The Liberals are belatedly dealing with the out-of-control population growth
Posted January 26, 2024
According to Canadian Press reports, the government was warned two years ago that increased immigration would have an impact on the affordability and availability of housing, as well as services such as health care.
On January 12th Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre correctly summarized the response needed to properly manage the unplanned surge in population. He said his Conservative Party “will get back to an approach of immigration that invites a number of people that we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.”
It is easier to say than to do but it does set out a clear direction. Meanwhile the Liberals have finally begun to respond to the crisis it created.
In a January 14th interview by the CBC’s Rosemary Barton, Immigration Minister Marc Miller hinted at changes to come. He said he would be “scrutinizing the number of international students and other non-permanent residents coming into Canada.”
The number of international students in Canada has ballooned from 325,000 in 2015 to more than 900,000 last year. Some never show up for classes, with some private colleges, mostly in Ontario, gladly pocketing the prepaid tuition.
On Monday, Miller announced that there will be a 35% reduction in student visas in 2024 and 2025. He says the motivation for the initiative is to protect international students from unscrupulous private colleges. Perhaps so occasionally, but some students may be tacitly accepting the “tuition fee” as good value for skipping the immigration lineup.
The number of international students is likely to drop regardless of steps the Liberals take.
India is by far the biggest source. In September Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the government of India of involvement in the fatal shooting of a Canadian Sikh leader. India’s Prime Minister Modi was offended. In October he expelled 41 Canadian diplomats in India who are needed to process visas for students.
Miller argues that his changes will benefit international students by eliminating bogus courses. Those students don’t vote in Canadian elections. In reality the primary political motivation is to give some relief to the overcrowded housing market.
It will be for the provinces to distribute the visas to their institutions. In Nova Scotia, Cape Breton University will be the most impacted, with three quarters of their students being international. Fortunately, they were already planning to phase in a reduction.
The Liberals point to various federal initiatives to facilitate housing: leaning on municipalities to ease zoning rules and regulations, dropping federal GST on new builds, lower interest rates for “affordable” projects, the rapid housing initiative. These are useful, but the impact is only felt when units are completed and occupied, which begins two years or more later.
Meanwhile the number of asylum seekers at airports has surged because of relaxations in visa requirements, especially from Mexico. These had been created by the Harper government but repealed by Trudeau in 2016. Recently, the numbers have matched what used to arrive at the informal Roxham Road border point. The Canada Border Services Agency processed 72,000 asylum claimants in 2023.
Support services in Quebec and Toronto are being overwhelmed by the numbers and their governments are demanding reimbursement from Ottawa. Ottawa is in turn leaning on other provinces to take on some of the burden.
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc says that he is looking at reinstating the Harper policy, though he did not call it that. We can expect an announcement from him along those lines shortly. It will be interesting to see whether it is touted as relieving pressures in the housing market or something else.
The increase in “temporary” foreign workers is the biggest piece of unplanned population growth. Excluding those that are also students, the number of work permit holders grew by 400,000 to 1,165,000 in the first nine months of the year.
That increase is greater than the 376,000 qualified immigrants. Minister Miller needs to be scrutinizing those numbers. It is worrisome that to date there has been no announcement that the government sees this as a problem.
More than half of the “temporary” workers are in low wage jobs. The easy access to inexpensive foreign workers puts downward pressure on the wages that citizens can earn.
Two years ago, when the government was warned of a housing crunch, the pace of annual housing starts was in the 250,000–300,000 range. (The government does not count completions.) Before the covid blip, the population had been rising at 500,000–600,000 per year.
In 2023 there were 224,000 housing starts while population grew by 1,030,000 in the first nine months. It is a wonder that the housing crisis is not even worse.
As of January 25th, there have been no announcements of changes to the temporary foreign worker program. When the Department was asked about this, the reply was, “The Government of Canada is committed to recalibrating the number of temporary residents admitted to the country in order to ensure that communities have the capacity to welcome and support them.”
Discerning readers will notice that this is remarkably similar to what Poilievre said two weeks ago. Good. Better late than never.
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