Limiting foreign workers won't solve troubles, but economists say it's a good first step - "“The increase in the number of temporary residents in the past two years has been unsustainable in terms of housing , infrastructure, health,” Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets Inc., said. “The short-term impact might be difficult on small businesses, especially, but the mid-to-long-term impact of this policy is actually positive.” As businesses lower their reliance on “cheap labour,” they will either have to raise wages to attract “locals” or replace labour with capital, he said. “This won’t be easy for businesses, but it will increase productivity and be beneficial for the economy.”... An overall decline in immigration numbers could lower headline gross domestic product (GDP) , which measures the value of goods and services produced during a specific time frame, as growth in recent years has been driven by more workers, Bank of Nova Scotia economist Rebekah Young said. On the other hand, the move could boost GDP per capita, which has been on the decline in recent months. “We are also likely to see the unemployment rate numbers fall,” she said. “It has been ticking up mostly as new arrivals have outpaced new job creation. The brunt of unemployment has been felt by recently arrived immigrants, along with younger Canadians, where there may have been some displacement by temporary workers.”"
Weird. Open borders advocates say the more migration, the better
Poilievre says he would cut population growth after Liberals signal immigration changes coming - "Poilievre has previously said immigration levels should be tied to housing starts... In an apparent reference to research from Mike Moffatt, the senior director of policy at the Smart Prosperity Institute who has studied immigration and housing, Poilievre said Canada "cannot grow the population at three times the rate of the housing stock, as Trudeau has been doing."... Talk of an immigration cutback comes as unemployment rates among immigrants and young people have crept up to concerning levels in recent months, according to federal data. According to the Bank of Canada's recent monetary report, the "newcomer" or immigrant unemployment rate now stands at 11.6 per cent — well above the overall unemployment rate of 6.4 per cent that was recorded in June... Immigration Minister Marc Miller also said "all options are on the table" when it comes to addressing immigration levels. He acknowledged that some people have expressed concern to him about the current pace of population growth, which is among the highest in the developed world."
This doesn't stop all the left wingers insisting that he won't, because their fantasy and cope are more important than reality
A Trump win spells trouble for Canada - "If Trump is elected, illegal immigrants in the U.S. will have incentive to head for the northern border to avoid being deported back to Central America. This is problematic because Canada lacks the border security and military resources to prevent illegal crossings. This means floods of people could arrive, claiming asylum, facilitated by smugglers. If that happens, Trump’s deportation scheme could turn Canada into the world’s largest refugee camp, bankrupting health, education, and welfare systems. Given Ottawa’s incompetence in immigration matters, it would take years to unravel such a massive backlog and cost billions in taxpayer dollars. Another danger is that a Trump regime will nix electric car vehicle initiatives at home and in Canada, costing government backers and car companies billions"
Cancelling wasteful industrial policy is bad if you're a rent-seeker
U.S. border patrol reports record number of encounters with migrants at the Canadian border - "U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it recorded a record-high number of encounters with migrants between border posts on the Canada-U.S. border between October 2023 and July of this year. It's a pattern experts say could be a problem for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government as the question of illegal immigration heats up in a close-fought U.S. election... "Part of the problem is as the southern border has gotten tighter, the coyotes (smugglers) are telling people to come to Canada and then they try to smuggle them into the United States," said Washington State immigration lawyer Greg Boos. Keith Cozine is an associate professor of homeland security at St. John's University in New York and a former officer with the Department of Homeland Security. He said the numbers at the northern border are cause for concern. "(It's) quite alarming when you consider that is more than the past 10 years combined, even probably longer than that," Cozine said. "Given the recent arrest of the Pakistani national in Canada, who was plotting to carry out some sort of attack on the anniversary of October 7, it is alarming."... According to U.S. CBP statistics, the source nationality accounting for the largest number of Border Patrol encounters at the border has been India: 9,742 of the 19,498 migrants stopped between October and July were from that country. Poirier said the RCMP used to see more migrants from Mexico until new visa requirements curbed the traffic. "For the past few months, what we're seeing is a lot of people landing at international airports, so either Montreal or Toronto," he said. "And then within a few hours of their arrival, we catch them at the border, either attempting to cross or they've already successfully crossed."... While Canada is part of the Five Eyes alliance of countries that cooperate on security and intelligence, Canada is considered the "lazy eye," said Sundberg."
How federal failures are ruining Canadian cities - "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... Last year, deportation orders were issued for 700 student visa holders from India for using fraudulent university letters to obtain entry, but the orders were frozen by then-immigration minister Sean Fraser."
Terror plots, now bomb arrests — Canada has a problem - "Taha Sleiman was arrested Thursday on a sleepy, tree-lined street in Niagara Falls. The houses along Beaver Glen Drive in the west end of this border town are typical suburban homes that typically sell in the $750,000 to $1-million range... the 21-year-old is facing one charge of “make, possess, care, and control of explosive device” and one charge of “unlawful possession of explosives.”... many are calling this another instance of a terrorist plot being thwarted in Canada. Given the past few months, making that assumption doesn’t require a big leap of faith. It’s doubtful that Sleiman is facing charges of making improvised explosive devices because he was planning on robbing a bank. The announcement of his arrest on Friday came as the U.S. Justice Department was announcing the arrest of a Pakistani national who had been living in Canada but was travelling to New York state to kill as many Jews as possible in attacks on or around Oct. 7. Whether Sleiman’s case is terrorism-related isn’t known, but what is clear is that Canada currently has a terrorism problem. Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, also known as Shahzeb Jadoon, is a 20-year-old non-resident who interacted with undercover agents in the United States during an alleged attempt to plan a terror attack in Brooklyn. According to documents filed in a New York court, Khan conspired to obtain an AR-15 and other firearms plus ammunition to carry out his attack, which he said he would do in the name of ISIS. The charging documents also allege that Khan chose New York City because he said it has the “largest Jewish population In america,” that the attack “could rack up easily a lot of jews” and that “we are going to nyc to slaughter them.”... It was just five weeks earlier that the RCMP announced the arrests of 62-year-old Ahmed Eldidi and his 26 year-old son Mostafa Eldidi. Ahmed Eldidi’s case created controversy after it was discovered that he came to Canada and was granted citizenship despite allegedly being the star of a 2015 ISIS torture video. Their plan, according to police, was to carry out a mass casualty event, presumably aimed at Toronto’s Jewish community. In July, we also saw Khaled Hussein, a 29-year-old Edmonton man, sentenced to five years in a British prison for being a member of a banned terrorist group. That sentencing on July 31 came just days after a fellow Albertan, 21-year-old Zachareah Adam Quraishi, was shot and killed in Israel trying to attack Israeli security forces near the Gaza border. Quraishi had travelled to Israel specifically to carry out his attack. On top of these terror plots, attempts and convictions we have a problem with people who clearly support terrorist groups such as Hamas marching in our streets. We’ve had Jewish schools, synagogues and community centres shot at, firebombed and threatened across the country. It was just two weeks ago that more than 100 Jewish institutions had bomb threats emailed to them. Canada has a terrorism problem. The target is the Jewish community and, sadly, it looks as if there will have to be a successful attack before our political leaders decide to do something to address this."
Weird. Muslims keep saying ISIS is really the Mossad. Why would they want to kill Jews?
LILLEY: Trudeau has broken every aspect of our immigration system - "India is currently the top source country for people claiming asylum with more than 15,000 claims in the first six months of this year, claims from Mexico are at nearly 9,000. People coming here from India and Mexico, with rare exception, are not refugees, they are economic migrants abusing a system meant to protect people from persecution. The Liberals could fix this problem by fixing the visa system, but they’d rather talk about building hotels, busing people across the country and be arguing with premiers than looking for solutions. When it isn’t letting the visa system rot, we have questions about how well we vet people coming into the country... Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the strength of our vetting system during a news conference in Montreal. To listen to Trudeau, there are no problems with the system. “First of all, this is an extraordinarily serious situation, and it highlights just how effective our security services and institutions are that we were able to interdict these, these very, very potentially devastating situations,” Trudeau said. The arrests are one thing, but why are we not catching people before they enter the country. One of the charges against Eldidi is due to what police say was his participation in an ISIS terror and torture video in 2015. Our asylum claims are off the charts, the visa system is broken, we can’t properly vet people coming into Canada and now a report from TD Bank that says the over reliance on temporary foreign workers is hurting the economy. All of these problems have been created by the Trudeau Liberals and their mismanagement of the system."
Meme - Darshan Maharaja @TheophanesRex: "Ghee is now under lock and key at my local No Frills. Notice that all the other cooking oils are not."
Liberals go hog wild on immigration, hoping to secure victory in 2029 and beyond : r/canada - "You used to be called racist for saying he is just bringing in voters. Now the Star is saying it lol"
Liberals use immigration to secure victory in 2029 - "The trend started in 2016, when Trudeau made some diplomatic hay by removing the Harper government’s visa requirement for visitors from Mexico. Despite a 70-fold surge in Mexican asylum claims, the Liberals waited until 2024 to reverse themselves. A “majority of claims were abandoned or rejected,” and that single Liberal flip-flop cost Canadian taxpayers $600 million a year for health care and shelter costs. Until recently, my nomination for the Most Idiotic Liberal Move on Immigration was the change that allowed any visitor visa applicant to “no longer have to prove they have sufficient funds to stay in Canada or demonstrate they will leave the country when their visas expire.” The government explained the move, which expired in 2023, as an extraordinary measure to help clear immigration backlogs. But the ramifications were clear — two key tests to assess whether you intend to leave when your six-month visitor visa expires were out the window. Is there a border guard anywhere else in the Western world who would waive you through if you had no return plane ticket and couldn’t prove that you could afford to feed yourself during your “holiday?” Trudeau changed that particular rule at the exact moment he was amending the “Safe Third Country Agreement” with U.S. President Joe Biden to shut down the Roxham Road illegal border crossing. Trudeau responded to political pressure from Quebec Premier François Legault regarding the “influx” of overland economic migrants yet proceeded to remove the one test we use at Canadian airports to separate bona fide tourists from those individuals too impatient to join a legitimate immigration queue. Having made it far easier for economic migrants to enter the country over the past eight years, Immigration Minister Marc Miller recently tabled a plan to “regularize” many of these same people. Like Captain Louis Renault in the movie “Casablanca,” who was “shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” Miller didn’t explain why his government allowed up to 500,000 people to overstay their visas in the first place. And that was before the news broke that Trudeau is lowering entry standards, giving spots to those who’ve not even earned a high school diploma instead of prioritizing, say, doctors and job-creating tech entrepreneurs. It all might make sense if Canada had a federal budget surplus, ample affordable rental accommodation, and short emergency ward wait times. But that’s not our reality. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is polite to put this down to mere incompetence. To me, there’s another possibility. Maybe the Liberals intended to fling open the nation’s back door and grow the pool of future permanent residency applicants, in the expectation that they’ll always be grateful to the political party that granted them entry to our generous land. A 20-something recently told me that his grandmother, who fled Argentina for Canada in the 1970s, would “Thank God and Pierre Trudeau” every night as she said grace before dinner: “we owed everything to him.” Consider that in 2021, Trudeau’s 5.6 million votes weren’t sufficient to secure another majority. His administration has brought in about 3.2 million new immigrants, and consciously allowed the number of temporary residents to swell to 2.8 million — a large chunk of whom have come post the 2021 election. More than any equivalent period in our history. One has to wonder if Trudeau has weaponized our Immigration system in an effort to build a new base of more than six million grateful future Liberal voters. What might look like “incompetence” may actually be the Liberal 2029 election strategy at work."
Hub Exclusive: Jason Kenney blasts Trudeau government’s ‘catastrophic’ immigration agenda, accuses Liberals of trying to create a ‘voting bloc’ - "The former politician, who made his name as a cabinet minister who embraced immigration and made major Conservative inroads into a variety of ethnic communities, made the comments in an exclusive interview... “I think one of the worst legacies of the Trudeau government will have been to undermine what used to be the most robust pro-immigration consensus of any Western democracy,” Kenney told Hub co-founder and editor-at-large Sean Speer. “I think they have redirected public opinion from being very broadly supportive about immigration, towards the public opinion environment you see on immigration in the United States and Europe.” “I think this was a catastrophic mistake,” he concluded... In 2022, then-Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship minister Sean Fraser said high immigration levels would, “help businesses find the workers they need, set Canada on a path that will contribute to our long-term success, and allow us to make good on key commitments to vulnerable people fleeing violence, war and persecution.” Two years later, many are sounding the alarm, saying the government’s immigration agenda has been too much and too fast. Experts say high immigration numbers have fuelled Canada’s housing crisis. “In the last three-and-a-half years, Canada’s population has grown by 3 million people, the level the country typically experiences in a decade, and slightly more than we experienced in the entire 1990s,” explained economist Mike Moffat in The Hub this week. “This level of growth was only sustainable if infrastructure and housing construction experienced similar increases. They did not, leaving our healthcare system underfunded and growing Canada’s shortfall of homes at nearly one million units.” Rapid and high immigration has also put a strain on public services like schools, transit, and hospitals. The government has also faced criticism for the lack of oversight it showed when it came to ballooning temporary foreign worker and international student programs. Amidst the immigration increases, workers are struggling to find jobs, as demonstrated by long line-ups at job fairs. Questions have also risen around integration amidst, among other things, a considerable number of pro-Hamas and pro-Khalistan extremist rallies in Canada’s streets and tensions between various ethnic groups. A recent Leger poll found 65 percent of Canadians believe the Liberals’ current immigration targets are too high, while only three percent said they are too low. Seventy-eight percent said immigration is contributing to the housing shortage, while 76 percent said it is impacting the health-care system. Compare this to 2015 when 82 percent of Canadians believed that “immigration has a positive impact on the economy of Canada.” “It’s a false dichotomy to suggest that you could still bring in like half a million permanent residents plus land 100,000 successful asylum claimants a year…without some negative consequences as well,” said Kenney. He added that it’s “almost an open borders situation.”... “We ended up in the Harper government with a system that was widely regarded by centrists, academics…as something of a model for the world.” In the past, including when Kenney was immigration minister, many immigrants to Canada were chosen via a points system. However, that is less and less the case today. In 2019, about 46 percent of economic immigrants were selected through the federal skilled workers program on the basis that they had the highest number of points. However, estimates predict that by 2026, only 8 percent of all immigrants will be selected based on having the highest points score. The number of temporary foreign worker approvals, including low-skill workers, has also grown by 120 percent. In some sectors, the amount of temporary foreign workers has increased by over 1000 percent... “They imagined, with these high levels, both on the permanent and temporary side, that they’re creating a new permanent Liberal voting bloc, and inversely, a political trap for the Conservatives,” he said. Similar accusations have been lodged against Democrats south of the border—that by welcoming newcomers they are attempting to secure grateful future voters. The Hub reached out to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada as well as the Liberal Party of Canada about Kenney’s accusation, but they did not provide a comment. Liberals had hoped to get Conservatives “to come out and oppose these extraordinarily high numbers,” according to Kenney. However, Kenney said the Liberal plan backfired. “They’ve created their own political trap because it’s new Canadians who are the most vulnerable to shortages in the labour market…[and] health care.”... Kenney also cited pressure from the business community for why the numbers have gotten so high... Kenney pointed out that the Liberals’ immigration agenda has hurt Canadian workers. “What they’ve done in the temporary foreign workers program is prevent the natural market response to labour scarcity, which has higher salaries and benefits,” he said. “We have not seen wages grow in proportion to what they should be.” “We’re now six straight years getting poorer as a country. [We’re] one of only three OECD industrialized countries, to see negative growth in per capita GDP, all of which was perfectly predictable,” he added."
Trump’s anti-immigrant views cause harm in Canada, too - "As a grown woman, a professor no less, I am told I am stealing jobs from more deserving white straight Canadian men. I am frequently dismissed as a “diversity hire” or was told by seemingly well-meaning white colleagues that I’m “so lucky to be a woman of colour right now” — a notion that dismisses my qualifications and hard work. I am not lucky to be a woman of colour right now and Donald Trump’s false xenophobic rhetoric in the U.S. presidential debate accusing migrants of increasing crime, eating pets, and pouring over the border in the millions is actually putting all people of colour in more danger — in the U.S., in Canada and around the world... We saw last month how misinformation and disinformation about the migrant status of the teenager behind the Southport killings in the U.K. provoked 29 anti-immigrant riots... Canada is not immune to this. In fact, the recent government policy changes targeted at reducing temporary foreign workers and international students have fanned the flames of rising xenophobia in Canada. International students, particularly from South Asia, have been targets of hate crimes and violence. These students contribute $22 billion to our economy a year, yet they are viewed as outsiders taking jobs or putting a strain on public services... We have to ask ourselves — who benefits from this rhetoric? The answer is no one. Blaming migrants for crimes doesn’t make us safer; it distracts from the real issues of inequality, underfunded public services, and the need for affordable housing"
If she doesn't like being seen as a diversity hire, why doesn't she oppose diversity hiring instead of blaming Trump?
She missed the memo that Asians are "white adjacent", so she's opening herself up to attack for branding herself "a woman of colour"
Clearly, if you oppose open borders, you're xenophobic
Naturally, she leaves out crucial context about migrant crime in the UK
Apparently if you have open borders, you will always be able to find so much money, you can pump them into public services so they will no longer be "unerfunded", and you can magick houses into existence overnight too
Geoff Russ: The Liberals are being consumed by the diaspora politics they nurtured - "What appears to have motivated so many voters to switch sides was Sauvé’s choice to campaign on a war more than 8,000 kilometres away. Sauvé famously — or infamously — plastered his pamphlets with Palestinian flags, as if he was running in Ramallah or Nablus. Whether he actually cares that deeply about Gaza is a mystery, but he was savvy enough to realize the power of the conflict as a wedge in Trudeau’s post-national Canada. This is what happens when mainstream, distinctly Canadian identity is hollowed out: an extreme form of multiculturalist ideology called post-nationalism fills the void, allowing foreign issues and ancient ethnic or religious feuds to dominate politics. It’s no coincidence that the ongoing Israel-Hamas war has inflamed a string of social unrest not seen in Canada for generations. Sure, the 2011 Occupy protests went on for well over a year, but they never resulted in firebombings or shooting attacks on community centres. In 2021, when Canadian churches were being burned, likely in retaliation for abuses at residential schools, there were also never any serious campaigns of bomb threats. For almost a year now, all of the above — or attempts at them — have been perpetrated against Jewish institutions, drastically reorienting the energy of the Canadian left towards a Middle Eastern conflict. This is a time of economic hardship and punishing unaffordability, yet a war in which Canada has no direct involvement seems to mean more to thousands, if not millions, of people here. The Liberal government’s tepid approach to the Israeli government, which has included rebukes and the suspension of arms sales to the country, is not enough for the anti-Israel lobby and activist groups, who refuse to settle for anything less than “globalizing” the intifada. When the anti-Israel crowd says “ globalize the intifada ,” what they want is for Canada to be a front in the war against Israel by non-military, though often violent, means. Few are questioning why the idea of using Canada as a proxy front is so normalized, even as they unnaturally impact our politics. Diaspora politics can clearly thrive under a post-nationalist government, with unforeseen consequences... Even John Ibbitson recently observed in the Globe and Mail that what is left of the Liberal Party is being further frayed by internal tensions over the war in Gaza, with more than 50 staffers — mostly of Arab and Muslim origin — refusing to help in the LaSalle-Émard-Verdun byelection."
Kevin Vuong on X - "Why’d @JustinTrudeau’s Immigration Minister personally intervene to stop a deportation order, upheld by a fed court, of a person:
— Criminally convicted 5x, incl. criminal contempt of court
— Boasted of US$170,000 foreign funding to blockade 🇨🇦 roads
— Blocked 🇨🇦 infrastructure"
This was probably Zain Haq, a climate change protester. You only get your bank account frozen, like with the Freedom Convoy, if you obstruct the left wing agenda even once
Martin Pelletier on X - "1 in 4 people on welfare in Ontario is an asylum seeker. That alone was costing the Province $500 million per year. The Federal govt opens up the taps and Provinces have to pay for it. And then when it fails Trudeau LPC supporters blame the Province. Everyone suffers in the end including the asylum seekers as resources become so stretched they break."
Why asylum claims are spiking at Canadian airports - "In 2016, the federal Liberal government dropped requirements that travellers from Mexico obtain visa to come to Canada, a requirement imposed by the previous Conservative government. Canada’s intake of asylum seekers from Mexico more than doubled each year from 2016 to 2023. Canada also succeeded in closing the Roxham Road border crossing in Quebec last spring, where irregular migrants from third countries had been walking into Canada after first finding their way to the U.S. That preceded a sharp increase in arrivals at airports in Ontario and Quebec, according to federal data. At around the same time, the federal government implemented measures to speed up its processing of visitor visas to clear up a mounting backlog. It quietly dropped requirements that passengers arriving here by air from certain countries demonstrate they are just visiting, for instance by proving they had a return ticket home and funds in a bank account. It proved to be a hugely consequential move that coincided with the surge in asylum claims... Approximately 24,000 Mexican nationals claimed asylum in Canada in 2023 — compared to just 250 in 2016, the year the visa restriction was lifted. In February this year, the Liberal government backtracked and reimposed the visa requirement for Mexican travellers that had been put in place by the Conservatives, in the face of so many asylum seekers. Mexico was the largest source country for migrants seeking asylum in Canada last year, followed by Haiti, Turkey, India and Colombia. Do airports have the resources to properly screen claimants? David Thomas, a Vancouver-based lawyer and mediator with over 20 years in immigration law, says that the short answer is “no.” Thomas said CBSA’s airport immigration screeners lack the resources to properly vet the asylum claimants who wind up in their queues. “A lot of the time they won’t even know if the guy in front of them had a criminal record in his home country,” Thomas said... it can take even the most well-resourced agencies upwards of a year to properly vet a foreign national seeking legal status in Canada. “Airport personnel, through no fault of their own, generally don’t do a very good job of scrutinizing applicants,” said Thomas. A source with knowledge of the CBSA’s screening procedures said that time is often a restricting factor for airport immigration agents. They are often trained to move people through the queue quickly, with limited time spent with each person. The source said that time pressures are pushing airport screeners to “shunt people onto the next stage of assessment,” usually their admissibility hearing, and “hope they’re vetted more closely later on.” Asylum seekers can stay until the federal government decides whether they qualify for refugee status. The average refugee claim takes about two years to process. Unsuccessful refugee applicants will be ordered deported but they can first appeal their decision, if they choose, and remain in Canada until after their appeal is heard. A typical appeal takes roughly a year to sort out."
Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "IN under 3 years... Canada went from the most generous, pro-immigration country on planet Earth ..to having many Premiers fighting with the immigration Minister publicly on Twitter (after private discussions failed) ...demanding he shut their borders. (A 🧵)"
This doesn't stop left wingers blaming corporations, landlords and government, because supply and demand are racist and xenophobic