There have been important immigration related developments in the last week.
As we both agree that this is the most important issue facing Canada today, I wanted to send you a quick update.
Since he became Prime Minister last year, Mark Carney has made significant changes to address the immigration crisis.
Of course, these changes are not nearly as drastic as what is needed but they have been undeniably a step in the right direction after the absurd policies of his predecessor Justin Trudeau.
In 2025 Carney slashed intake levels of permanent and temporary migrants, set record levels of deportations, and imposed stricter rules for international students.
For the first time in Canada’s history we had negative population growth.
All of these were welcome changes and gave reason for hope in the new Carney administration.
But throughout 2026, and in the last week in particular, the shine has started to wear off.
Last week Statistics Canada issued a correction to their population stats. They found they had not be accurately tracking visa renewals by temporary residents or people transitioning from study to work permits.
It turns out Canada did not actually have negative growth last year, in fact our population continues to grow.
After setting a record of 23,160 deportations in 2025, figures have stagnated through 2026 to only an average of 1,862 per month — 22,345 projected by the end of year.
Not only is it disappointing to see these figures falling rather than rising, even the record is nowhere near high enough.
It is projected that there are more than 500,000 illegal migrants in Canada. There are about 100,000 more on failed asylum claims and 2 million expiring visas throughout 2026.
The government needs much more robust deportations capabilities to simply enforce our own laws.
At less than 25,000 deportations per year, this problem will never be fixed.
And to make matters worse, in an interview with the New York Times earlier this week, Carney signaled that increases to immigration were on the horizon.
In the interview, Carney focused on the rise in temporary migration since 2023.
He pointed out that the temporary migrant population had rapidly expanded from 3% to 7.5% of the overall population and that this was putting pressure on education, housing and other things.
As a result they issued reforms to reduce and cap the number of temporary migrants.
Carney is acting as if the situation is solved, but the reality is his changes have hardly made a difference.
The temporary migrant population has dropped by less than 1% to 6.7% in 2026.
After only a year of modest reductions, Carney is signaling that Canada is ready to start increasing immigration levels again:
“When do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada. So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control.”
This is completely absurd.
After a decade of Trudeau’s radical policies, Canada needs much more significant reforms to get our country back on track.
This is a huge opportunity for the Conservatives who have the chance to own the position of immigration restrictionism, or better yet, remigration.
The Conservatives have been quick to jump on this issue but they are still not going far enough.
It is not enough to reduce the numbers, we must to reverse the flow.
This is why an organization like the Dominion Society is important. We need a force outside of the political system to represent the interests of Heritage Canadians and put pressure on all existing parties.
We need to be able to punish the Liberals for this shift, and we need to be able to push the Conservatives to go even further.
I had already sort of intuited that.I responded:Charles, to his credit, replied:This exchange inspired the following comment, heartwarming to me personally (thanks Matt!):Gone but not forgotten! Of all the factions I encountered during Alien Nation’s brief but intense moment in the MSM spotlight, Libertarians were by far the most bone-headed. This was a mild sorrow to me because I had been deeply influenced by my encounter with libertarianism after coming to the U.S. from England to study at Stanford in 1970. (Libertarianism simply did not exist at the University of Sussex back then). I spent a lot of time working through the relationship between libertarianism with immigration patriotism—in fact, with any kind of patriotism—as Greg Johnson recently discussed in his review of Quinn Slobodian’s 2025 Hayek’s Bastards, a book which paradoxically is the closest thing to an intellectual biography I’m ever likely to get. (Greg’s parallel podcast interview with me is here).Of course, by then I’d realized that many Libertarians, seeking for a once-size-fits-all explanation of the world, were psychologically similar to the dogmatic Student Marxists who had so brightened up my undergraduate days (and who now rule Britain). Although, of course, the Libertarians’ one-size-fits-all panacea was immeasurably superior.But there was one exception to this: the “Paleolibertarians,” a factional split led by the brilliant (and famously factional) economist Murray Rothbard. Paleolibertarians were enthusiastically willing to consider what the new issue of post-1965 mass, non-traditional, immigration meant to libertarianism, partly because it so irritated what Rothbard gleefully termed The Kochtopus e.g. the Cato Institute. And they did so until Rothbard’s untimely death in 1995, at what now seems to me to be the early age of 68. Thereafter their chief internet forum LewRockwell.com, edited by Mises Institute founder Lew Rockwell, regressed to left-Libertarianism, probably following its donors, and the Paleolibertarian faction was eclipsed.But not completely. Rothbard’s most prominent student, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who has been described as “The Last Paleolibertarian, ” founded the Property and Freedom Society in 2006 and sustained the tradition. (I am sorry to learn that Hoppe’s long relationship with the Mises Institute has recently, abruptly, been Cancelled).I spoke to his PFS conference in 2008. The issue hasn’t gone away. (Sigh again)“Immigration Is The Viagra Of The State”—A Libertarian Case Against ImmigrationFirst published on VDARE.com, 06/04/2008
Ladies and Gentlemen:I want to start off by thanking Hans [-Hermann Hoppe] and Guelchin [Imre, his wife and owner of the equally beautiful Karia Princess Hotel] for hosting this conference and in particular for inviting me to speak here today.We’re at a peculiar moment in the history of liberty. It’s been almost seventeen years since the Soviet Union collapsed. (I’m acutely aware of this because my son was born that day, making him, as I like to think, the very first post-Communist baby!) At that time, even a life-long American academic socialist like Robert Heilbroner was compelled to confess, in a celebrated essay in the New Yorker magazine, [The Triumph Of Capitalism, January 23, 1989] that the century-old battle between capitalism and socialism is over and capitalism has won.Yet in the US it’s very probable that the party of free markets—perhaps
I should say the alleged party of free markets—is going to be annihilated in this year’s election and that the party of statism may be in power for a generation.There are obviously a number of reasons for this reversal. But one of them, I think, is that (at least in the US) libertarianism rested on its laurels and simply did not address the next generation of problems that came to the fore amid the wreckage of socialism. One of those is problems is immigration and, ultimately, the role of the national community, the nation-state. As I understand it, the role of the Property and Freedom Society is to address those problems and to rearticulate the libertarian vision.Hans-Hermann Hoppe did address the problem of immigration, in his own writings and by arranging for a special issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the summer 1998 issue [Volume 13, Number 2] guest edited by Ralph Raico, which was devoted to the subject. It’s a seminal volume of essays, revealing for example that the dean of American libertarian philosophers, John Hospers, who actually received one electoral college vote when he ran for President as the Libertarian Party candidate in 1972, rejected Open Borders and the notion that if you support free trade, you have to support free immigration. [A Libertarian Argument Against Opening Borders(PDF). ]I don’t think the debate among libertarians has moved much further forward, greatly to the discredit of the Libertarian Establishment. Hans should really be giving this talk today. But I guess he believes in the Division Of Labor!So my topic today is “A Libertarian Case Against Immigration”.
I am myself an immigrant (or an emigrant, depending how you look at it) from Britain to the U.S. with some years in Canada. So I’m not saying that immigration is absolutely a bad thing. But I am saying that it can be a bad thing, and that in the US today—and also Europe—it is a bad thing. In the U.S., we’re constantly told by immigration enthusiasts, a distinct subspecies among American intellectuals, that immigrants do dirty jobs Americans won’t do. And, I tell them, here I am!I’m going to make this case with special reference to the example of the U.S., partly because that’s where I’ve lived for nearly forty years and partly because I’m a financial journalist, not a philosopher, and I find the presence of actual facts, as opposed to pure theory, kind of comforting. I will say, however, that the problems of America are the problems of the West.How many of you are Americans? Any Canadians? Europeans? Brits? (I distinguish between Britain and Europe!). [PB: Mostly Europeans, a few Americans and Brits, one Australian on walkabout, no Canadians.
I am going to start off by reviewing the facts of the US example. Then I’m going to analyze those facts from what appears to me to be a libertarian perspective, looking at practical problems and then theoretical problems. I’ll conclude by suggesting what this suggests about immigration—and about libertarianism itself.Americans are taught to believe that they are “a nation of immigrants.” Of course, all nations are nations of immigrants. There is no known case where people grew out of the ground. What’s different about America is the speed with which it was put together. Unfortunately, it can be unput together just as quickly. And that, in essence, is what’s happening.So these are the facts:For almost 50 years in the middle of the twentieth century, from the early 1920s to about 1970, there was pause during which there was almost no immigration into the US at all.There have been many such pauses in American immigration history, stretching right back into the colonial period, and they have been essential to the process of assimilation. During that period, no-one, not even the great Austrian economists like Mises or Hayek (and certainly not the influential Objectivist novelist Ayn Rand, remarkable though she was), really thought much about immigration.
The 1965 Immigration Act, plus a simultaneous decision to stop enforcing the law against illegal immigration, unleashed a new influx. (The decision to stop enforcing the law is very obvious in the date, most glaringly in the 98 percent collapse in workplace prosecutions during the Bush Administration, unmistakably a precursor to the planned integration of North American workforces as in the European Union). About 1 million legal immigrants and some 3-500,000 net illegal immigrants now enter the US every a year.For technical reasons—basically the emphasis on so-called family reunification, which is not family reunification at all but chain migration—immigration has been skewed away from Europe and toward the Third World.As a result, although Americans are stabilizing their population at around 300 million, the government is in effect second-guessing the people on population size, which because of immigration could be 400 million by 2050. One third will be post-1970 immigrants and their descendants.
Because these are overwhelmingly non-white, the U.S., 90% white as recently as 1960, will be majority non-white sometime after 2050.This is a transformation without precedent in the history of the world. To adapt Brecht, the government is dissolving the people and electing a new oneAmazingly, the consensus among labor economists, confirmed by the 1997 National Research Council report The New Americans, is that there is no significant net aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans.
There is an increase in Gross Domestic Product, but virtually all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves in the form of wages. If transfer payments factored in, there is a small but significant nation-wide loss.In other words, Americans are not merely being transformed for nothing, but they are actually paying to be transformed.Of course, individual Americans benefit, notably employers of cheap labor, and they lobby hard for the privilege (not something libertarians of which would normally approve). But other Americans, notably workers, lose. And they lose a lot—basically government policy is redistributing about 2 percent of GDP from labor to capital.
So here’s something that is having enormous consequences, inflicting enormous expense, operating quite contrary to what was anticipated.Obviously, it’s a government policy!And that’s the bottom line to this review of the US situation, which I really want to stress. The point is that the status quo is statist.We don’t have open immigration in the US or any Western country. We have an extremely complex and intrusive government policy. Government determines, by commission and omission, how many immigrants come in, what race they are, and what skill levels they have. (In the U.S. the post-1965 influx has been significantly less skilled than before, basically of the emphasis on “family reunification”, which is not family reunification at all but chain migration). Doing nothing about immigration as it exists right now is not a libertarian option. It’s a statist option.
Conversely, arguing that the US should restrict immigration, should in fact have a simple moratorium, with no net immigration, could paradoxically represent a diminution of the government’s role, in its powers and its opportunity to exercise them. We’ve all heard of the night watchman state. What libertarians also should want, it seems to me, is a gatekeeper state.So that’s the situation in our case study, the US. Now I’m going to analyze it from a libertarian perspective. It seems to me that it presents two types of problems—practical and theoretical.PracticalThe Americans have had mass immigration before—notably the so-called Great Wave of immigration from about 1880 through the 1920s, when it was cut off by legislation. And they’ve had a welfare state before, roughly since the New Deal in the 1930s. But they’ve never had both together. And they just don’t work.
At one stage, when I worked at Forbes, I used to interview Milton Friedman every year, until we got a new editor and he stopped it on the curious grounds that Friedman was too old. In one of these interviews, Friedman said something that has been much quoted. He criticized the Wall Street Journal, which has a major and negative role in this and other American debates and said “They’ve just got an idée fixe“ about immigration: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.“But it’s not obvious to many libertarians, who continue to think about immigration as if it was still 100 years ago and the government was taking just 5 percent of GDP, instead of 30-40%. Yet the welfare state has visibly altered the incentive structure for immigrants. One of the ways it shows up is that, in the last Great Wave, somewhere up to 40% of all immigrants ended up going home. If they failed in the workforce, there was no safety net. Now there is. And net immigration is 90% of gross immigration.Now the Libertarian response to this is often to say, well, let’s just abolish welfare. Obviously, despite the reforms of the 1990s, the US has failed to do that. But it’s also important to note that we’re not just talking about “welfare“, strictly defined. We’re talking about transfer payments of all kinds. One of the most important is public education, which currently represents a subsidy from the taxpayer to the student of some $8000 a year. And because of a Supreme Court ruling called Plyler vs. Doe, American school districts have to educate the children of illegal immigrants. So what rational immigrant is going to go home when his child is getting an education worth, or at least costing, two or three times the per capita GDP of his country of origin?Of course some Libertarians say, let’s abolish public schools too. And I agree—I’ve actually
Indian High Commissioner suggests Canada should increase its Indian population by 60 million
India’s High Commissioner to Canada stated because of Canada and India’s “complimentary economies,” Canada should be keen to welcome 60 million more Indians into the country.
Dinesh K. PatnaikPhoto Credit: Leah Mushet, WS; ChatGPT
CALGARY — India’s High Commissioner to Canada stated because of Canada and India’s “complimentary economies,” Canada should be keen to welcome 60 million more Indians into the country.
In an interview with CBC News on Saturday, Commissioner Dinesh K. Patnaik, echoed sentiments of a mutually beneficial economic strategy, which he believes includes a large increase of Indian immigrants.
“You have things which we need, and we have things which you need,” stated Patnaik.
“For example, you have the second largest [geographical] country in the world — with a 40 million population, you need at least over 100 million population.”
Patnaik is referring to India’s high population — as India yields the highest population in the world with an estimated 1.4 billion people in 2026, which it would be willing to lend to Canada.
“You need people to man many of your resources,” stated Patnaik.
“We have the capacity, we have the intellect, we have the talent, we have the resources.”
According to Statistics Canada, the country’s population is approximately 41 million in 2026.
In 2021, 44%, or 1.1 million, of Canada’s population was Indian, the largest group of South Asians in the country.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs reports, as of 2025, Canada has 2.8 million Indians in the country.
What Patnaik was insinuating was that since Canada needs 100 million individuals in order to truly actualize its economic potential — Indians would help to do so.
Statistics Canada has already predicted by 2041, Canada’s South Asian population (which includes more than just Indians), will reach 4.7 to 6.5 million people.
But Patnaik is suggesting something different — he is advocating 60 million of India’s citizens leave the country.
This advice would go against what the feds have claimed their current immigration plans are.
Last fall, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced a return of immigration levels in the country to “sustainable levels.”
The IRCC states they expect to issue 408,000 study permits in the next year; of this number, 155,000 will be for new international students.
They also state this is a 7% decrease from 2025 numbers.
This is related to a lowering of Canada’s Indian immigration since, a report on public college international student demographics from Statistics Canada states in the 2023 to 2024 academic year, 59% of students were coming from India.
The IRCC also stated they are reducing their permanent resident (PR) targets and their temporary resident (TR) targets between 2025 and 2027.
It reported in 2025, there were 146,395 fewer new workers compared to the same period in 2024.
Pierre Poilievre keeps saying he wants a “carbon tax election”.
He considers scrapping the carbon tax his most important priority.
This in itself should tell you all you need to know about how unambitious he is and how disappointing a Poilievre government will be.
(Let alone the fact that he will simply replace the carbon tax with subsidies to “green” technologies and carbon capture in order to reach the Paris Accord targets, which he still supports.)
If that’s his priority, how can anyone expect him to adopt any of the bold policies that Canada needs?
He won’t cut back unsustainable spending.
He won’t repeal Trudeau’s laws and abolish Trudeau’s programs.
He won’t stop sending money for foreign wars.
He won’t send to jail the transgender industry monsters who mutilate our kids.
He won’t stop mass immigration and protect Canadian identity.
If he were serious about fixing Canada’s problems, Poilievre would call for a “mass immigration election”, given this is by far the biggest issue we face and it is literally destroying our country.
But he won’t because he’s just Trudeau lite.
Lavone, the whole country is fed up with Trudeau and yes, realistically, yes, it’s almost guaranteed that Poilievre will be the next prime minister.
But that makes it even more important for the People’s Party to have strong showing at the next election.
There must be a credible populist and patriotic opposition to the next Conservative government, not just a collection of globalist and socialist parties.
We must be there to keep Poilievre on his toes and offer a real alternative when Canadians are inevitably disappointed.
Swiss novelist Max Frisch, referring to the foreign “guest workers” allowed into Europe after the Second World War, said, “We wanted workers…but we got people instead.”
1. Housing Crisis
This one is simple enough: Prices are determined by the relationship between supply and demand. As Canada’s population has grown through large-scale immigration, which reached a rate of nearly 1.3 million in 2023 alone (when including non-permanent residents like foreign workers and international students), both home prices and rents have soared.
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Vancouver, Toronto, and Hamilton are now the three least affordable cities in North America. In his 2010 book Millionaire Migrants, UBC (University of British Columbia) Professor David Ley found a positive correlation coefficient of 0.94 between Vancouver and Toronto house prices and net international migration. For more evidence on the relationship between immigration and housing prices, check out Madeline Weld’s excellent article on the topic: “Blatantly Oblivious to the Blindingly Obvious.”
The result is social chaos and displacement, with younger generations feeling locked out of the housing market and delaying having children, and elderly Canadians on a fixed income returning to work to meet rent or mortgage payments.
2. Strained Healthcare
This one is also pretty simple: Immigrants need healthcare too! Adding large numbers of future patients from overseas every year is exacerbating the pre-existing problems with our healthcare system.
Though the population has grown by 5 million people in the last ten years alone, Canada has added just 167 medical residencies. In 2023, Canada accepted 471,550 permanent residents, as well as around 800,000 foreign workers and international students. Despite the federal government’s claim that the solution is to bring in doctors and nurses from overseas, in reality, we only accept about 4,000 immigrant healthcare workers per year.
This loss of farmland weakens Canada’s food security, forcing us to depend on importing food from other nations—in an increasingly fractious world order. It also fuels urbanization, threatening Canada’s beloved countryside landscapes, and the rural lifestyle many of us are attached to.
4. Crowding of Schools
Like so many effects of mass immigration, the overcrowding of Canadian schools is a function of the law of supply and demand—which our political elite is apparently unaware of! Simply put: Provinces and school districts are being overwhelmed by large numbers of additional students from newly-settled immigrant families. In Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown and Stratford received 375 newcomer students who were neither predicted nor planned for. Surrey, B.C., is considering putting schools in high rises!
To be sure, school crowding is not the fault of the immigrant families in question. Both immigrant and native-born Canadians alike are the victims of the classroom crowding caused by an out-of-control federal immigration policy.
5. Foreign Interference
From the alleged Chinese interference in recent Canadian elections to the assassination of Khalistan separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar outside a Surrey temple, Canada is now a hotspot for foreign interference. While politicians of all stripes have denounced the meddling of foreign states in Canadian affairs, none have explicitly linked it to the presence of large foreign diaspora populations on Canadian soil.
The fact is, the presence of large diasporas invites foreign interference. This is especially true of China, which considers all ethnic Chinese to be nationals of China—regardless of their place of residency. For Xi Jinping, overseas Chinese play an irreplaceable role in China’s rise. The link between diaspora populations and foreign interference appears to be an ironclad rule of geopolitics, and has been seen in Europe as well, with Turkish president Erdogan urging Turks in Germany to vote against German Chancellor Merkel after a diplomatic rupture between the countries.
6. Declining Living Standards
Large-scale immigration is touted as necessary to Canada’s economic success, but this could not be further from the truth. While Canada’s immigration-driven population growth does grow the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it lowers GDP per capita. In other words, while the economic pie grows, most people’s slice gets smaller!
This process has gotten so bad that the National Bank of Canada released a report warning that Canada is in a “population trap” whereby any increase in living standards is impossible—a problem which usually occurs in emerging economies like India or Sub-Saharan Africa!
7. Urban Sprawl and Densification
The federal government describes immigration in abstract terms: addressing labour shortages, offsetting ageing populations, or growing the GDP. In reality, immigrants are not just workers, they are people—people who need a roof over their heads! To accommodate immigration-driven population growth, a large amount of Canada’s energy and wealth is spent endlessly building both single-family developments and high rises.
The urban sprawl strategy is most visible in places like Calgary, with new cookie-cutter developments being continually built on the surrounding prairie. Alberta saw a population boom of 184,000 in 2023 alone (with international migration accounting for far more than interprovincial migration), so this looks likely to continue. The densification approach is most apparent in British Columbia, which recently abolished single-family zoning in most communities to accommodate immigration-driven population growth.
8. Declining Social Cohesion
Social cohesion is a measure of the strength of the bonds linking members of a group to each other—and to the group itself. As ethnic and cultural diversity increases because of large-scale immigration, the number and severity of society’s cultural fault lines increases.
One way in which this is manifesting in Canadian society is brawls between or within diaspora groups. On September 2nd, 2023, about 150 Eritreans clashed in the parking lot of Calgary’s Falconridge Plaza, armed with sticks and pipes. Similar clashes occurred in Edmonton and Toronto. The origin of the disputes was a difference of views about the government in Eritrea. In November of 2023, viral videos emerged of a clash between Hindus and Sikhs on Diwali in Mississauga.
9. Incompatible Cultural Practices
Most of Canada’s immigration now comes from India, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. While culturally rich in their own way, cultures and religions in these regions often hold values diametrically opposed to those of Anglo Canadian and Quebecois society. The result is the import of behaviours incompatible with—or even offensive to—the Canadian way of life, such as:
A daycare worker in the Quebec city region discovering, while changing a young girl’s diaper, that she had been the victim of female genital mutilation.
If immigration targets remain unchanged, there will be a dramatic change in the country’s ethnic, cultural, and linguistic composition. Many citizens, both native-born and immigrants, will be uncomfortable with a change at this rate and scale to the country they know and love. To make matters worse, the successive federal governments, which have overseen Canada’s policy of large-scale immigration, have never consulted Canadians on whether they actually want this kind of change. [Published in Druthers, May, 2024]
I am worried. Very worried. In the wake of the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire Primary, and Biden’s ongoing failures, I now believe that Donald Trump is unstoppable. He will not only win the GOP nomination, but the White House.
While this is great news for the United States, it is very bad news for Canada, especially those pockets of Canada where progressive Americans of means seek refuge. I live in one of those pockets. Worse still, I live in a tourist destination well known to this demographic. I am in close proximity to three blue states in the Pacific Northwest.
I have seen this (horror) movie before.
When Trump won in 2016, my community was inundated with these accursed contemptibles. One could not safely walk one’s dog or stroll down an isle of the local supermarket or frequent an outdoor cafe without bumping into one of them. Beneath their superficial good cheer, there was a seething cauldron of rage looking for any opportunity to vent. On too many occasions I was the chosen sounding board. Lucky me. Apparently these woke head cases mistook me for a trained clinical psychologist. But I am simply not equipped to treat Americans with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
These encounters would follow a predictable pattern. After a brief exchange of banalities. the creative American liberal would find a way to insert a gratuitous anti-Trump remark entirely out of context. Much in the same way that virtue-signalling Covidian cultists felt obliged to inform you that they had just been vaccinated, as if it were a badge of honour rather than what it actually was. A badge of fear, wilful ignorance, indoctrination and groupthink.
Typically their tirade was launched from the presumption that Canadians know as little about American politics as Americans do about Canada’s. So they would proceed to school me. It was like having MSNBC played back to me. When we parted I felt so stuffed with lying bullshit that I had to resist the impulse to sprint to the nearest drugstore in search of a laxative. I am pretty resilient but there is only so much misinformation I can digest in one sitting. Frankly I have found these people insufferable, and have come to tremble when they approach each and every summer, when their numbers become overwhelming.
While one can theoretically endure their rantings by wearing earplugs or feigning deafness, localresidents have not been able to endure their devastating impact on real estate prices and rents. As Professor Alberto Saiz of the University of Pittsburgh concluded from his study of the negative impact of tourism on housing affordability, affluent tourists behave much as Julius Caesar did. Only instead of “He came, he saw, he conquered” it’s “They came, they saw and they bought”, real estate that is, epricing locals out of the housing market. The result is a community like mine. A madhouse for four warm months and a ghost town in the colder months. A place where forty percent of housing units belong to absentee owners and essential workers could n’t find shelter. That’s the xenophobic fact of the matter.
The spectre of a waves upon waves of mask-wearing morons pouring across the border to escape Trump shakes me to the core I can barely contend with the CBC parrots who make up two- thirds of permanent Canadian residents here, but when their idiocy is shored up by American blue state progressives, I will feel like Custer at Little Big Horn. How can I repel these zombies? I feel helpless. I know they’re coming but I can’t fight them off. At least the Texans at the Alamo had guns, but in Jacinda Trudeau’s Republic, Canadians may soon be forbidden to arm themselves with a pea shooter.
Canadians, that is, reality-based Canadians, desperately need protection from this woke horde. We can rid our country of Trudeau in the next election, assuming there is one, but how can we stop a tidal wave of blue county hordes in 2025?
Perhaps I should sell my house to one of them and use the proceeds to buy a house in Idaho or Montana. Or in one of the 11 counties in eastern Oregon who want to secede and cut themselves off from Leftwing lunacy. It would be a win-win. They can live out the rest of their life in California North and run it into the ground the same way they ran Seattle, Portland and San Francisco into the ground.. And I can spend the rest of my life hanging around people with a modicum of common sense. The culture shock might kill me. But I’d take the risk.
Imagine me living in a place where I was able to say what is on my mind without first looking over my shoulder. Imagine not being compelled to publicly say something I don’t believe to be true, like the contention that a man can have a baby or the US Mexico border is secure. Imagine not having to celebrate mental illness on “pride” days. Imagine living in a jurisdiction where parents could protect their kids from Drag Queens and groomers. Or living in a world where election results are not determined by the ability of governments and their Big Tech collaborators to deny access to crucial information? Or living in a state or province where citizens could make an informed decision about an inadequately tested gene therapeutic because skeptics could debate government appointed medical "experts" on an even playing field.
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
If I could cross the Iron Curtain and reach that Promised Land to the south, it would be Back to the Future. A return to the Canada I once knew. That was when Communism was a dirty word and people knew what a woman was. Tim Murphy
Canada’s Auditor General says the mismanagement and changing priorities of immigration officials has caused an inventory backlog and resultant extension of waiting times.
“Most of the delays were really being caused by inefficient management practices around applications and managing the inventory,” said Karen Hogan at the release of her audit of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada.
“There’s a backlog of inventory that, at times, is greater than the immigration level for a given year.
“The department has the ability to improve how they process applications, but also to be more transparent with the applications about what their wait time might actually be.”
With Canada’s record immigration levels targets for the upcoming years, at 465,000 this year, 485,000 in 2024, and 500,000 in 2025, the Auditor General’s findings hint at a systemic incapacity to handle the additional workload.
The audit was conducted to establish IRCC’s efficiency – or lack thereof – in processing permanent residence applications.
Eight permanent residence programs were focused on under the economic, family, and refugee and humanitarian classes.
All of those programs remained backlogged at the end of the previous year.
“On average, privately sponsored refugees waited 30 months for a decision while overseas spouses or common-law partners waited 15 months to be reunited with their partners in Canada,” Hogan says. “While processing times improved in most of the programs we examined, they continued to exceed the department’s service standards for most applications in 2022.”
Moreover, the Auditor General reported that some applications waited in the queue for longer periods of time after they were initially submitted by applicants. This was most common with refugee applications, which waited an average of 15 to 20 months before receiving an initial assessment.
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Differences in size and age of application backlogs by country of citizenship existed in seven of the eight permanent resident programs examined by the Auditor General.
While improvements have been made, the report said that the length of time some applications spent in the system is increasing, especially for refugee and spousal sponsorship applications from overseas.
In response to the audit, IRCC Minister Marc Miller said that his department has continued reducing backlogs by digitizing applications, hiring and training new staff, and relying on automation to increase processing capacity and efficiency.
“Immigration is critical to Canada’s long-term success, and we recognize the importance of ensuring that our systems operate efficiently,” he said.
“I am optimistic, considering the progress made by IRCC despite all the challenges it faced over the past few years.”
The report said that by the end of 2022, 99,000 refugees were still waiting their applications to be processed.
The processing time for refugee applications is 3 years on average, and many applicants spend years waiting on a decision.
Privately sponsored refugees waited 30 months on average for a decision, while overseas spouses or common-law partners waited an average 15 months to be reunited with their partners in Canada, compared to the 12-month service standards.
PNP Processing Time Increases
In the family class, upwards of 21,000 applications were finalized within six months of being received – ahead of at least 25,000 older applications that were in the backlog at the end of 2022.
In the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), the backlog time increased from 12 to 20 months from January to December of 2022.
The age of applications for in-Canada spousal sponsorships increased from 27 to 47 months.
The report further demonstrated that backlogs vary by country in seven out of eight audited programs, especially for government-assisted refugees, federal skilled workers, and sponsored spouses who applied from out of country.
In the government-assisted refugees program, for example, more than half of the applications submitted by Somalian citizens and the Congolese citizens were backlogged.
In comparison, only one-third of Syrian applications were in backlog.
While these three countries have the most applications for government-assisted refugee sponsorships, their visa offices are also the most under-resourced.
“The department continued to assign application workloads to offices without assessing whether they had enough resources to process them,” said the audit.
The report’s overall point – Canada is taking more applications than it can handle under the current immigration targets the government has set.
Another contributing factor is the failure of the Immigration Minister to exercise his authority to “apply intake controls” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Auditor General’s Recommendations:
To provide applicants with clear expectations about timelines for a decision, IRCC should establish “achievable and reliable” service standards for PR application processing. This includes refugee applications. Additionally, online information on expected processing times should be provided for all permanent resident applications and consider the volume and age of applications in its inventories.
IRCC should take steps to identify and address the differential wait times to support timely processing in all PR programs, as it works within the annual admission targets set by the Immigration Levels Plan. Moreover, it should develop and implement a plan to collect race-based and ethnocultural information from applicants directly to address any racial disparities in wait times.
IRCC should examine backlogged applications to identify and action processing delays within its control, including waiting for officer actions or follow-up. Older backlogged applications should also be prioritized while working to achieve the annual admission targets set by the Immigration Levels Plan.
To improve consistency of application processing times across its offices, IRCC should match assigned workloads with available resources, and it should support these decisions with reliable information on the available capacity within its offices. Immediate action needs to be taken by it to address application backlogs that have accumulated in certain offices with limited capacity.
To support timely processing for all applicants, IRCC should examine differential outcomes in processing times related to the implementation of automated decision-making tools and reduce these disparities to the extent possible, including by reallocating sufficient resources to the applications directed to the manual processing.
IRCC should implement – without further delay – online application portals for its refugee programs, while also working to complete its Digital Platform Modernization Initiative.
High levels of immigration made Canada the second-fastest growing developed-world economy in recent years, trailing only the U.S., as it competed to attract high-skilled workers from around the world.
Now, the newcomers are starting to strain the country’s ability to absorb them, putting at risk an important engine of the country’s growth.
The country of 40 million people last year welcomed more than one million permanent and temporary immigrants, Statistics Canada said. That influx generated a population growth of 2.7%; the increase of 1.05 million people was nearly equivalent to last year’s increase in the U.S., a country with more than eight times Canada’s population.
In the next two years, Canadian officials say they will boost the number of permanent newcomers by almost a third, with most being skilled migrants such as carpenters, computer scientists and healthcare workers who qualify under a merit-based points system.
The system, touted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government but first developed in the 1960s, has helped drive economic growth, attract entrepreneurs and fill vacancies for skilled positions. It has been broadly supported across the Canadian political spectrum, with the goal of attracting the world’s best and brightest to Canada.
But the intake of newcomers is increasing so rapidly that analysts and newly arrived immigrants say it is adding fuel to an overheated housing market, straining a stressed healthcare system and clogging up roads in cities unaccustomed to traffic jams.
The country’s housing prices remain among the highest in the world even after a rapid and hefty rise in interest rates, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The price of a Canadian home sits 36% above 2020 levels because residential construction can’t keep up with population growth, analysts say.
TD Bank economists, in a report last month, forecast that based on current demographic trends, the shortfall in housing units that are needed to keep up with projected demand could roughly double to a half-million units within just two years.
Historically, newcomers flocked to major cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, but they are now also settling in smaller urban and suburban areas.
The total population of Canada’s capital region, around Ottawa, grew by 8.5% between 2016 to 2021, according to the national census, and house prices there surged 84% in the same period, based on data from the Canadian Real Estate Association. In the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge region, a technology and manufacturing hub 70 miles west of Toronto, the population grew 10% to 575,000. In the 2016-21 period, house prices more than doubled.
As immigration has surged, Canada’s gross domestic product per capita—widely used by economists to measure a country’s standard of living—has declined. National Bank Financial said last month that Canada’s per-capita output is on track to fall 1.7% in the second quarter from a year ago, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts Canada’s GDP-per-capita growth could be one of the lowest among developed-world economies over the next four decades.
Canada’s aggressive immigration “camouflaged the real underlying problem in this country, which is a lack of business investment and productivity,” said David Rosenberg, former chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch and now head of Rosenberg Research. This is showing up in everything from stressed public-transportation, roads, healthcare and housing, he said.
