After several days of riots and rabble-rousing in response to the Trump administration’s ham-fisted determination to round up illegal immigrants, downtown Los Angeles was placed under curfew on Tuesday. The disorder has spread to more than a dozen American cities. There have been scores of arrests.
It has all made for great television and amusing political theatre, with Democrats shouting righteously about the rule of law and due process while ignoring their own support for “sanctuary” laws that undermine their own government’s capacity to enforce federal immigration legislation. Not to be outdone, Donald Trump’s Republicans have invoked the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to back their plans for mass deportations. The 1798 law was about pirates.
Despite heartrending accounts of children torn from their parents’ arms, Americans are not generally overwrought about Trump’s hardline remedy to the preposterously intractable American political quagmire involving undocumented workers and border security.
shows Trump is polling better on this file than on the economy or inflation, with 54 per cent of respondents expressing approval.
In the popular imagination, Canadians would not abide such lowbrow measures as mass deportations of illegal immigrants, but in fact we would. Or rather roughly
, which is more or less the same as the American polling results. Nearly half the respondents to a Leger poll undertaken for the Association of Canadian Studies last December said mass deportations are necessary to deal with illegal immigration in Canada.
It’s not for lack of evidence that 65 per cent of Canadians say Ottawa’s immigration levels are set too high. That was the view of only 35 per cent of respondents in 2019, and even after the Liberal government’s recent pledges to get its act together and scale back on the annual volume of newcomers, that’s the standpoint of nearly two-thirds of us. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to argue against it.
Statistics Canada’s “population clock” counted 41,681,71 people who were living in Canada as of Wednesday morning this week, up from 35,851,800 in 2015. This was the biggest spike in immigration in 60 years, contributing to Canada’s rank as the
for housing affordability, after Portugal, in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Despite reassurances from Prime Minister Mark Carney that his government intends to scale back the influx, the numbers keep going up.
StatsCan’s data for the end of the first quarter of this year shows there are 291,165 more
in Canada than there were in April of 2024, for a total of slightly more than three million people. Among them are 290,000 foreign students admitted this year. Additionally, asylum claimants numbered 457,000 by April this year, up by nearly 130,000 from 2024.
Then there’s the officially guessed-at number of perhaps 500,000 people
in Canada.
The 2025 target for new temporary-resident arrivals is 673,650, declining to 543,600 by 2027 — but housing starts in Canada added only 245,000 units in 2024. What all this means is that if we’re extraordinarily lucky, Canada’s housing affordability catastrophe will remain at roughly the same crisis levels for the foreseeable future.
It doesn’t help that Immigration Minister Lena Diab doesn’t seem to know how many undocumented workers there are in Canada, or how many temporary workers leave Canada after their permits expire. Peppered by Opposition immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner in the House of Commons this week, Diab wouldn’t or couldn’t say how many of the million-plus foreign students from 2023 left Canada after their study permits expired. “Anybody whose visa expired is expected to leave,” she said.
Ottawa’s assumption that people simply leave when their visas run out is “a fiction,” according to former federal economist Henry Lotin, founder of the consultancy Integrative Trade and Economics.
Sky-high immigration levels aren’t the only cause of the breakdown in the relationship between average incomes and housing costs in Canada. Zoning rules and the cost of fees and development charges get a lot of headline play, but it is becoming increasingly clear that there’s a lot more going on, most of it involving profiteering and the
in new housing starts.
Across party lines, there is a broad political reluctance to advance any policy that would actually reduce home prices in Canada. Meanwhile, eight in 10 Canadians have concluded that homeownership has become a
, and seven in 10 Canadians who don’t own a home say they never expect to own one.
“We are living through a paradigm shift — one in which homes are no longer primarily bought by local families, but by global investors,” says housing analyst John Pasalis. “Housing has become a financial asset unbound from local incomes, and policy has yet to catch up.”
On top of the economic impacts, there’s the matter of Canada’s fraying social fabric.
A huge surge in wealth migration from the People’s Republic of China in recent years has swamped Canada’s long-standing Cantonese communities and introduced grave threats to Canada’s political sovereignty. After all the scandals involving compromised federal politicians and manipulated federal election races, there is still no sign that the Carney government intends to proceed with a foreign influence registry.
With politically active immigrants from the Middle East emerging as a heavy counterweight to Canada’s long-standing affinity with the Jewish state of Israel, profound changes are underway in the formulation of Canada’s foreign policy and Canada’s traditions of religious tolerance.
For all the Liberals’ recent admissions of error, the Trudeau government’s immigration legacy is with us still, and there’s little evidence that a Carney government, despite its reassurances, will be making much of a break with it.
While Toronto has lately adopted an American-style “sanctuary city” policy through its Access T.O. initiative (“Access to City Services for Undocumented Torontonians), this doesn’t mean that Canada is hurtling towards American-style standoffs between federal and local enforcement authorities.
It’s just that while Americans are going through distinctly American convulsions related to immigration, Canada doesn’t have anything to brag about. Canada’s old consensus on immigration has been broken. The public trust in a functioning immigration system has been badly shaken.
It can’t go on like this.
National Post