Maddeaux | Mark Carney hopes to lure tech workers to Canada. One problem: Canada is already struggling to keep and attract talent

2025/10/15 Leave a comment

Reminder not so easy:

Domestic STEM talent is fleeing, too. A 2023 study of STEM graduates from the classes of 2015 and 2016 at the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo and University of British Columbia found two-thirds of them working in the U.S. Similarly, a 2020 survey of graduating STEM students at the University of Waterloo found 84 per cent of the class planned to work in the U.S., driven primarily by significantly higher compensation. Nevermind attracting the best and brightest; we should be more worried about the U.S. absorbing our best and brightest.

In 2023, think tank The Dais clocked the average American tech salary to be about 46 per cent higher than the average Canadian tech salary with exchange rate and cost of living taken into account.

Top talent is smart enough to run a simple equation: wages are too low and living costs are too high. In particular, housing costs are outrageously divorced from incomes. Canada’s tech hubs in particular have some of the most distorted price-to-income ratios in the world….

Source: Opinion | Mark Carney hopes to lure tech workers to Canada. One problem: Canada is already struggling to keep and attract talent

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Sabrina Maddeaux: Canada’s immigration absolutists are refusing to correct course, no matter the cost 

2025/06/27 Leave a comment

Although intemperate and unbalanced, fundamentally correct in her critique:

…What is radical is the Century Initiative, whose dogged ideology rejects reality, denying and distorting evidence to pursue their vision, regardless of who else it hurts. There are many examples of this, but some are more egregious than others.

First is the Century Initiative’s claim that any reduction in immigration will harm housing affordability. Of course, it’s actually soaring immigration numbers far in excess of the housing stock that largely contributed to the housing crisis. In 2022, the federal public service warned Trudeau’s government about this consequence. In 2024, BMO economist Robert Kavcic wrote in a client note, “We’ve been firm in our argument that Canada has an excess demand problem in housing…non-permanent resident inflows, on net, have swelled to about 800k in the latest year, with few checks and balances in place, putting tremendous stress on housing supply and infrastructure.”

Yet somehow, the Century Initiative hasn’t gotten the message. Rather, their report argues, “housing supply shortages may be exacerbated due to the important role of immigrants filling critical labour shortages in Canada’s residential home construction industry.” They claim “the construction industry continues to rely heavily on immigrants to fill critical labour market gaps” and cite that “more than 1 in 5 general contractors and builders are immigrants.”

That figure may be true, but it’s also misleading because the immigrants who work as contractors and builders include those who arrived years, if not decades, before the recent immigration surge. In fact, a December 2023 Bank of Canada report on the matter notes, “A rise in immigration to Canada may contribute more to housing imbalances than found in studies of other countries. This is because Canada already has imbalances between its housing supply and demand and because relatively few newcomers join the construction industry.”1

At the same time, the authors state immigrants tend to boost near-term demand for rental accommodation while using funds brought from their home countries to achieve similar home ownership rates to those born in Canada within just a decade.

The bottom line: we know mass immigration greatly boosts housing demand, while data showing any meaningful boost to supply—and certainly enough supply to offset said demand—does not exist.

The Century Initiative also makes the argument that continued mass immigration is essential to Canada’s economic growth and prosperity, writing, “reduced immigration levels will reduce Canada’s nominal GDP by $37 billion over the next 3 years and accelerate Canada’s trajectory toward economic decline.” However, using nominal GDP instead of GDP per capita to measure prosperity conveniently glosses over some stark realities.

Nominal GDP measures the total value of goods and services a country produces. It is easily juiced with higher population numbers and doesn’t account for the distribution of wealth within an economy or individual living standards. This is what GDP per capita, which divides GDP by the total population of the country, does. Canada’s GDP continues to hover around pre-pandemic levels, despite enormous population growth, as we fall further and further behind the U.S. and other peer economies. This is why Canadian economists have called using GDP in this context “a mirage of economic prosperity.”

The Century Initiative’s report goes on to make many, many mentions of “significant labour shortages” in “critical industries” to justify reversing immigration curbs. Yet, most of its attention is spent on attracting U.S. researchers and academics with a vague mention of IT and cybersecurity workers related to national security. There may be opportunities to recruit some true stars in these fields, but it’s unclear why the Century Initiative feels these very rare, exceptional talents couldn’t possibly be accommodated within Mark Carney’s 415,000 new permanent residents per year?

Otherwise, the Century Initiative is pretty mum on so-called labour shortages, because there aren’t many in Canada these days, let alone those that could be solved through more immigration. Rather, reckless immigration policies have suppressed wages in many sectors and contributed to soaring unemployment, especially for younger Canadians.2

Canada couldn’t keep up with the mass immigration targets set by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, and recent reductions are only a first step on the path to correcting the tremendous harm done. This is no longer a controversial statement for most Canadians, regardless of political stripe, because data, lived experience, and a basic understanding of math make it blindingly obvious. If you are already struggling to find enough homes, doctors, and jobs for five people, there’s going to be a problem when you try to accommodate 10.3

Instead of recognizing this and correcting course, the Century Initiative chooses instead to double down on its singular worldview at the expense of reason and the welfare of Canadians—particularly younger ones. They are not big thinkers, but extremists in pursuit of a narrow goal at the expense of all else.

Source: Sabrina Maddeaux: Canada’s immigration absolutists are refusing to correct course, no matter the cost

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Sabrina Maddeaux: Canada can’t cynically rebrand temporary foreign workers and call it a day 

2024/08/22 Leave a comment

More commentary from the right (Maddeaux briefly tried to be a Conservative candidate for the upcoming election). But addressing the impact of previous Liberal government loosening of visa and work restrictions will involve politically difficult trade-offs, many which a future Conservative government would also find challenging:

…More details on the change are due in the fall, but the government’s announcement provides clues on how they intend to sell the program to Canadians. It says, “The initiative would support the modernization of the economic immigration system by expanding the selection of permanent residents to candidates with a more diverse range of skills and experience.”

The gist: they plan to fold their TFW scheme into the permanent resident stream, pat themselves on the back for increasing “diversity,” and hope voters don’t pick up on the rebrand.

This move kills several birds with one stone. First, converting a large number of TFWs into permanent residents will help them achieve one of their marquee goals: 500,000 new immigrants per year by 2025. Despite the obvious stresses placed on housing, health care, and other infrastructure by this sky-high target unburdened by any signs of strategic planning, there’s been no indication Liberals intend to rethink it.

Second, low-wage employers will get continued access to these workers, preventing any serious pressure to raise wages.

Third, it will allow Liberals to earnestly claim they’ve cut back the TFW program, which is what’s getting all the bad press, without actually having to do any cutting.

Finally, it allows them to avoid the growing mess of expired work permits, which this government clearly doesn’t have the appetite to enforce. In their worldview, enforcing immigration rules isn’t progressive. Yet, moving a mess to a different room still means it’ll eventually have to be cleaned up—and, if it gets bad enough, someone’s eventually bound to argue the best course of action is to simply throw the entire thing out.

This is why it’s so difficult to take the Liberals’ pro-diversity claims seriously. Their actions, as already evidenced by rapidly shifting public opinion on immigration, continuously undermine long-term shared economic and cultural gains in favour of key stakeholders’ short-term financial interests.

Canada is lucky to still be a country where nuanced and level-headed conversation about immigration is not just possible but desired by voters. The public wants thoughtful solutions from policymakers, not marketers trying to sell them the same failed product in new packaging. That begins with recommitting to immigration in service of shared prosperity, not low-wage employers’ bottom lines.

Source: Sabrina Maddeaux: Canada can’t cynically rebrand temporary foreign workers and call it a day

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

Sabrina Maddeaux: International students are lucrative assets — Marc Miller says so

2023/10/02 Leave a comment

Unfortunate choice of words that meets the standard definition of a political gaffe: telling the truth. However, she should at least acknowledge that the provinces are equally complicit, particularly Ontario as freezing fees and allowing private colleges encouraged much of the abuse;

As Canada’s population continues to explode in a clearly unsustainable — and unethical — fashion, the federal Liberals continue to insist there’s no problem. Typically, they do this moralistic backpatting under the guise of embracing diversity.

Except when the mask slips and they say the quiet part aloud, like when Immigration Minister Marc Miller called international students “an asset that is very lucrative” during question period last week.

The admission struck a vastly different chord than when he told CBC News last month that his chief concern was “the stigmatization of particularly people of diversity that come to this country to make it better.”

So, which is it? Are Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals chiefly concerned about the wellbeing of newcomers, or do they primarily view them as cash cows for post-secondary institutions and low-wage employers? Because right now, it can’t be both.

Statistics Canada recently reported Canada’s population grew by over a million people between July 2022 and July 2023, with nearly all the growth coming from immigration. Even more striking is the 46 per cent increase in temporary residents over the same time period.

Remember, these numbers are vastly undercounted — by around a million, according to some estimates. We won’t get more accurate numbers from Statistics Canada until sometime next month.

Canada has an increasingly poor reputation for the way those temporary residents are treated once here. Too often, they face exploitative work conditions, low wages and substandard living conditions, alongside scam artists and diploma mills looking to cash in on those who desire to live here permanently.

Miller was right when he said immigrants want to come to Canada and contribute to its betterment, but what was left unsaid is that we don’t seem to care much about their betterment as long as someone’s benefiting financially.

Just three weeks ago, a United Nations special rapporteur who specializes in modern slavery called our temporary foreign worker program a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” This was after a visit to Canada where he spoke to migrant workers who reported unsanitary living conditions, overtime with no pay, wage theft, no access to healthcare and fear of reporting abuse.

This week, the Senate concluded our temporary foreign worker program is “probably in need of a critical rethink” after studying the issue for months.

Meanwhile, the extent of the exploitation suffered by international students continues to be exposed. This week, another Senate report found foreign students were being misled, often intentionally by “education consultants” paid by Canadian colleges to recruit overseas, that studying in Canada will automatically lead to permanent residency.

Some of these “schools” — if they can be called that — don’t even have proper classrooms, instructors or class schedules, let alone accommodations or support services. Tuition is sky high and, while some students come from wealthy backgrounds, many more rely on their families taking out high-interest loans back home or re-mortgaging the family farm.

For these students, there’s more at risk than simply being unable to work in their chosen field or obtain permanent residency — their families have put everything on the line for what can be a cruel mirage of an opportunity.

This immense pressure, combined with Canada’s too-often disappointing reality and dismal living conditions, has contributed to a reported increase in suicides among international students. One funeral home told CBC News this spring that they used to repatriate no more than two student bodies to India per month, but that number has more than doubled in the last year.

It’s worth noting Canada doesn’t actually track the number of international student deaths, let alone suicides, within our borders. Perhaps it’s more convenient not to know.

International students are also increasingly falling victim to sexual exploitation as they struggle to afford rent and other necessary expenses.

Trudeau’s Liberals can’t wash their hands of responsibility by blaming a few bad actors and calling it another day on the Hill. These problems have worsened significantly since 2015 when they came into power with a determination to turbocharge immigration at any cost, with no plan for sustainability. This was no secret among those paying attention, although many in politics preferred to look away.

The recent Senate report also went so far as to say the federal government itself is “perpetuating an inflated sense of hope” by not being clear with prospective students about the actual process of obtaining permanent resident status when advertising the advantages of studying here.

Canada sells its immigration program as a vehicle for hope. In reality, it’s become loaded with human tragedy and tales of horror. It appears the Liberals are fine with that, as long as newcomers continue to be lucrative assets for the right stakeholders.

Source: Sabrina Maddeaux: International students are lucrative assets — Marc Miller says so

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Sabrina Maddeaux: Housing and health crises eroding Canada’s pro-immigration consensus

2023/07/10 Leave a comment

More commentary based upon the Abacus poll and findings re concerns on housing, healthcare and infrastructure:

For about as long as most politicians and voters alive today remember, Canada has been a solidly pro-immigration nation. Until now, public opinion was effectively unanimous, at least outside of Quebec, that more newcomers represent an absolute good.

This allowed us the luxury of being rather superficial about immigration policy. It was far from a matter that decided elections — in fact, it’s such a historic nonstarter, pollsters rarely bothered to include it when asking Canadians about what issues mattered to them.

Any discussion of it was usually one note: how do we get more immigrants, quicker? Differences between parties’ approaches were barely visible to the human eye.

But public opinion can shift rapidly when voters’ lived experiences, or even perceptions of them, change. Indeed, a new poll by Abacus Data’s David Coletto suggests we may already be on that path.

This is why, particularly with housing and health-care shortages causing pain from coast to coast, it was never a good idea to take Canada’s pro-immigration consensus for granted.

As housing and health-care problems slipped into full-blown crises, the federal Liberals continued to do exactly that. Not ones to favour policy nuances and high on moral hubris, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government took the “more is always better” immigration ethos to the max.

While commentators, including me, and economists warned that this rapid-scaling approach may not be sustainable and risked souring Canadians on immigration, there’s been no sign anyone in power is listening.

Canada’s immigration targets soared to 500,000 a year, not including the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which totalled over 200,000 new approvals in 2022, or international student visas, which are limitless and counted just over 550,000 new students last year. That’s well over a million new people entering Canada per year.

To help visualize the magnitude, that’s an entire Calgary (population: 1,019,942) added each year. Or approximately two Hamiltons (population: 519,949), or three Halifaxes (population: 359,111).

Meanwhile, there’s a surgical wait list of 6,509 children at Toronto’s SickKids hospital, 67 per cent of whom are beyond the recommended window for care. Wait lists for family doctors are reaching the 10-year mark in some locales. British Columbia is offloading at least 5,000 cancer patients to the U.S. because untenable wait times could lead to preventable deaths.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said last year that we need at least 5.8 million homes by 2030 for housing to become affordable again. A year later, many municipalities across the country aren’t anywhere near on pace to build their share of the pie.

It’s also more and more often newcomers themselves, particularly temporary workers and students, who suffer the brunt of housing shortages when they arrive. This has led to increasing exploitation, from employers confiscating passports to landlords taking rent in the form of sexual acts.

This is certainly not the Canada many newcomers imagined, and it shouldn’t be one we’re proud to offer more and more of them with visions of our own economic gain dancing in our heads.

Any realist would see something has to give. Canada can’t have it all when it comes to immigration while shortages of basic goods and services persist. While the shortages aren’t immigrants’ faults, and they shouldn’t be blamed for them, that doesn’t preclude us from acknowledging our immigration policies need a sober second look.

Coletto’s national Abacus Data survey taken this June reports 11 per cent of Canadians now rank immigration as a top three issue. More revealing, 61 per cent of respondents consider Canada’s 500,000-per-year immigration target too high. Thirty-seven per cent of Canadians classify the 500,000 target as “way too high.”

I can’t help but wonder what the response would be had Abacus’s question cited the true one million newcomers entering per year. As it stood, 63 per cent of respondents think the number of immigrants entering Canada is having a negative impact on housing, and 49 per cent feel the same way about the impact on health care. Only 43 per cent believe immigration is positively impacting our economic growth.

Many federal politicians seem afraid to touch the complex immigration file for fear of being branded xenophobic or racist by political opponents. Yet, Coletto finds even a majority of immigrants think current targets are too high.

Barring a miracle on the housing or health-care fronts, and if public opinion continues in this direction, lawmakers can’t avoid the immigration file much longer. The question should be, how can we responsibly tailor our immigration policies now, so that we can continue to grow the country robustly into the future?

Canada’s been lucky to enjoy so many decades without having to think too hard about immigration, but the longer we wait to do so, the tougher the eventual conversation will likely be.

Source: Sabrina Maddeaux: Housing and health crises eroding Canada’s pro-immigration consensus

Toronto Sun editorial also picks up on this theme:

The Trudeau government’s commitment to dramatically increase immigration levels is causing widespread concern among Canadians.
A recent Abacus Data survey of 1,500 adults from June 23 to 27 found 61% believe Canada’s target of admitting about 500,000 permanent residents next year is too high, including 37% who feel it is “way too high.”
Abacus Data CEO David Coletto said 63% believe current immigration levels — the government is planning to bring in about 1.5 million immigrants from 2023 to 2025 — are having a negative impact on Canada’s housing shortage.
Almost half are concerned about the impact on Canada’s health-care system

There’s still a large percentage of Canadians who agree with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s arguments that immigration is important to increase the number of available workers in Canada because of our low birth rate (50%) and to contribute to economic growth (43%).

The underlying concern to us is that the federal government should be setting its immigration targets in close consultation with the provinces and particularly with major cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.
That’s because most immigrants don’t settle in “Canada” but in specific urban centres across Canada, stressing municipal and provincial governments in terms of providing public services.

While Canada’s annual admission levels of refugees are in a separate category from permanent immigration, the situation in Toronto illustrates the problem.

Toronto Mayor-elect Olivia Chow recently noted the city government this year will spend about $97 million accommodating refugee applicants who occupy about a third of the city’s shelter spaces.

Since this is the result of federal policies, Chow said, the Trudeau government needs to contribute to the costs of their care.
To be fair, the feds have given almost $200 million to shelter support for refugees in Toronto over the past five years, but the city says the ad hoc nature of these payments is unsustainable and they need to be made on a permanent and reliable basis.

Canadians have concerns about immigration levels not because they’re racists, but because they legitimately worry about their impact on already stretched municipal and provincial services across Canada

Since the Trudeau government is setting those targets, it also has a responsibility to consult with provinces and cities on how to accommodate them.

Source: EDITORIAL: Feds need to listen on immigration levels

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Sabrina Maddeaux: Liberals bring in influx of immigrants without a plan to support them

2023/01/06 Leave a comment

Yet another commentary questioning the impact of high immigration levels on housing, healthcare, infrastructure etc.

But Maddeaux is silent on the “complicity” of provincial governments who are responsible for addressing many of the externalities and costs, the business community in pushing for high levels of both permanent and temporary residents, and the various stakeholders supporting the increased and increasing levels:

The federal Liberals are well on their way to meeting at least one of their marquee goals: 500,000 new immigrants per year by 2025. The stats for 2022 just came in, and last year saw a record 431,645 new permanent residents.

That’s a 6.4 per cent increase over 2021 — and this year aims to admit 465,000 new residents, which will be another 7.7 per cent increase over 2022. These numbers don’t include temporary foreign workers or international students, which are also rising at record rates.

This sort of rapid swell isn’t just historic for Canada, it makes us the fastest-growing country in the G7. This would be great news, if not for the fact that we’re also among the least equipped to accept a mass influx of new people.

To put those earlier numbers in context, the population of Halifax is about 440,000. Quebec City’s is around 550,000. We are, or soon will be, adding the equivalent population of one of those cities each year.

Diversity is a pride point for many Canadians, and we’re undoubtedly a stronger and better country thanks to immigrants’ many contributions over the decades. However, this doesn’t mean we should blindly open the floodgates to hundreds of thousands more per year, when there’s scant evidence we can support them.

As much as we may want to welcome more immigrants into the fold, there needs to be a debate about whether now is the best time to boost targets. We may find that, until we get our house in order, the risks outweigh the potential rewards.

Immigration isn’t inherently good for a country, or even for immigrants, in and of itself. Positive outcomes for all parties require careful planning and a sense of realism. Unfortunately, it appears the Liberals have neither.

Our health-care system ranks poorly against peer countries and seems to be only getting worse. We can barely even care for sick children in our major urban centres, let alone rural areas. Family doctors are practically the new Polkaroo.

Our housing situation is dismal. We don’t have enough homes, and the ones we do have are exorbitantly expensive and out of reach for all but the very wealthiest young Canadians and newcomers.

It seems like we have shortages of every type of basic infrastructure and service, from transit to schools and childcare spots.

International students are frequenting food banks, living in crowded and often unsanitary rooming houses and even driving five hours –– each way –– to attend classes.

Many immigrants still can’t work in their trained fields because we haven’t taken the time to sort our credentialing systems. Despite just about everyone agreeing that foreign-trained doctors shouldn’t be driving taxi cabs, it always seems to be a problem for another day.

Meanwhile, Liberals argue that we need more newcomers to boost our economy and address labour shortages. Not only does this seem callous and exploitative in light of our inability to provide for needs like housing and health care, there’s little evidence our current immigration system can produce these desired outcomes.

At a certain point, we will get diminishing returns. While more immigrants mean more tax dollars, we don’t get to just take from them without giving anything back. They, too, require doctors, affordable homes, schools and passports in a timely manner. They use subways and parks and, eventually, long-term care homes.

By failing to invest heavily in infrastructure and government services, the Liberals are exacerbating resource scarcity and intensifying competition for fundamental goods and services.

Historically, this never ends well. Eventually, people look for someone to blame for their declining quality of life, and that group tends to be newcomers.

To be clear, such scarcity isn’t the fault of immigrants. It’s the fault of governments that either failed or didn’t bother to properly plan to support their targets. Yet that will be of little consolation if Canadians’ historically welcoming nature begins to take a turn.

Canada’s success with immigration is thanks to its record of sustainable growth. For the Liberals to throw that ethos out the window isn’t just irresponsible, it’s dangerous.

Source: Sabrina Maddeaux: Liberals bring in influx of immigrants without a plan to support them

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,