Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said that under his leadership, Canada would have slower population growth, though he would not commit to slashing the Liberals’ permanent resident targets.
Poilievre would not say if his party supported the Justin Trudeau Liberals’ plan to increase the country’s permanent resident population by half a million every year until 2026, during a media conference in Ottawa on Thursday.
Poilievre calls out the Liberals' disastrous mistake of allowing an ISIS terrorist to immigrate to Canada.
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) August 29, 2024
"We will also secure our borders to make sure that never again do accused ISIS terrorists get into our country and become citizens of Canada." https://t.co/TXq29qiryW pic.twitter.com/36r11cptTW
Poilievre instead pivoted and said that he would link population growth to housing stats, employment demands, healthcare capacity, and slammed the Liberals for bringing people in without considering such factors.
“We have to have smaller population growth. There’s no question about it. We cannot grow the population at three times the rate of the housing stock as Trudeau has been doing,” he said. “We need to have a growth rate that is below the growth in housing, healthcare and employment.”
The Liberals have announced some measures to apparently slow the flow of immigrants coming to Canada as the country has failed to overcome the challenges that come with mass immigration.
In January, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that there would be plans to reduce international student permits by 35 percent over the next two years. The announcement came after the government increased the minimum financial requirements for international students.
Other measures have made it easier for newcomers to come to Canada, including the admission of 5,000 Gazan refugees as a result of the Israel-Hamas war.
Poilievre slams the Liberal cabinet after their 'retreat' and says Trudeau must resign.
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) August 29, 2024
"Canadians cannot afford another painful, costly, chaotic, and corrupt year of Justin Trudeau." https://t.co/vD78U4ZuZQ pic.twitter.com/94EvkjUMBG
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced earlier this week that Canada would be banning businesses from hiring low-wage temporary foreign workers in cities with high unemployment. The cap on the number of foreign workers at a single company would also be reinstated.
The surge in immigration has been cited as a factor contributing to the increased demand for housing in Canada, which now ranks among the priciest real estate markets in the developed world.
According to 2022 data from the OECD, Canada’s home price-to-income ratio climbed to 148.16, surpassing other expensive nations such as Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Additionally, an RBC report released earlier this year revealed that a Canadian earning the median household income would need to allocate 63.5% of their earnings to cover the costs of owning a typical home at current market prices.
Poilievre has accused Trudeau of destroying Canada’s immigration system by untethering it from housing and job growth. He promised that his party would restore the system to how it was before 2015. “We had a multi-generational consensus in immigration for literally decades. Before Trudeau came along, immigration was not even a controversial issue,” he said.
Poilievre calls out NDP leader Jagmeet Singh for propping up the Trudeau Liberals and selling out Canadians to delay the election to qualify for his taxpayer funded $2.2 million dollar pension.https://t.co/vD78U4ZuZQ pic.twitter.com/b59PAYOMGp
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) August 29, 2024
“I would run the immigration system… the way it was run for the 30 years prior to Trudeau being prime minister. We had a common sense consensus between Liberals and Conservatives for three decades [to] screen people to make sure they were safe [and we] only brought in the numbers that we could absorb into our housing, health care and job market and block temporary foreign workers where they were taking jobs from Canadians.”
