If there is one criticism that keeps coming up about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, it is that it puts too much emphasis on announcements and not enough on implementing the programs that flow from them. This is a government that almost systematically neglects the unintended consequences of its initiatives, focusing instead on the message it wants to send to certain targeted political constituencies. It does not seem to learn from its mistakes, or, when it does, it is too late to repair the damage already done.
The proof of this is his management of Canada’s immigration system. Once the envy of the world, this system was based on precise selection criteria that allowed Canada to rank applicants so that only the most qualified among them obtained permanent residence, regardless of their country of origin. The Liberals had already started to deviate from this principle before the pandemic by creating exceptions for certain categories of immigrants. Starting in 2021, however, the Trudeau government completely upended the system by raising the thresholds for permanent and temporary immigration in order to boost economic growth and fill the shortage of workers in certain sectors of the economy.
Not only was Canada going to accept more permanent residents—setting a target of 500,000 by 2025—but they were increasingly going to come from pools of hundreds of thousands of temporary residents already based in the country, thanks to the massive expansion of the federal temporary foreign worker and international education programs. The established selection criteria had been circumvented to favour those who already had Canadian work experience, even if it was low-wage work that did not require specific skills or advanced degrees. But in doing so, Ottawa could boast that it was speeding up the granting of permanent resident permits and meeting employers’ demands for labour.
But we know what has happened since then. The housing crisis is just the tip of the iceberg, the most visible consequence of the Liberals’ abandonment of the principles that have guided all previous federal governments on immigration for more than five decades. The unemployment rate for youth aged 15 to 24 was 14.2 per cent in July, according to Statistics Canada, up 3.6 percentage points from a year ago and the highest level since 2012. Among young men, the jobless rate climbed to 16 per cent. The situation is even worse for young immigrants who have been in Canada for less than five years, whose unemployment rate was 22.8 per cent in July, up 8.6 percentage points from the same month in 2023. While Canada’s economy continues to grow, job creation remains well behind population growth due to permanent and temporary immigration. What would happen if a recession or severe economic slowdown ever hit the country? A “perfect storm.”
This week, the Trudeau government finally announced its intention to tighten the eligibility criteria for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, not in the distant future as it had repeatedly suggested, but starting next month. Among other things, the duration of permits will be reduced to one year instead of two, and the maximum proportion of temporary workers within a single company will again be 10% instead of 20%. But with nearly 2.8 million non-permanent residents in the country, more than double the number in 2021, experts rightly expect that thousands of them will choose to go underground rather than leave Canada when their residence permits expire. After all, most of them came to Canada on a temporary basis with the expectation of obtaining permanent residency later, thanks to the changes to eligibility criteria introduced by the Liberals in 2021. However, Minister Marc Miller suggested this week that Ottawa is now also examining the possibility of reducing the permanent immigration thresholds.
The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) are already struggling with a workload that is beyond belief. They do not have the staff or the resources to ensure that all these temporary foreign workers and international students leave the country as soon as their permits expire. And it is hard to believe that the Liberals, as big spenders as they are, will increase the CBSA budget to deport all the new undocumented immigrants who do not leave Canada voluntarily. The government is already accused of turning a blind eye to the exploitation of temporary foreign workers by some unscrupulous employers. Deporting thousands of former temporary foreign workers who are forced into hiding would earn it the “Trumpist” label.
The Trudeau government’s retreat this week will not be enough to get Canada’s immigration system back on track for several years and will swell the ranks of undocumented immigrants in the country, with all the social and economic repercussions that implies. It is hard to imagine this worst-case scenario happening in a country that was once the envy of the world when it comes to immigration.