…Over the last few years, work visas have been issued in unlimited numbers, with effectively no questions asked. That’s not how things used to be.

It should be quick and easy for a Canadian business to get a temporary work visa to fill a specialized, high-wage position. If an aeronautical engineering firm needs to recruit a senior production manager at $250,000 a year, they should get that visa yesterday.

But visas for $15-an-hour sandwich artists? Particularly when Statistics Canada says the summer jobless rate among students is at its highest level in decades? Forget it.

The temporary foreign worker streams must become smaller and more selective. Jobs paying, say, at least 150 per cent of the average Canadian full-time wage – that’s roughly $110,000 a year – should be possible to fill from overseas. Lower-wage applications should be auto-stamped “Denied.”

Yes, exception will have to be made for the long-standing program of seasonal agricultural workers. But other industries have to be weaned from their addiction to low-wage, low-rights labour. Going cold turkey will leave businesses with no choice but to raise wages and invest in productivity.

Selectivity should also be the rule when it comes to student visas. Immigration Minister Marc Miller is finally putting a cap on numbers, which were long unlimited. Infinite supply spawned an ecosystem of what Mr. Miller correctly dubbed “puppy mill” colleges, selling entry to Canada in exchange for minimal tuition. It’s a racket that Mr. Miller says he’s scaling back, but which he has hardly ended.

Canada should give student visa priority to programs with the best labour market outcomes, and the highest tuition. Some provinces, led by Ontario, appear to be doing the opposite. Foreign students at Ontario’s public universities pay tuitions that are generally several times those at public colleges, yet the lion’s share of Ontario’s student visas are allocated to colleges, not universities.

It’s not anti-immigration or anti-immigrant for Canada to be selective. It’s how we used to do things. It’s also how, from the 1980s until recently, through governments Progressive Conservative, Conservative and Liberal, Canada had higher levels of immigration than the rest of the developed world – and higher public support for immigration.

…Housing unaffordability is partly the result of an unprecedented and unplanned jump in non-permanent immigration, far above anything Canada has ever seen, and far above Liberal immigration plans. It was a case of severe government incompetence, and it’s still unclear to what extent the Trudeau administration is actually addressing the mess, as opposed to crafting a comms strategy to fuzzy it. Statistics Canada’s latest estimate of the non-permanent population is 2.8 million, up from less than two million a year ago.

Closing the gap between housing supply and housing demand, by greatly increasing housing supply, will take a long time. It calls for hundreds of thousands more construction workers and hundreds of billions more dollars. It risks bringing other economic distortions. In contrast, closing the gap by reducing population growth can be done quickly.

The Liberals may or may not need a new leader. They won’t win on fear. They can’t win by pitching more of the same. They definitely need a better record to run on.