Sun editorial: High immigration fuels Canada’s housing crisis

2023/11/04 Leave a comment

Unfortunately true:

While Canadians continue to worry about the availability of affordable housing, the Trudeau government announced Wednesday it will continue its current policy of boosting immigration levels to record highs through 2026.

Its existing plan, announced a year ago, of admitting 465,000 new permanent residents to Canada this year, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025, will now be extended to another 500,000 admissions in 2026.

Next year’s target of 485,000 new permanent residents will consist of 281,135 economic immigrants, 114,000 in family class, 76,115 refugees and 13,750 humanitarian admissions.

For 2025 and 2026, 500,000 new permanent residents will be admitted annually — 301,250 economic immigrants, 118,000 in family class, 72,750 refugees and 8,000 humanitarian admissions.

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has long argued higher immigration levels are needed to boost economic growth because of Canada’s low birth rate, its pursuit of high immigration policies flies in the face of growing public concerns about the lack of affordable housing.

A Nanos poll in September showed most Canadians surveyed — 53% — believe Canada’s current immigration levels are too high, compared to 34% who approve of them and 8% who think they should be higher. The remaining 6% were unsure.

An Environics poll released this week found stronger support for immigration — with 51% of those surveyed disagreeing with the statement “there’s too much immigration to Canada” compared to 44% who agreed.

But opposition to current immigration levels rose dramatically by 17 percentage points in one year, while support dropped by 18 percentage points — both huge reversals.

In recent months the TD Bank, BMO and National Bank of Canada, among others, have all warned the federal government that its policy of high immigration is exacerbating Canada’s housing shortage.

As the National Bank put it:

“The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing and demand … As housing affordability pressures continue to mount across the country, we believe Ottawa should consider revising its immigration targets to allow supply to catch up with demand.”

While Canadians have always welcomed immigration, there are clearly growing public concerns about federal immigration policy.

But on this issue, as on so many others, the Trudeau Liberals just aren’t listening.

Source: EDITORIAL: High immigration fuels Canada’s housing crisis

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Sun Editorial: ‘Jihadi Jack’ is not Canada’s problem

2023/09/12 Leave a comment

Agree. UK “offloaded” him to Canada despite him having born and raised in the UK and never having spent any time, or significant time, in Canada. Feel for the parents but not a reason to provide consular and other support:

Once again, pressure is being brought on the federal government to provide consular assistance to Canadians in Syrian prison camps.

Canadians are being held in camps run by Kurdish forces that reclaimed the area from the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — a military organization that seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
A recent Canadian Press story recounted the visit of a four-person “civil society” delegation, including a senator, to the camp to discuss the repatriation to Canada of some of those held there. The report omitted vital details about one of the men mentioned, Jack Letts.At 18, Letts left his home in the U.K. to join the terror group ISIS. Dubbed “Jihadi Jack” by the British media, Letts gets his Canadian citizenship through his father, John Letts. It’s unclear how much time — if any — his son has actually spent in this country. Jack was born and educated in the U.K. and that country has revoked his citizenship. As a signatory to the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, Canada can’t deprive a person of citizenship if it renders them stateless. So the U.K.’s pre-emptive action in revoking Letts’ citizenship has dumped the whole mess into our laps.

In 2019, then Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said, “Canada is disappointed that the United Kingdom has taken this unilateral action to off-load their responsibilities.” He told the CBC, “We have no obligation to facilitate his travel from his present circumstances, and we have no intention of facilitating that travel.”

This country should hold fast to that sentiment. It’s true Letts was young when he made the bad decision to join ISIS. His parents are exhausting every avenue in an attempt to return their son to them, as most parents would. Nevertheless, his presence in this country would be an insult to all those who honour the principles of freedom and democracy and those who have come here to escape terror.

Canadian citizenship is not a flag of convenience. It’s a badge of honour, hard won by those who fought and died for our rights and freedoms. Jack Letts does not in any way embody those values.

Source: EDITORIAL: ‘Jihadi Jack’ is not Canada’s problem

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Sun Editorial: Federal policies made housing crisis inevitable

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Recognizes role that provinces also play:

The way the Trudeau government talks about Canada’s affordable housing crisis, it’s as if the rapidly increasing number of international students and immigrants it’s admitting to Canada every year snuck up on it.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals came to power in 2015, Canada accepted 352,325 international students.

This year, according to Immigration Minister Marc Miller, the number will be about 900,000.

Miller told CBC’s The House on Saturday this isn’t just contributing to Canada’s affordable housing crisis, but also creating problems with “the integrity of the system, that has mushroomed, ballooned in the past couple of years.”

Now add the fact that when the Liberals came to power in 2015, 271,845 immigrants became permanent residents of Canada.

The Trudeau government’s plan is to boost that number to 465,000 this year, 485,000 in 2024 and to 500,000 in 2025.

Three Canadian banks have warned the federal government’s policy is misguided.

TD Bank said “continuing with a high-growth immigration strategy could widen the housing shortfall by about a half-million units within just two years.”

National Bank of Canada said “the federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing and demand.”

BMO said “heightened immigration flows designed to ease labour supply pressure immediately add to the housing demand they are trying to meet.”

The Trudeau government says it’s wrong to blame international students — on whom it may be considering a cap on admissions — and immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis.

Of course they’re not to blame.

The government is to blame for increasing their numbers so rapidly, with no coherent plan to house them, consistent with Trudeau’s view that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility. It’s not something that we have direct carriage of.”

To be fair, provincial and municipal governments share responsibility for housing with the federal government, which also says we need high immigration levels because of our low domestic birth rate to bolster the economy, including having sufficient workers to build homes.

But what’s also true is that issues the federal government has direct carriage of — immigration and international students — are contributing to Canada’s affordable housing crisis.

Source: EDITORIAL: Federal policies made housing crisis inevitable

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Sun editorial: High immigration fuels housing shortage

2023/08/14 Leave a comment

As it appears from Minister Miller’s initial public comments that the government has no intention to revise or freeze current and planned levels, they risk being labelled, correctly, as being pro-immigration ideologues and oblivious to reality.
There is enough concern about the impact of permanent and temporary migration across most of the political spectrum that this presents a major political risk to the Liberals in 2025.
The weakness, or course, is that all the provinces want more immigration save for Quebec and are thus equally complicit to the Liberal government: 
Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller has responded to repeated economic warnings the Trudeau government’s high-intake immigration policies are contributing to Canada’s housing shortage with a turn of phrase that doesn’t address the problem.
He said Friday we need more immigrants to build more housing.

“Without those skilled workers coming from outside Canada, we absolutely cannot build the homes and meet the demand that exists currently today,” Miller said, as reported by Global News.

But if the federal government’s plan to bring in almost 1.5 million immigrants to Canada between now and 2025 is already contributing to the housing shortage and raising the cost of housing, how will bringing in more immigrants solve it?

As TD Bank warned recently: “Continuing with a high-growth immigration strategy could widen the housing shortfall by about a half-million units within just two years. Recent government policies to accelerate construction are unlikely to offer a stop-gap due to the short time period and the natural lags in adjusting supply.”

The National Bank of Canada cautioned: “The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing and demand … As housing affordability pressures continue to mount across the country, we believe Ottawa should consider revising its immigration targets to allow supply to catch up with demand.”

BMO (Bank of Montreal) reported “heightened immigration flows designed to ease labour supply pressure immediately add to the housing demand they are trying to meet … The infrastructure in place and the industry’s ability to build clearly can’t support unchecked levels of demand, so the affordability conundrum continues.”

It’s true there is a shortage of workers in the construction industry and Miller recently announced a plan to encourage skilled trade workers to immigrate to Canada, but the federal government can’t guarantee how many immigrants will end up in the construction trades.

Given the fact most immigrants end up in cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary, the feds should be consulting with provincial and municipal governments about the number of immigrants they can reasonably absorb.

This as opposed to obsessing about reaching a target of almost 1.5 million immigrants by 2025.

Source: EDITORIAL: High immigration fuels housing shortage

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Sun Editorial: Trudeau’s responsible for housing policy

2023/08/03 Leave a comment

Seems like Postmedia on a roll with this linkage:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claiming housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility flies in the face of everything he’s said about the issue since coming to power in 2015.

Seriously, what is he thinking?

Appearing in Hamilton on Monday to announce four affordable housing projects creating 214 new units, to which federal taxpayers contributed $45 million, Trudeau said: “I’ll be blunt as well. Housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility. It’s not something that we have direct carriage of. But it is something that we can and must help with.”

He blamed the previous Stephen Harper government for abandoning housing policy, accusing Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre of being a party to that decision.

He also said the Ontario government should be doing more.

We agree with Trudeau that all levels of government have a part to play in the issue of housing supply, but for him to claim affordable housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility, undermined his own message that, “of all the cost-of-living challenges … housing is the most expensive thing.”

If that’s true, given everything Trudeau has said about the importance of affordable housing since he came to power in 2015, it had better be a primary responsibility for him.

As for Trudeau not having “direct carriage” of the issue, he has direct carriage of immigration, where he’s rapidly increasing the level to 1.45 million new arrivals between 2023 and 2025, contributing to the surge in demand and higher costs for housing nationally.

Trudeau knows this. As he said Monday: “Right now we’re facing a real challenge around housing in terms of supply. There’s simply not enough places for people to live.”

On the campaign trail in 2015, Trudeau promised a “comprehensive National Housing Strategy” to “make housing more affordable for those who need it most – seniors, persons with disabilities, lower-income families and Canadians working hard to join the middle class.”

As of March, 2023, according to the feds, taxpayers have committed $33.69 billion to Trudeau’s national housing strategy, which will top out at over $82 billion in March, 2028.

Trudeau says this has helped almost two million families and individuals get the housing they need.

If he’s going to claim successes in federal housing policy, he has to account for its shortcomings as well.

Source: EDITORIAL: Trudeau’s responsible for housing policy

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Sun Editorial: How to create a crisis in housing

2023/07/31 Leave a comment

Sun nails it more directly but avoids the option of freezing or reducing levels:

Hello, newly minted Housing Minister Sean Fraser and congratulations on your promotion. Ditto Marc Miller, also recently arrived in the Immigration portfolio after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s seismic shuffle this week.

The left hand of Immigration seems to be unaware of what the right hand of Housing is doing. So shake hands and start working together.

The Trudeau government has what it calls an “ambitious” target of bringing in 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

According to its National Housing Strategy, the federal government is committed to building, “up to 160,000 new affordable homes” over the next 10 years.

You don’t have to be a math genius to see the problem. The government is committed to bringing in 1.4 million people over the next three years and has a plan to build only 160,000 new homes. That leaves approximately 1.2 million newcomers looking for homes. Certainly, the private sector will fill many gaps – if they’re allowed to.

We already have a housing crisis, with people under-housed or homeless and those who can’t afford a mortgage in this over-inflated economy the government has created.

No one is arguing that this country shouldn’t bring in newcomers. Canada was built on immigration. It’s our economic lifeblood. But the numbers have to add up. And these don’t.

Fraser said recently he would, “urge caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers.”

Fair enough. Now show us your logical and practical plan to house them.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland recently turned down Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s reasonable request for more federal funding to help deal with a massive influx of asylum seekers who were living on the streets.

Freeland set an adversarial tone for every big city. The federal government will bring in hundreds of thousands of newcomers to this country, dump them on cities, shortchange those communities and tell them to deal with it.

It’s not just housing. Where’s the funding for new schools, community centres and healthcare? The government is creating a crisis.

Trudeau needs to put his money where his mouth is – and fund those newcomers before they, too, are living on the streets.

Source: EDITORIAL: How to create a crisis in housing

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