Keller: The campus occupations aren’t protected by free speech, because they aren’t speech

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

…Imagine if a Christian campus group took over King’s College Circle, and said it would remain until the university stopped funding anything to do with abortion. Should they be removed? Why? If your answer is they have to go because their opinions are wrong, you’re standing free speech on its head. This is Canada, not the People’s Republic of China.

The legal problem with an occupation, left or right, pro-Palestinian or anti-vaccine, isn’t what its participants are saying. It’s what they’re doing – taking over a space and holding it hostage.

What does that have to do with free speech? Nothing.

Source: The campus occupations aren’t protected by free speech, because they aren’t speech

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Keller: The Trudeau government’s promise of 3.87 million new homes is next to impossible

2024/04/29 Leave a comment

I and others have been noting that time needed to increase housing means further revisions to the number of immigrants, temporary and permanent, is needed:

…An extraordinarily high share of our national wealth is already invested in housing rather than in productive business assets. In 2022, 37.9 per cent of Canada’s gross fixed capital formation – investment in assets – was tied up in dwellings. That’s the highest level in the OECD.

And the Trudeau government’s unreachable building target may aim too low. To achieve affordability solely through more housing, CMHC last year said the number of homes needed could be almost six million. CIBC economist Benjamin Tal pegs the shortfall at closer to seven million.

The logical conclusion is that we can’t build our way to affordability, at least not any time soon. Ottawa has to lean harder on the demand side of the equation. That means significantly reversing the unprecedented spike in the number of temporary residents. Population growth has to come down – way down.

Source: The Trudeau government’s promise of 3.87 million new homes is next to impossible

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Keller: Is the Trudeau government overselling how much housing it can build? Yes

2024/04/17 Leave a comment

Indeed, particularly in the next few years if not more. Likely will not help their electoral prospects given time required to build new housing:

…When CIBC economist Benjamin Tal updated the CMHC estimate earlier this year, to account for recent unprecedented population growth because of immigration, he pegged the shortfall at closer to seven million homes.

If that’s true, then getting to housing affordability doesn’t just mean a doubling of the pace of home building. It would take a quadrupling.

The Trudeau government’s sudden burst of furious housing announcements – plus the suggestion that the resistance of some provinces is all that stands between Canada and sweet affordability – may deliver political dividends in the run-up to a 2025 election.

However, the overnight erection of a glittering skyline of new housing policies comes after the government spent years ignoring the growing stresses caused by its immigration choices. That’s partly what got us here.

The Liberals are now saying a lot of the right things on both housing and immigration. It’s a start. But to quote a handwritten note from the PM’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, which was entered into evidence last week at the foreign interference inquiry: “Bragging is not doing.”

Source: Is the Trudeau government overselling how much housing it can build? Yes

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Urback: According to Justin Trudeau, Justin Trudeau is fear-mongering on immigration,

2024/04/06 Leave a comment

Keller: The Trudeau government’s housing promises can’t fix a crisis of its own making

Good use of pointed satire to highlight the hypocrisy or wilful (?) blindness:

Someone, somewhere, appears to have taken a blowtorch to Canada’s immigration system. It’s a mess. We have too many people, and not enough homes, not enough transit, not enough health care infrastructure. International students are lining up at food banks and homeless shelters. Canadians’ attitudes on immigration are becoming more negative.

Who set fire to our once-enviable immigration system? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on a mission to find out. Just as soon as he gets all of this soot out of his hair.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Mr. Trudeau laid out the facts. “Over the past few years we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration … that has grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb,” he said. He gave an example: in 2017, two per cent of Canada’s population was made up of temporary immigrants; today, it’s 7.5 per cent. “That’s something we need to get back under control,” he said, adding that temporary immigration has “caused so much pressure in our communities.”

A few years ago, someone named Justin Trudeau would have accused Mr. Trudeau of fear-mongering for making these sorts of remarks about immigration. In fact, he saidexactly that when, for example, Conservative MP Steven Blaney asked about the massive backlog in immigration applications amid a wave of asylum seekers in 2018. “It is completely irresponsible of the Conservatives to arouse fears and concerns about our immigration system and refugees,” Mr. Trudeau said at the time.

“The reason for the delays is that the Harper Conservatives spent 10 years cutting our immigration services and getting rid of the employees who process applications,” he continued. “They did not manage our immigration system responsibly.”…

Source: Opinion: According to Justin Trudeau, Justin Trudeau is fear-mongering on immigration

Less clever, but equally pointed:

 

The only way to bring housing supply and demand back into a more equitable balance, at least in the next few years, is to lower demand. And the only way to do that is for the Trudeau government to retrace its hasty steps on temporary foreign residents. That is what the government has promised. That is what it has to do.

Source: The Trudeau government’s housing promises can’t fix a crisis of its own making

My reflections on this change of direction by the PM, and the related push on housing, is that it feels like fin de régime flailing around and desperation.

The change brings to mind, one of my favourite scenes from one of my favourite movies, Casablanca:

  • Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds? [Vote me out?]
  • Captain Renault: I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here. [immigration has grown too fast]
  • [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
  • Croupier: Your winnings, sir. [poll numbers]
  • Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much. [someone, somewhere else, broke immigration]
  • [aloud]
  • Captain Renault: Everybody out at once….

 

 

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Keller: The Liberals broke the immigration system at high speed. They’re repairing it by baby steps

2024/03/27 Leave a comment

Hard not to agree:

…In all of this, the Trudeau government is caught in a bind of its own making. It found, to its evident delight, that sharply ramping up the number of people arriving on notionally temporary permits was easy. To govern is to choose, but the government discovered that the less choosing it did – and the more rubber-stamping of visas it encouraged – the easier governing appeared to be.

It is now discovering that unwinding things, even a little, is more difficult. It will be lobbied heavily to eviscerate its modest promises, and to quietly reverse this course reversal.

That is also where Liberal predilections reside. They didn’t just break the immigration system. They broke it with great enthusiasm. And their repair job is still mostly blueprints, drawn up haltingly and under the duress of public opinion.

Compared with Europe and the United States, Canada has long had a wider immigration door, but also far more control – an aspect of the “order” in peace, order and good government – over who enters. That is what underpinned public support for immigration.

And controlling the door was important because once somebody gets into Canada, whether as a temporary worker, student or even tourist, it isn’t easy to get them to leave. Not if they don’t want to. Ottawa decides who gets in but has much less control over, or information about, how many people whose visas have expired, and who are no longer legally allowed to reside in Canada, nevertheless remain.

In the months and years to come, that is likely to be the final aftershock of Liberal immigration policy.

Restoring sense and sanity to the system won’t be easy. Breaking is easier than repairing.

Source: The Liberals broke the immigration system at high speed. They’re repairing it by baby steps

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Keller: Economically speaking, we’re all living in Brian Mulroney’s Canada [immigration]

2024/03/04 Leave a comment

Fair observation. Harper conservatives also maintained levels during 2008 financial crisis. Unclear whether Poilievre will maintain current plan of 500,000 new Permanent Residents by 2015 or not, not to mention curbing the steep rise in temporary workers and international students:

…There’s one more legacy of the Mulroney era that never gets talked about: immigration.

Until the early 1960s, immigration to this country was largely restricted to Europeans and Americans. Then, under John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives, Canada for the first time opened itself to the world, adopting a race-neutral immigration policy.

A quarter-century later, Mr. Mulroney’s PCs made a second big change to immigration, by moving to permanently increase annual immigration levels, regardless of economic conditions. Until then, Canada’s quotas had fluctuated year-to-year. In the boom times of 1967, for example, a Liberal government admitted 223,000 new Canadians. But numbers were sharply reduced under Pierre Trudeau, reaching a low point of just 84,000 arrivals in 1985.

The Mulroney government decided to not only steeply raise the annual targets, but to keep them there. In 1993, Canada accepted just shy of 257,000 immigrants.

The Chrétien Liberals would scale back those numbers, but only slightly. For most of the Chrétien era, the number of immigrants remained north of 200,000 a year, and at around 0.7 per cent of the population. That continued through the Harper era.

The Mulroney decision, paired with the Diefenbaker decision, slowly changed this place. The Canada of a couple of generations ago often talked about itself as the product of two founding peoples, British and French. Such phrasing now sounds anachronistic, and it is. But in the early 1980s, the visible minority population was less than 5 per cent of the national population.

Today, that figure is closer to 30 per cent. The mayors of Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary are all visible minorities, three of them are immigrants – and nobody cares. That too is part of the Mulroney legacy.

source: Economically speaking, we’re all living in Brian Mulroney’s Canada

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Keller: The Trudeau government needs more than words to restore the immigration consensus

2024/02/28 Leave a comment

Keller continues his well founded critique of immigration policies and highlights, as others have done, the mismatch between immigration and housing (I would add healthcare and infrastructure) timelines and the need to downsize temporary migration and other measures:

… Ending the severe mismatch between housing demand and supply, in this decade rather than the next (or the one after that), means addressing the cause of the spike in demand. It means significantly downsizing the temporary foreign worker program, downsizing and smartening up the student visa program, and things like reintroducing visa requirements for Mexican tourists, which the Trudeau government removed in 2015, and which has led to tens of thousands of refugee claimants arriving at Canadian airports.

Canada had an immigration consensus from the 1960s to 2015. The Trudeau government broke it. Mr. Miller can restore it. But des belles paroles won’t be enough.

Source: The Trudeau government needs more than words to restore the immigration consensus

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Keller: Justin Trudeau has the power to fix one of his biggest political problems. Joe Biden isn’t so lucky

2024/02/19 Leave a comment

Not as easy as portrayed but definitely compared to the USA:

….Mr. Biden and Democrats want to address this. This year, after Senate Democrats gave in to long-standing Republican demands and agreed to a tough border bill, the President said he would gladly sign it the minute it hit his desk.

Former president Donald Trump responded by ordering Republicans to kill the bill. He wants disorder at the border.

And Canada?

Our immigration surge – a mix of low-wage temporary foreign workers, schools peddling visas to aspiring low-wage workers, and refugee claimants arriving as alleged tourists from countries such as Mexico – is having effects similar to those in the U.S. Similar, but bigger.

On the one hand, GDP is higher than it would have been. But GDP per person has been shrinking since 2022. A country with a history of lagging productivity is lagging more than ever. Each piece of pie is getting smaller.

And population growth has been so large and fast that rental housing vacancies are at a record low, and heading lower. Rents are very high relative to wages, and unlikely to moderate any time soon. Ditto housing prices. Voters have noticed.

Mr. Biden can’t fix his immigration problem because Mr. Trump’s congressional minions won’t let him.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in contrast, has all the tools to rewrite the story he authored.

Most of what needs doing – downsizing but up-skilling the student visa program; eliminating temporary foreign work visas outside of agriculture and high-wage jobs; reimposing visa requirements on countries such as Mexico; returning permanent immigration to a focus on skilled immigrants – is up to the executive in the Canadian system.

If he wants to, the PM can make like Nike, and Just Do It.

Source: Justin Trudeau has the power to fix one of his biggest political problems. Joe Biden isn’t so lucky

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Keller: On immigration, the sum of Canada’s special interests is not the national interest

2024/02/10 Leave a comment

Nails it (money quote: “Even the government appears to have been largely unaware of its own actions, and even more ignorant of their consequences.”:

…When government makes policy, it usually consults with all of the stakeholders. It takes notes. It aims to please. And on temporary immigration, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall because he did exactly what all the king’s stakeholders and all the king’s lobbyists told him to do.

The business lobby said there was an economy-wide labour shortage – there isn’t, but sit through enough business stakeholder meetings and you’ll believe it. The solution was unlimited recruitment of low-wage overseas workers.

Colleges and universities said they needed an ever-growing number of student visas, their provincial masters mostly agreed, and business applauded because visa students were another low-wage work stream. A Quebec government that loudly demanded lower immigration quietly pressed for ever more temporary foreign workers. And progressive activists pushed for the lowering of all barriers to coming to Canada or remaining.

Year after year, the Liberals gave the stakeholders what they wanted. In a government-as-client-service model, it read like a success story.

But the sum of a bunch of narrow special interests does not add up to the national interest. It’s a pity this government didn’t figure that out sooner.

Source: On immigration, the sum of Canada’s special interests is not the national interest

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Keller: Here’s a crazy idea: How about a student visa program whose main beneficiary is Canada

2024/02/03 Leave a comment

Not crazy and worth having this more extreme approach as a basis to compare current and future policies:

….Turning things around calls for doing far more than what federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced last month.

Allowing visa students to work an unlimited number of hours off-campus fed the business model for unscrupulous educational operators. Mr. Miller says that in the spring, he may reduce the work limit to 30 hours a week. He needs to go much farther. To end the tuition-for-minimum-wage-work trade, he has to end the right of visa students to work, with the exception of those in highly-paid jobs.

Similarly, post-graduation work permits should only go to those who’ve been offered a highly-paid job. All other graduates will have to leave Canada on graduation, their tuition having purchased education but nothing more. If you have a job offer paying at least, say, $75,000, you get the work permit. If not, you don’t.

One more thing: the feds should raise the cost of a student visa. It currently costs just $150. How about $5,000?

Those three simple steps would separate Canada’s educational wheat from the chaff. And it would do so without provinces and the feds having to micromanage which programs of study are worthy of student visas or work visas or post-graduation visas – a system rife with lobbying and the potential for corruption.

What I’m proposing would put the weakest institutions, public and private, out of the student-visa business. But it would strengthen the strongest and highest-quality institutions, including skilled-trades training programs, and even open new doors for them….

Source: Here’s a crazy idea: How about a student visa program whose main beneficiary is Canada

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