Canada First Immigration Reform Committee

While the political elites promote large immigration increases as being about “inclusion” or “openness,”the true agenda is about serving global corporations who want larger supplies of labour – making it easier to pay each worker less money and making it tougher for Canadian citizens to afford having more children.

The Trudeau Liberals have announced plans to bring in 1 million new immigrants in the next three years.

While immigration numbers were around 260,000 under the Conservative government, Trudeau is planning to raise the yearly number to 340,000 per year.

Trudeau’s planned increase is a massive influx.

Politicians – even the most Conservative ones – are generally worried about the consequences of criticizing this huge planned increase in immigration.

After all, the elites regularly condemn anyone who questions immigration policy as a “racist,” which scares many politicians away from asking questions.

Another factor that causes people to be unwilling to criticize immigration policy is the oft-repeated phrase that “we need large immigration increases because Canadians aren’t having enough children.”

Of course, the elites want to make sure that nobody ever asks, “why aren’t Canadians having more children?”

And here’s where the elitist orthodoxy around immigration breaks down.

A key factor in the lower birthrate among Canadians is the massive increases to the cost of living. As many have pointed out, it now takes two incomes – and huge amounts of debt – to afford what was once possible on one income.

When people are constantly working and falling further into debt just to barely keep their heads above water financially, it’s incredibly difficult for families to afford having more children – even when they want to.

While the government pretends to do something about this growing unaffordability problem, they don’t do the one thing that would really help fix it: Increase the leverage of Canadian workers.

It’s a simple supply-and demand problem.

The more potential workers Canada brings in every year through immigration, the more each worker in the country has reduced bargaining power. Since there is an expanding pool of workers, workers are competing for companies, rather than companies competing for workers.

This makes it easier for companies to pay workers less, and forces people to work longer hours and give up more of their life to their job – meaning less money and less time for family.

This helps big companies – particularly global corporations – the most.

This then becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: It makes it tougher for Canadian workers to afford more children, which leads to a lower birthrate, which then is used as justification for even larger immigration increases.

Additionally, minimum wage hikes don’t help this problem, since many companies will just lay people off instead of paying them an artificially set wage. Those laid off often go on social assistance, which leads to increased taxes on taxpayers – which again hurts the affordability issue.

So, the key issue is the leverage of each individual worker.

Lower wages, more hours, and more desperation = reduced ability for families to have more children.

By increasing immigration rates even further, Justin Trudeau’s immigration policy will reduce the leverage of Canadian workers, which will make the affordability issue even worse, and will make it tougher for Canadian citizens to afford larger families.

However, if the immigration rate was kept between 200,000 and 260,000 – the level that it was at under Harper – combined with massive tax cuts to make life more affordable – we would begin to reverse this situation.

Canada’s aging population creates a growing demand for workers, meaning that maintaining immigration levels at a modest level (rather than Trudeau’s massive increases) will begin to strengthen the power of Canadian workers.

Over time, companies would begin competing for Canadian workers, meaning they would need to pay higher wages (without needing an artificially mandated wage increase by government).

These higher wages would reduce the debt burden on households, give workers more leverage to negotiate favourable hours and family-friendly policies, and would make it easier to afford having more children.

This would begin to destroy belief in the elitist orthodoxy that justifies massive immigration increases, and this is why the elites are so afraid of it.

While they hide their policies behind virtue-signalling concepts lines such as “diversity is our strength,” their real agenda is to serve global corporate interests.

Global corporations want a massive pool of desperate, underpaid workers. They don’t want a country where workers have influence and leverage. So, they need to bring in more and more people every year to destroy that leverage, and they need a way to demonize anyone who notices what’s actually happening. So, they claim to support “openness” and “diversity,” and call any critic a “racist.”

While Canada should remain a country that welcomes immigration, that welcome should be on terms that benefits Canadian workers. Many immigrants bring great ideas and great skills to our country, and we benefit from welcoming people into the Canadian family.

That said, we must always be watchful for politicians who try to use our immigration system to serve elite corporate interests that hurt Canadian workers.

The job of the Canadian government is not to fix the world or open our doors up to an unlimited amount of people. The job of the government is to serve Canadians, and a big part of that is making it more affordable for our own citizens to afford larger families.

That’s why we must be willing to push back against the broken and failed elitist orthodoxy on immigration, and have a real discussion in this country about helping our families and our workers.

Spencer Fernando