Canada officially has an immigration problem. No, it’s not the one we’ve been hearing about for months now, which the federal government has belatedly addressed through policies that cap both the number of foreign students coming to this country and temporary foreign workers being used by our business community. With rents in major urban centres already dropping, the impact of the post-COVID surge in temporary migrants on shelter costs and demand for services like healthcare and education is already on the wane.
But this is just the beginning of Canada’s immigration challenge. Recent polling data confirms the pro-immigration consensus that we once enjoyed — one that was unique among developed countries — is rapidly deteriorating. According to new data from Environics Institute’s Focus Canada research, nearly six in ten (58 per cent) Canadians now think the country accepts too many immigrants. That’s a 14 per cent increase over 2023, which was itself a 17 per cent increase on 2022’s data. In other words, the number of Canadians who think we accept too many immigrants has more than doubled in the last two years.
It’s a reminder of how fragile that consensus actually was — and how much the federal government might have overestimated its durability. There’s no question that its policy choices, from opening up the temporary foreign worker program to allowing far more foreign students to study here, have exacerbated existing pressures on housing affordability and access to key services. They own these mistakes and that should be particularly painful for a political party that has long defined itself by its embrace of multiculturalism as official government policy.
But if Liberal bumbling helped sow this bumper crop of anti-immigration sentiment, Conservative politicians and pundits are more than ready to harvest it. As the Environics survey shows, 80 per cent of Conservative supporters — 80 per cent! — now think Canada has too many immigrants, up from 43 per cent in 2022. Based on the recent behaviour of some of the Conservative movement’s leading lights, they seem determined to push that figure even higher.
In her recent public address that announced new funding for schools in Alberta, for example, premier Danielle Smith effectively blamed immigration for the overcrowding that has defined classrooms in her province for years now. “The Trudeau government’s unrestrained open border policies, permitting well over a million newcomers each year, are causing significant challenges,” she said. Never mind, for the moment, that her government literally funded a multi-million dollar ad campaign called “Alberta is Calling” that encouraged people to move from BC, Ontario, and the rest of the country. For Smith, it’s much easier to just blame the immigrants.
Her predecessor, former federal immigration minister Jason Kenney, has been nearly as reckless on this issue. In an interview with The Hub co-founder Sean Speer, he suggested that federal immigration policy is really about “creating a new permanent Liberal voting bloc, and inversely, a political trap for Conservatives.” This is a more sophisticated version of Elon Musk’s now-familiar refrain about how Democrats are supposedly trying to “rig” the election by allowing migrants into the country to vote (even though they can’t). As Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne noted, “this is an utterly irresponsible and inflammatory accusation: Trumpian, in fact.”
It gets even Trumpier as you move further towards the margins of the Canadian Conservative ecosystem. Over at True North, an increasingly popular safe space for Conservative politicians, show host Harrison Faulkner has been repeatedly testing the limits of just how far he can go. “Why do we need to have foreign-born politicians at the cabinet table?” he said in a video that listed off people like Justice Minister Arif Virani, Minister of Small Business Rechie Valdez and a host of others. “ What is the benefit that it brings to Canada?”
The benefit, of course, is that they bring a broader range of experiecnes and backgrounds to the decision-making table than a cabinet comprised entirely of Canadian-born people could. It also completely misses the point here, which is that where they come from — and whether their family has been here for ten years or ten generations — has no bearing on things like merit or competence.
But these are rational answers to an irrational impulse, one that seems to be spreading rapidly among Conservatives both here in Canada and around the world. Remember Donald Trump’s demonstrably false nonsense about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating dogs and cats? Well, in the least surprising development possible, Canada’s own Rebel Media headed there to engage in what Politico’s Adam Wren described as a “conspiracy scavenger hunt.” As it happens, Danielle Smith was featured at a Rebel Media event in Calgary earlier this month. One might wonder if the issue of migrants eating pets came up.
None of this is going to end well if Canada continues down this path. Our long-term prosperity depends on our ability to effectively integrate immigrants, who will account for all of our country’s population growth by 2030. That population growth is crucial to mitigating the economic and fiscal effects of a rapidly aging population, and immigration will play a key role in addressing labour shortages in areas such as caregiving, healthcare and the skilled trades. If we’re ever going to harness the numerous benefits associated with a larger population — say, 100 million — we need to get a handle on this issue right now.
Conservatives need to get a handle on it too. They may think they can harness this energy to their own purposes, which is the exact same mistake establishment Republicans thought about Donald Trump and his own nativist obsessions. But the more their party is defined by anti-immigration sentiment, the more they’ll feel compelled to cater to its self-destructive impulses. As we’re seeing in America, that can and will lead to some very dark and dangerous places.
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