Canada’s Conservative Leader Flips to Oppose Justin Trudeau’s Migration

Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada's Conservative Party, during the Canada Strong and Free
David Kawai/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Neil Munro

The likely next prime minister of Canada has suddenly flipped his pro-migration platform and is now promising to deeply cut Justin Trudeau’s migration flood.

“It’s going to be much lower, especially for temporary immigration,” said Pierre Poilievre, head of the pro-migration Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He continued:

It’s impossible to invite 1.2 million new people to Canada every year [as Trudeau has done]. When you’re building 200,000 housing units, it’s impossible. There’s no room.

Poilievre declined to give a target number for more migrants. Instead, he said that immigration should be tied to the rate of home building and job creation.

The sudden shift comes after Canadians have rejected the mass migration policies imposed by Trudeau. Those investor-backed open-door policies have demoralized young Canadians, slashed wages, reduced productivity, rocketed housing prices, and super-charged poverty and crime.

“Our economy is now smaller than it was in 2019 when adjusted for inflation and immigration, and pretty much in the same place it was a decade ago,” admitted a June 4 report by Canada’s RBC Royal Bank. Amid Trudeau’s migration, “a growing share of savings and investment has flowed to real estate and construction, which, while needed and beneficial for many reasons, are both relatively inefficient and can hold back the overall productive growth of an economy,” the report said.

Until now, Poilievre had supported Trudeau’s migration-poverty policies because his business wing is addicted to the inflow of cheap workers, consumers, and renters. Also, his wife is a migrant from Venezuela.

Understandably, many immigration reformers are skeptical of Poilievre’s pre-election conversion and noted his unwillingness to say how many migrants he will welcome.

Many of the voters who are most concerned about migration now back Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, who has long opposed Trudeau’s nation-wrecking migration policy.

Poilievre recognizes that 61 percent of his conservative party’s 2021 voters want migration reduced, according to a June poll by Research Co. The poll reported:

“About two-in-five Canadians who voted for the Liberal Party (41%) or the New Democratic Party (NDP) (39%) in the last federal election would decrease legal immigration to Canada,” says Mario Canseco, President of Research Co. “The proportion jumps to 63% among Canadians who supported the Conservative Party in 2021.”

The “temporary migration” cited by Poilievre refers to Canada’s massive inflow of poor foreigners into many rubber-stamp colleges. The colleges appeared when Trudeau allowed foreign students at the colleges to get work permits — and a chance of Canadian citizenship — in exchange for college fees.

The result is a massive population of poorly educated student migrants from India who are desperately searching for any job — even at minimal wages. The migrant “students” also are staging political protests to demand residency.

Former President Donald Trump recently proposed a similar disastrous college migration policy in the United States. He told a group of investors:

Anybody graduates from a college — you go in there for two years or four years — if you graduate or if you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.

Trump has promised similar policies before, and so his campaign immediately backtracked. “We ought to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America … who would never undercut American wages or workers,” said the statement from spokeswoman Katherine Leavitt.

Trump’s supporters were not happy with his plan to increase migration.

“That would be a horrible thing, because of the problems with illegal immigration and everything,” Shea Thompson, a 20-year-old college student from Spokane, Washington, told Politico. “Obviously it’s following other immigration policies that he’s going to go through and put in place.”

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s reckless migration strategy has helped wreck his chance of winning the next election, due by October 2025. A June poll shows that his support has dipped under 20 percent and Poilievre’s party at 36 percent.

Migration and imposed diversity remain popular in the nation partly because investors, politicians, and their media allies deny and minimize the vast economic, pocketbook, and civic damage.

Even if he loses, Trudeau’s massive flood of migrants has created permanent ethnic politics and civic disputes throughout Canada’s formerly stable and coherent culture. For example, migrants and their new political parties are for the immigration of more migrants — such as Arabs in the Gaza strip — and are demanding that Canada get involved in their home country’s politics.

The polling company reported on the declining role of Canada’s home culture:

Canadians remain split when assessing two different concepts related to immigration. While 44% (-1) would prefer for Canada to be a [multicultural] mosaic, where cultural differences within Canadian society are valuable and should be preserved, 42% (=) would embrace the [older] concept of the melting pot, where immigrants assimilate and blend into Canadian society.

Also, advocates for bigger government welcome migration, partly because it creates massive economic distortions — such as poverty and sky-high rents — that a bigger government can promise to fix.

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