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September 3, 2024 - 8:00pm
One of the most pro-immigration countries in the world has turned sour on welcoming more newcomers. A recent poll conducted on Canadians’ attitudes towards immigration shows that 65% of the population believes the Liberal government’s current immigration targets are too high. Ever since coming to power in 2015, Justin Trudeau has opened the floodgates of new migrants pouring into Canada, with 500,000 permanent residents expected in 2025. Polling shows that 78% of respondents believe high immigration levels are contributing to the national housing shortage, while 76% said they are having an impact on healthcare.
Canada has long been seen as a case study for how to welcome and integrate immigrants from all walks of life into a multicultural utopia. Developing an enviable points-based system that accepted only the best and vetted out anyone who would not contribute towards the shared vision of building a nation together, Canadians had for decades overwhelmingly supported inviting newcomers into the country. They believed that the Government was doing its job and making sure everyone who came in did so legally and through the right channels. Those feelings are now a thing of the past, as Trudeau’s out-of-control policies have destroyed the Canadian consensus on immigration.
Sensing the mood across the country, and how unhappy Canadians have been about long wait times in hospitals, rising rates of crime, and a housing crisis that shows no signs of abating, the Liberals have been on a mission this year to rein in the number of temporary foreign workers in the country. Last year, this group made up 6.2% of Canada’s population — up to 2.5 million people.
An explosion in the number of international students from India has also contributed to falling support for issuing new visas. Many of these recent arrivals tend to work 40 hours or more per week while on study permits, requiring lower wages and driving up competition. This has led to a stark rise in youth unemployment numbers across the country.
Crime has also been a factor, with international students from India found to be involved in the murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar last year. In July this year, authorities apprehended a man and his son mere hours before they were about to carry out an Isis-inspired terrorist attack in Toronto. After their arrest, it came to light that the man had immigrated to Canada in 2018 and became a citizen this May after applying for asylum in 2021. Prior to coming to Canada, he had appeared in an Isis video in 2015, and had his application screened twice before being granted citizenship.
News of such high levels of incompetence and lax security around Canada’s immigration system has led to an erosion of trust in the institution, and it’s going to be very hard for the Liberals to win it back. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, currently the favourite to win the next Canadian election, says the country needs to slow its soaring population to alleviate its housing problem.
Putting a cap on the number of international students coming into the country, or ending exemptions that allow visitors to apply for work permits from within Canada, won’t reverse the trend of Canadians wanting to shut out people from arriving to exploit the system. Nor will it save Trudeau from being annihilated in the polls come election season next year. A seismic shift in policy is required, and it’s clear that a change in leadership is necessary for that to be achieved.
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SubscribeIn the last 6 months in Canada it has been striking that nearly every fast food chain is now is staffed exclusively with young people from India. This has definitely displaced local people as my teenagers friends have uniformly struggled to find jobs this summer. One of Trudeau’s many problems is that his government overdoes everything and then refuses to change course. He really has managed to sour the Canadian population on immigration. It really is hard to describe what a perfect storm of blind ideology, incompetence and corruption his government has been.
Can only hope. The world, esp the Anglosphere, needs some good news and sensible leadership.
” Nor will it save Trudeau from being annihilated in the polls come election season next year. ”
No politician in Canadian history is as deserving of annhilation as Trudeau.
The points based immigration system based on Canada’s economic need worked well. My own family emigrated from the UK to Canada in the early 80s. My father was an oilfield engineer and was sponsored by his employer to emigrate, specifically to help develop the Hibernia field off Newfoundland. We integrated well (although I returned home to the UK permanently in ’97) and became Canadian citizens three years later. The rest of my family are still there and are very proud Canadians. High value, high skilled immigration not overseas ‘students’ working for Uber Eats. Jordan Peterson is right when he says Canada, while often perceived to be staid and dull, was nonetheless the model of a small-c conservative Commonwealth society where American-style aspiration was tempered by solid institutions inherited from the British and adapted to its particular needs. I return every year and still love the country but despair at how all that’s been thrown away by Trudeau’s Liberals, the NDP and fellow travellers.
I feel for many immigrants who are leaving harsh circumstances and are looking for a better life. But we just can’t take in the world. In the United States, it isn’t just Central and South Americans who are trying to get into our country. People from Asia, the Middle East and Africa are flying to Mexico so they can enter the States. Where are they going to settle? The West is in a Mega Drought, and the water situation looks bleak. People say we have the space for immigrants, but there aren’t towns or jobs in big sky country . The rural states have dying towns and no jobs. Rust Belt states don’t have enough jobs. Where there are jobs for immigrants, that also means housing becomes scarce and rents go up. Small hospitals can’t handle the larger population. There are probably a billion or more people who would like to emigrate to Europe/Britain or the States. As temperatures get hotter every year in the global south, we will be inundated with the masses. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to stop it.
Trump was supposed to stop it by building the wall, didn’t happen or only a small section was built, so much for one of the few promises that he made in 2016. Maybe he will build another small section, but he doesn’t talk about it much. Nothing wrong with immigration when it’s properly controlled based on a nation’s needs and capacities, but mass migration that is out of control needs to end. The backlash is certainly brewing.
Deceitful trolling posts, like “Dave’s” only reminds one how deceitful wokeism is at its empty heart.
Woke open-borders morons simply ignore the real issues which unlimited immigration creates.
Temperatures not getting hotter in the global south. Not even in the north.
I know how to stop it. It’s an invasion. Get out the army, and fire live rounds.
You just gave the lunatics an excuse to arrest you. Be smarter than them.
Trudeau is a disaster for Canada, immigration policy is in total disarray, and incompetently managed. He had an agenda, now it’s backfiring. It’s too late for him to get this under control, he will go down with the sinking ship of that horrible government, the worse in my lifetime by far, and I was born in the fifties. It was obvious that the country cannot absorb more than 1% of the population annually, there was no way to build that much housing, and new housing is very expensive, most immigrants could never afford it, I don’t know what they were thinking. And Trudeau will leave behind a very damaged economy with no productivity growth, out of control deficits and debt and very limited growth prospects. Alot of young people want to leave Canada to work elsewhere more affordable, even recent immigrants want to go elsewhere or go back to their country if they can. Government spending is out of control, they keep adding civil servants, yet the quality of services keeps declining. The military is poorly funded and equipped, they are so far away from meeting minimal Nato requirements. I have never seen the federal government in such a mess. Time for Trudeau and his cronies to leave the scene or get totally kicked out in the election which is not scheduled until next year. But I feel sorry for any government that will inherit this mess, not convinced Poilievre is the right person for what will be very challenging.
I’d like to see Canada drop all NATO requirements, financial or otherwise.
Deficits: these are what the government spends into the economy. Which means its deficit is always mirrored by the creation of net financial wealth for the private sector. The federal government is nearly always in deficit and the private sector in surplus.
The national debt is a historical record of all the money the feds spend into the economy that isn’t taxed back and is currently held in the form of government securities. It’s not “out of control.” Canada, with a sovereign currency, its entire debt in Canadian dollars, faces zero risk of insolvency. The country can never run out of money. We spend currency into existence, and retire it via taxation. The money we send to CRA to pay federal tax isn’t actually used to pay for anything. That’s not the purpose of tax, on a federal level, in a country like Canada with a sovereign currency.
“Deficits: these are what the government spends into the economy. Which means its deficit is always mirrored by the creation of net financial wealth for the private sector.”
Lots of assumptions here. If you are constantly paying interest on debt, that money is completely unproductive. You also assume that govt spends money efficiently and productively. Not even close to reality.
I can understand that I gave the impression that I assume government spends efficiently and productively. I tried for a condensed summary to suit the comments section, which doesn’t leave space to identify and address things I don’t mean to imply.
My purpose is only to describe the reality of government finance mechanics. I think you are quite right to focus on efficiency and productivity; these are the questions worth asking, not how to bring down the deficit or pay off debt. The kind of questions to ask are why money is being spent. Does it improve the human condition? Who gets the surplus (the “deficit”) on the other side of the balance sheet? Does this worsen or counter inequality? And so on.
The government is always paying interest on debt, but it’s not necessarily unproductive. Again, we need to look at the other side of the balance sheet. The dollars the federal government spent, but didn’t tax back, is currently saved in the form of government bonds. They’re part of our wealth & savings — at least for those fortunate enough to own some of the bonds. Federal bonds are an interest-bearing dollar.
The feds choose to pay bills in two ways. When they decide to match deficit spending by selling bonds, we name it “borrowing,” but there’s really nothing to pay back. They’ve just paid with a different form of money, that happens to bear interest. The debt is the growth of somebody’s savings. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s not so good. Again I think you are right to ask that kind of question.
Government can also choose to leave any reserve balance in the system rather than drawing off through bond sales. We don’t have to sell bonds. Issuing them doesn’t mean the government is dependent on bond sales to finance anything. Bond sales are also used as a tool for interest-rate maintenance, but we could instead choose to have a permanent zero-interest rate policy with no government bonds. It would open up fiscal space and disarm political posturing and conflict. Again, these are the kind of questions to ask, not how the feds can pay for things, etc.
Getting to your concern about interest, people like Larry Summers claim that since government chooses to pay interest on bank reserves, that deficits aren’t cost-free. But the federal government pays interest (and all else) by the electronic version of a check. It doesn’t cost anything because money is created when you deposit the check. You and I can’t create money, but the federal government can, just as with private banks.
The Bank of Canada’s balance sheet reporting tells how it works:
In other words they play a game whereby the Finance Dept. pays interest on debt that the BoC holds, which covers the bank’s cost of operation, and in return the BoC returns any surpluses to the Finance Dept. It’s shifting cash from one pocket to another yet pretending the pockets are independent of each other. In reality it’s all the same dollars. Accounting-wise, do we track everything on the BoC’s balance sheet or on the Finance Dept’s? It makes no economic difference, but it makes a giant political one.
If you give all the money to your pals at least somebody is happy with you.
Sounds more like voodoo economics or a ponzi scheme, when you have a currency you should manage it responsibly and not print it into oblivion. The national debt is not a ‘historical record ‘, it’s debt accumulated annually, often from reckless spending and poor fiscal policy. If you know anything about finance, there is no such thing as zero risk. The risk lies with currency debasement, aka inflation.
That’s why governments like moderate inflation, it inflates the value of the debt away over time, and they are scared to death of deflation. And out of control debt eventually squeezes out the productive economy creating stagnation. There is no free lunch.
Dave, with respect your description of the mechanics of government finance is outdated. The idea that spending (“debt”) will automatically cause inflation is based on the former gold standard, which Canada hasn’t had for many decades now. Back then, when government printed more money but the amount of gold stayed the same, they indeed devalued the currency. But today the currency isn’t backed by anything, its value isn’t based on any essential object like a precious metal. In a country like Canada, with a “fiat” or “sovereign” currency, the currency’s value is based on the productive economy.
Federal debt is just the money the government spent into the economy and didn’t tax back. It’s a historical, or if you prefer, an accounting record of the times the government made a net deposit, spent more than they taxed out (taxation’s purpose not being revenue to pay for anything).
Inflation isn’t sparked by the amount of money the government creates — and it creates it by spending — but by the availability of biophysical resources that the money wants to buy.
The government can’t buy anything it wants in any quantity or at any speed. The economy has internal limits. If government tries to buy too much of something it will push up prices as the economy has trouble matching demand. In that circumstance, inflation can get out of control. But there are plenty of ways for the government to deal with inflation. For example, it can withdraw money from the economy via taxation.
As long as government spending doesn’t max the full productive capacity of the economy it won’t set off an out-of-control price spiral.
The risk of inflation is determined by a couple of things. One is, as mentioned, lack of productive capacity, running out of physical resources while government keeps spending to buy more of it. Happily, with wise planning we can expand productive capacity — more hospitals, more nurses, etc. — which makes the additional spending capacity/fiscal space larger, pushing the risk of inflation further away.
The other inflation risk is the abuse of market power and price setting. A market where giant corporations have the ability to raise prices just because they can. Too big to care. Such a market is either not competitive enough, or lawmakers or regulators let them get away with it. If we taxed and regulated abusive market power into oblivion, we’d expand that additional spending capacity, in turn lowering the risk of inflation.
It’s like the Marxist technical papers you can pick up at their booths in election time.
Bret, I don’t understand where you’re coming from. I mean, I’m here because I was attracted by Unherd’s advertised mission that it’s “for people who dare to think for themselves… we make it our mission to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it… Our approach is to test and retest assumptions, without fear or favour. The effect, we hope, is to get a little bit closer to the truth — and to make people think again.”
I assume that most people value making the world a better place, and that they are trying, in good faith, to understand it as best they can, and to understand possible solutions.
What I don’t understand is why someone would come here and simply ridicule heterodox ideas such the one I presented, without actually engaging with a single point.
I’ve studied the subject and have taken the trouble here to articulate ideas that interest me. I took a risk by exposing the rationale behind my thinking. I make it available for others to criticize if they want. But you take no such risk; you sit back and make cheap shots, and express only the most conventional notions to be found every day in mainstream media.
So, why subscribe to a media platform, let alone make comments on it, when that platform is all about encouraging different ways of thinking, to be open to new ideas, to “think again?”
Bret like most White Unherders Just come here to whine about Black People and how evil Wokeism and DEI is. Like White folks know anything about Merit and Hard work than Black folks. They just come here to reinforce each other’s ignorance and White SUPREMACIST tribal hatreds.
Like most White Unherders?” Come on. A comment like that doesn’t help make a better online environment either. It’s offensive. To escalate and stir the pot is just so easy to do.
What an ignorant, racist comment!
If you don’t want war, the best measure is to be prepared for it. The Trudeau liberals have enriched their friends at the expense of the tax payer. They have avoided years of recession by bringing in million of immigrants per year. We are now governed worse than the us. That’s quite an accomplishment.
I too am happy to criticize Trudeau and his government. I think they have done lots of bad things and done some good things. But I think that the good things are not enough.
Recalling Martin Luther King: “I have no time for the tranquilizing drug of gradualism and incrementalism.”
I think another ingredient in this brand of tranquilizing drug is performative politics, where there is only the appearance of substance. Trudeau certainly isn’t alone in this regard.
Canada is a disaster… a failure of monumental proportion. It has the world’s biggest market on its doorstep, natural resources in abundance, agricultural resources ditto… and hardly any world class businesses, and as for famous Canadians? just what has Canada ever lead the world in? What has it succeded at?
Canada has, and has had, some of the very best writers in the world. There are more successes. They await easy discovery by any genuinely curious mind.
But in general Canadians have prided themselves on being uncontroversial and ‘just average’….
It has succeeded at inflicting upon the UK both the malign Mark Carney and the deranged Professor Toops, both mercifully now gone but not without having contributed to the wholesale destruction of the UK. In my opinion.
Didn’t Trudeau’s wife separate from him as well? Seems like he doesn’t manage anything well?
Well there are only three choices and two of them have been helping to dig the hole.
How was Handsome Trudeau able to blind you to his venal incompetence? He must be more charismatic in person.
Elected, twice. Shame or pity.
Is the author Pakistani? She seems to single out Indian students and fails to mention her compatriots are a big source too of immigrants into Canada.
Many parents in India would be relieved if the spoilt Gen Z kids would stay home and not drain family funds by embarking on expensive and fairly useless foreign degrees-and turn Woke too.
But that calls for stringent education reform and not cross- subsidising flaccid varities with droves of foreign students paying higher rates than domestic ones.
The Indian immigrants I have met are kind, incredibly hard working people. They are not ideological zealots.
I am glad to hear that. I know some who have migrated to Canada and they are as you describe.
I find this writer to be missing the woods for the trees. Her point should not be to demonise nationalities but ask for better managed or reduced immigration.
She seems to be blaming Indian students for all Canada’s problems with sweeping generalization and superficiality.
Another poor UH piece.
“a multicultural utopia”.
Now there’s an oxymoron, if there ever was one.
I suspect the problem in Canada is much like the problem in Britain. It’s not so much the absolute numbers coming in, it’s a problem of indigestion.
How do we integrate these migrants into their new home, socially and economically? How do we persuade them to leave ancient enmities behind them? How do we house them? How do we give them employment without depressing wages for everyone?
It’s similar to when I eat too much, too quickly. I get indigestion.
A selective, modest , controlled immigration system is a no brainer. It could also benefit the immigrant and country of settlement if done sensibly.
It would also be mostly popular and politically astute.
Is there any good evidence that immigrant labour depresses wages generally? Or do immigrants take up jobs that the existing population won’t? I’ve seen claims for both sides of this argument for around a quarter of a century now, so surely somebody has a convincing dataset one way or the other by now?
There is also no evidence that bears shit in the wood
Canada and Canadians are the best argument against eugenics. Their points system for immigration has been a disaster. Such a droll mob of Presbyterians turned Woke over two generations I have never ever met anywhere. What next for Canada? Attract neanderthals?
The dude has always been an empty suit, along with the great majority of Western leaders. A little style, no substance, bought by his handlers. He really has no idea how inept, incompetent, and boring he really is. Bad combination for Canada’s citizens.
Marxist Ken doll describes him well.
Looks like the ndp think they are in a good position to supplant the libs. Election is imminent.