Did you know ? Before Isaac Newton discovered gravity, everyone took things lightly. The quip applies superbly to the sudden epiphany of members of the Trudeau government regarding immigration.
“I don’t think anyone needs a briefing to understand that, if there are more people who need housing, this will have an impact on the housing situation”, said this week one of the architects of Trudeauist mass immigration, because until recently holder of this portfolio, Sean Fraser, but who, since the summer, has been punished for where he sinned, because he is now Minister of Housing.
His successor, Marc Miller, went so far as to declare that the country had “lost control” of the number of foreign students in the country, but that this state of affairs was the responsibility of the provinces, some of which tolerate the presence on their territory of what he called “ puppy mills “. In French, these are “puppy mills”. He talks about these private schools which are diploma factories of uncertain quality, delivered in record time to students, many of them from India and China, and which give them, according to the generous rules in force, access quick to citizenship.
One of the best recipes for political bad faith is to identify, within a major problem, a real but secondary element, and to pretend that by tackling it, we are tackling the issue head on. . Because, deep down, do the members of the Trudeau government think that having increased to half a million per year the number of immigrants permanent is excessive? No.
“Canadians are almost unanimous in their support for immigration. This is an extraordinary advantage. Our current thresholds for permanent immigration are those we need for our economy,” declared Justin Trudeau without laughing. All recent polls show, on the contrary, that Canadians’ support for immigration thresholds is experiencing a historic drop. Nearly three-quarters judge — wisely — that the thresholds must be reduced at least until the housing crisis is resolved. If the trend continues, there will soon be unanimity.
The festival of sophistry
Perhaps he thinks that Toronto’s business community, which has advocated for increased immigration for years and which fuels his campaign fund, is still with him. Not according to their Pravda, the Financial Postwhich summarizes the ambient consensus as follows: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to significantly increase immigration […] without providing adequate support has created a long list of economic problems, including higher inflation and low productivity. » TD Bank’s chief economist, Beata Caranci, sums it up this way: Trudeau “ screwed up “.
How can the Prime Minister’s judgment be so far from reality? The solutions, he explains, making his case worse, are within reach: the 500,000 permanent workers per year can find accommodation, he claims, as long as universities find accommodation for their international students and businesses. for their temporary workers. All you had to do was think about it. Because in the Trudeauist universe, there are three distinct housing markets. Incredulous? Let us recall that we are talking about a man who, having obtained accommodation worth $84,000 for his vacation in Jamaica, declared that, “like many Canadian families, we went to stay with friends for the vacation of Christmas “.
We miss the days when he spouted empty sentences. Because his new statements are worse: false. He continues to argue that we need more immigration to solve labor shortages. But since Canada has received more than two million arrivals in two years, shouldn’t we have solved the problem and have a surplus of manpower?
The economist Pierre Fortin concluded from a review of recent scientific literature that this conclusion “is nothing but a big fallacy.” Each immigrant who fills a job requires the creation of another job to provide him with all his services. The same goes for the claim that immigration enriches us (the impact is insignificant) or rejuvenates us (same result). However, we continue to hear politicians, bosses and commentators repeating this nonsense.
To go into detail, let’s say that it is true that, if we dump a million Chinese in Quebec, each with $1,000 in their pocket, the GDP will grow by a billion. If you are a GDP, it’s joy. If you’re not a GDP, it’s less fun. And if it was a question of avoiding a demographic decline by maintaining the recent growth of Quebec’s population, demographer Marc Termotte concluded that to do this, all categories included, only 58,000 immigrants per year would be necessary. , rather than the current 580,000 — the 55,000 permanent and 528,000 non-permanent. So, the tenth.
The sophisms about the benefits of immigration would only be background noise if the consequences did not become so serious, for housing, education — 1,500 additional reception classes in Quebec — and, ultimately, the the explosion of homelessness.
Cognitive difficulty
Twisted minds claim that the cognitive difficulty of the federal Liberals on immigration is due to this information, reported in The sun by Hélène Buzzetti: “At their last convention, pollster Dan Arnold revealed that voters born outside of Canada are the most likely to vote Liberal. Their level of support for the Liberal Party exceeded that of non-immigrants by 8 points in the 2015 election, by 13 points in 2019 and by 19 points in 2021. » Reducing the flow of entries from this electoral windfall is a good idea, especially during a crossing of the desert.
François Legault, for his part, used the Miller formula: identify part of the problem and act as if it were the essential thing. The overflow of asylum seekers, he wrote to Trudeau, cannot continue. Certainly. But Legault has always had the freedom to limit the number of foreign students and temporary workers on its territory. He chose not to. His minister Christine Fréchette complains that a good number of temporary immigrants are only within the jurisdiction of Ottawa. But it is because it refuses to invoke the Canada-Quebec agreement on immigration to demand control.
It is the particular misfortune of Quebecers to be currently governed in Ottawa by Trudeauists who take their post-national fantasies of grandeur for truth and in Quebec by a Prime Minister who admitted during the electoral campaign to not being “a budding genius.” of immigration”. It seems.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has a good time pushing this procession of sophists into their contradictions, and highlighting how distressing the passivity of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is and how contrary the Canadian project is, not only to our interests, but to the simple good management of our affairs. He seems to be the only one who understands the seriousness of the issue. He therefore deserves, for this week, the Isaac Newton Prize.