head of the Bank of England until 2020, was one of the highest-profile campaigners against Brexit, the movement to leave the European Union.

Regardless of its long-lasting implications, Brexit was significantly fuelled by Britons who wanted to protect housing prices by better controlling migration levels, which were being elevated by the EU’s Schengen system, which allows the free movement of people within 29 participating countries.

For perhaps the first time, migration will be a bubbling issue this Canadian election.

While the link to housing prices gets much of the notice, SFU’s Jeram also believes “the negative framing of immigration in the U.S. and Europe likely activated latent concerns among Canadians. It made parties aware that immigration politics may no longer be received by the public as taboo.”

Source: This should be the first Canadian election that focuses on migration

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Yakabuski: Mark Carney turns the page on Justin Trudeau’s postnational Canada 

2025/03/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

….To be sure, Canada’s identity is strong, resilient and regenerative enough to survive without The Bay. But at a time when Canada’s existence is being threatened by our superpower neighbour and erstwhile best friend, we need leaders who are unafraid of celebrating the history of a country that remains one of the world’s most envied.

Mr. Carney seems to get it. “The ceremony we just witnessed reflects the wonder of a country built on the bedrock of three peoples: Indigenous, French, British,” he said after being sworn in on Mar. 14. “The office of Governor-General links us through the Crown and across time to Canada’s proud British heritage …Our bilingual identity makes us unique. And the French language enriches our culture.”

Of course, it will take more than replacing the words “Canadian Heritage” with “Canadian Culture and Identity” in a ministerial title for Mr. Carney to prove he is an uninhibited Canadian nationalist willing to challenge those who disparage our history and our (yes, flawed) heroes, all while encouraging a respectful dialogue about our past and future.

Still, Mr. Carney does appear to have turned the page on postnational Canada – an entity which, it must be said, only ever existed in our ex-PM’s imagination. In this respect Mr. Carney has more in common with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, a stalwart defender of Canadian symbols and all things John A. Macdonald. They are both post-postnationalists.

Vive le Canada.

Source: Mark Carney turns the page on Justin Trudeau’s postnational Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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