Tag Archives: Diane Francis

Diane Francis: Canada’s immigration problems are of Trudeau’s own making

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Diane Francis: Canada’s immigration problems are of Trudeau’s own making

Trudeau has been putting his own interests above those of the Canadians he is supposed to serve

Author of the article:

Diane Francis

Published Oct 22, 2024  •  Last updated Oct 22, 2024  •  3 minute read

14 Comments

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, Ont., on Oct. 16.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, Ont., on Oct. 16. Photo by Justin Tang/The Canadian Press files

The global immigration mess spreads because asylum laws are easily gamed and smuggling is an industry unto itself. Europe and the United States have been deluged with people from nearby impoverished, corrupt or war-torn countries.

Canada, on the other hand, should not have a problem — but it does. It shares a border with the United States and oceans separate it from the world’s trouble spots. But Canada’s political system is dysfunctional. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vastly increased the number of immigrants, temporary foreign workers and asylum seekers who are admitted to Canada every year.

“Nearly three-million people living in Canada have some type of temporary immigration status, with 2.2 million arriving in just the past two years, according to government statistics. Temporary residents represent 6.8 per cent of the country’s total population of 41.3 million, up from 3.5 per cent in 2022,” reported the New York Times.

This flood of immigrants has sparked a backlash. A recent Leger survey conducted for the Association of Canadians Studies (ACS) found that two-thirds of Canadians believe immigration levels are too high. “What’s different in this survey is that negative sentiment towards immigrants is noticeably on the rise and has also reached levels not seen in the last two decades,” said Jack Jedwab, the chief executive of ACS.

Negative sentiment towards immigrants is noticeably on the rise and has also reached levels not seen in the last two decades

Jack Jedwab

Recent immigration has contributed to economic and social problems in the two biggest destination cities, Toronto and Vancouver. Housing prices are unaffordable and health-care systems are overburdened.

“To break out of this rut and prevent this further decline in Canada’s living standards relative to our peers, policymakers must enact comprehensive and bold policy changes to encourage business investment and innovation, promote worker education and training, and achieve better immigration outcomes where more is not always better,” wrote the Fraser Institute’s Alex Whalen, Milagros Palacios and Lawrence Schembri in July.

In a recent interview with the Financial Post, Patrick Brown, mayor of Brampton, Ont., attested to the problems caused by Ottawa’s irresponsible immigration policies, notably the flood of student visas handed out in recent years. For several years in Brampton, storefront operations advertised that they could obtain student visas for foreign students in return for a fee.

Mayor Brown said there were “private ‘colleges’ in plazas.… We found legitimate universities and colleges and also the wild west. A number had been approved by the (Ontario) Ministry of Colleges and Universities. But some had not. Now, international students must go to the public (government-funded) schools, not the private ones.”

It appears that federal immigration officials were approving student visas for people to go to questionable, or even non-existent, colleges. This is now getting “cleaned up,” according to Brown. But how many of the student visa holders who are already here are actually students attending legitimate institutions? How many of these “colleges in plazas” have been shut down or investigated?

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Though Trudeau has looked to put curbs on immigration in recent months due to the undeniable problems his reckless policies have caused, it has become abundantly clear that he has been putting his own interests above those of the Canadians he is supposed to serve.

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Trudeau Is Implementing the Globalists’ Plan to Flood Canada With Third Worlders & Replace the European Founding/Settler People

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Trudeau Is Implementing the Globalists’ Plan to Flood Canada With Third Worlders & Replace the European Founding/Settler People

Diane Francis: Immigration pushing housing, health care to the breaking point

Trudeau’s immigration policies have put a significant strain on large urban areas such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal Author of the article: Diane Francis Published Jul 24, 2023  •  3 minute read 30 Comments A Canadian flag on a condo balcony in Toronto. The city suffers from health-care shortages and unaffordable housing prices. A Canadian flag on a condo balcony in Toronto. The city suffers from health-care shortages and unaffordable housing prices. Photo by Cole Burston/Bloomberg

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s push to increase immigration to unprecedented levels is damaging Canada’s health-care system.

The numbers reveal the problem. Last year, Canada welcomed 492,984 new immigrants, all of whom will eventually be issued health cards, entitling them to medical benefits for life. This year, another 465,000 immigrants are set to arrive, plus another 485,000 in 2024 and 

Between 2016 and 2021, the Trudeau government admitted a record of over 1.3 million permanent immigrants into the country, all of whom will require medical services. This has put a significant strain on large urban areas such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, which have borne the burden of the influx because they are where the lion’s share of immigrants settle. Toronto and Vancouver, in particular, already suffer from health-care shortages and unaffordable housing prices.

The feds set immigration targets with little regard for skills, the burden placed on social welfare systems or the impact on housing costs. The result is that many hospitals are reaching their limits. Doctors and nurses are in short supply, Canadians face long wait times for specialists and elective surgeries and millions lack a family physician. By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. You may unsubscribe any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails or any newsletter. Postmedia Network Inc. | 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4 | 416-383-2300

This is not nearly enough. Financial Accountability Office of Ontario projects that Ontario alone will be short 33,000 nurses and personal support workers by 2028, despite provincial initiatives to boost graduates.

Canada’s immigration levels are disproportionate to other developed nations, taking in about four times as many immigrants as the United States on a per capita basis. To make matters worse, Ottawa’s screening is inept. Despite the staggering immigration numbers, the federal government has failed to address the shortage of skilled labour across the country by recruiting qualified tradespeople.

This push to significantly increase the population was concocted at a weekend gathering in 2011 in Muskoka, Ont., led by Dominic Barton, who served as global managing director of McKinsey and Co. before becoming Canada’s ambassador to China for a time, and former BlackRock Inc. honcho Mark Wiseman. They created a Toronto-based lobbying group called the Century Initiative, which believes Canada’s population should reach 100 million by 2100.

The group estimates that, given sagging birth rates, reaching their arbitrary goal of 100 million would require Canada to accept at least 500,000 immigrants a year, if not more. This has now become our official immigration policy, with the Trudeau Liberals targeting around 

The Century Initiative hopes to create “mega-regions,” increasing the population of the Greater Toronto Area from 8.8 million in 2016 to 33.5 million by the end of the century, the population of Metro Vancouver from 3.3 million to 11.9 million and the National Capital Region from 1.4 million to 4.8 million.

Seven years of this foolish Liberal immigration policy has placed a significant strain on the health-care system and housing market. And Canada is going to make matters worse by admitting upwards of 753,000 international students this year, which will further increase the cost of rentals.

A CIBC report last year said that the admission of huge numbers of newcomers in 2022, including an estimated 955,000 “non-permanent residents,” represents “an unprecedented swing in housing demand in a single year that is currently not fully reflected in official figures.”

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Financial Post Columnist Diane Francis Calls for Immigration Sanity

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Financial Post Columnist Diane Francis Calls for Immigration Sanity

“Overly ambitious immigration targets must be severely trimmed because the deluge of people … is putting unnecessary strain on Canada;s health care system as well as housing supply, notably in Ontario and B.C. Simply piling more people onto a medical system or a housing market that are flailing is irresponsible.” –Diane Francis, Financial Post, Jan. 19/2023

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Diane Francis: Trudeau’s immigration scheme is just another way to redistribute Canada’s wealth

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Diane Francis: Trudeau’s immigration scheme is just another way to redistribute Canada’s wealth

Plopping lots of people into an economy may increase GDP, but not if they’re grandparents, unskilled, can’t find work or are underemployed Diane Francis 126 Comments

A pedestrian walks by a painted Canadian flag in Toronto.
Canada has a target of one million new permanent residents by 2022. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post files

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It’s hard to imagine a bigger bungle by the Trudeau government than the vaccine fiasco and budget carnage, but now there’s immigration. Aims are to allow 1.2 million more permanent residents into Canada in the next three years when other, well-managed countries like Australia and New Zealand, are preoccupied with retaining the living standards of their existing populaces by trimming immigration.

“History teaches us that when we grow our immigration levels, we grow our economy,” Canadian immigration minister Marco Mendicino said earlier this year, a lawyer without economic credentials..

In March 2020, he announced a target of one million new permanent residents by 2022. Then in October, he bumped this up to 1.2 million from 2021 to 2023. This is more than triple the U.S. per capita immigration rate which has nearly nine times Canada’s population. (That doesn’t include the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.)

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The ravages of the pandemic have resulted in prudence elsewhere. The U.S. reduced its visa approvals a year ago, Australia lowered its immigration target to 160,000 (with 28 million people compared to Canada’s 37.7 million), and New Zealand said its priority was to train people already in the country for available jobs.

By contrast, Mendicino announced that of the 400,000 allowed in per year, the breakdown would be 232,000 immigrants in the economic class, or employable people; 103,500 in the family class (mostly parents and grandparents); and 65,000 refugees and protected persons.

Such levels are unjustifiable by many measures. Canada’s unemployment rate is high, at 8.1 per cent, compared to 6.1 per cent in the U.S, and 5.6 per cent in Australia. Canada’s economic recovery is more fragile and will take longer, according to forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. is vaccinating its way back quickly to an estimated 6.4 per cent growth in 2021 and Canada is forecast for 5 per cent growth this year, but that’s impossible given the lockdowns and border closings due to Ottawa’s ongoing vaccine procurement failure.

Besides, the very notion trotted out by the immigration minister that the economy grows because of immigration is fallacious. Plopping lots of people into an economy may increase the GDP but not if they are grandparents, unskilled, cannot find work, or are underemployed.

To analyze the benefits of immigration, it’s important to look at the GDP per capita figures. This metric makes it obvious that Canadian immigration has served mostly to cut the pie into smaller pieces for everybody: Canada’s GDP ranks ninth in size, but its GDP per capita is only 18th, less than the U.S. GDP per capita at fifth place, or Australia’s at 9th place.

Other reasons this aggressiveness is inappropriate is because the U.S. recovery may not flow northward as border closures continue, or the likelihood that new entrants will be unable to find jobs or, if they do, will displace workers already here.

Other negatives include the reality that 1.2 million newcomers will overcrowd Canada’s cities and increase the cost of services, and the cost of housing which is already unaffordable to Canada’s middle class. And why would Ottawa allow more elderly persons into a country that is aging rapidly and increasingly struggling with health-care costs for older persons?

Trudeau’s immigration scheme is unlikely to yield anywhere near the numbers sought.

The fact that the GDP per capita is lower than Canada’s peers demonstrates that this is not about wealth creation. It does nothing to address Canada’s soaring debt ratio or to create jobs for Canadians. This immigration reach is about vote-getting in immigrant enclaves, and simply another accelerated policy to redistribute Canada’s wealth.

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