Canada’s supercharged immigration is shrinking wages, hiking house prices, and polarizing national polls, but the nation’s establishment — including the right-of-center party — is demanding more migrants to build more housing in suburban neighborhoods.
“I’ll sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal lands to build, build, build,” said Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. He said on August 15:
My common sense plan is to require cities [to] permit 15 percent more homebuilding per year or I will pull back their federal grants. Those that beat 15 percent target will get a building bonus. I’ll require every federally funded transit station to have high-density apartments around and even on top … We will remove the gatekeepers and we will build homes that our working-class people can once again afford — just like they could afford eight years ago.
Poilievre did not suggest any reversal of liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plans to import roughly one million permanent and temporary migrants into Canada’s 40 million population, even though the inflow has spiked housing prices and stalled wages for ordinary Canadians.
But the consumere conomy stimulus is strongly backed by the nation’s elite investors and landowners, because it adds 10 migrant consumers and renters for every four Canadian high-school graduates each year. “In 2022, Canada’s population grew by more than one million people, a number that included 607,782 non-permanent residents and 437,180 immigrants,” CTV.com reported on August 16.
Trudeau’s answer to the shortage of housing for Canadians and migrants is to extract more migrants from poor countries who can be used to build houses for prior migrants.
“Without those skilled workers coming from outside Canada, we absolutely cannot build the homes and meet the demand that exists currently today,” Trudeau’s immigration minister, Marc Miller, said on August 11. He also rejected calls for immigration cuts, saying:
If people are asking us to slash [immigration], what does that mean? Does that mean slashing the skilled workers that we need to actually build those houses? Slash family reunification, which can be devastating for the mental health and well-being of the families that are already here?
Canadian officials also want to extract more doctors and nurses from poor former British colonies — for example, India, Pakistan, and Kenya — where locals face many healthcare shortages.
Canada is also reducing the economic strain by directing unproductive Canadians into early death via the government-promoted “Medical Assistance in Dying” program. The very unpopular program killed 9,500 Canadians in 2022.
However, Miller also acknowledged wide-scale fraud in the immigration system, so allowing the government to reduced the inflow of temporary migrants with temporary visas without blaming their high-immigration policy.
The government’s massive inflow of consumers and renters into Canada’s economy is causing shortages of housing, healthcare, and education slots.
The policy is also reducing the average productivity of workers, which determines family wages and national wealth, partly because many of the migrants come from countries with no tradition of high-quality education, U.S-style professionalism, or English-language culture.
The same changes are occurring in the United States as President Joe Biden’s deputies use their bureaucratic power to smuggle more blue-collar and white-collar migrants into Americans’ workplaces, housing, hospitals, and retail stores.
The Wall Street Journal reported on August 14:
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. “This is what happens when our government decides to triple the rate at which our population is growing without giving any thought to where everyone will live,” said John Pasalis, president of Toronto real-estate brokerage Realosophy Realty.
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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.
But woke government officials downplay the productivity and housing problems and instead talk about claimed racism and the status of sexual minorities. “To dissent against mass immigration risks wild accusations of bigotry,” wrote op-ed writer John Robson:
But what doesn’t nowadays? Like the joke about the patient who calls every single Rorschach ink blot a nude woman, then when the psychiatrist suggests he has a sexual obsession retorts, “Hey doc, you’re the one showing all the dirty pictures,” our elites increasingly see white supremacy in every defence of our heritage then say “Hey Canuck, you’re the one obsessed with race.”
Polls show the public is quickly reversing its polite support for massive migration.
Our multi-decade embrace of super-high immigration was supposed to flood our country with entrepreneurs and innovators; the practical overall result appears to be stagnant labour productivity, along with frank inattention to research and development on the part of our businesses. Everywhere you look it is economists who are shooting warning flares into the sky, and even the central bank is making Marge Simpson dissatisfaction noises. Only federal politicians, fearful of a third rail that may soon be totally disconnected from any power, remain quiet.
Social media sites are also showing emotional reactions from Canadians who are being locked out of a stable, middle-class life:
More tent cities are opening for homeless Canadians, just as Presindent Joe Biden’s high-migration economy is increasing U.S. homelessness:
Meanwhile, migrants from warm Asia are crowding into the strip of green land between Canada’s U.S. border and the frozen north:
Extraction Migration
The U.S. government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
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