OP-ED: Can we reverse the Trudeau immigration fiasco?

John Weissenberger writes, "The Liberals’ immigration failures are almost too numerous to list, with fresh scandals appearing almost weekly."

Photo by Alban on Unsplash

By: John Weissenberger

John Weissenberger is a Calgary geologist and former executive. He was Chief of Staff in the federal Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, 2007-2008.

Early in 1951, a refugee in Bavaria tried a second time to emigrate to Canada. His mistake on the first attempt had been to write, under “occupation”, the word “teacher”. He’d been a trained teacher before the war, but Canada didn’t need teachers. Asking around, it seemed Canada needed labourers, so when my father wrote “labourer” on the application, he was accepted.

Despite being a “land of immigrants”, Canada used economic criteria to choose who we took. Bigotry and prejudice had also existed – as with the continuous voyage requirement (1908) and Chinese Immigration Act (1923) aka “head tax” – but this changed with the introduction of what would become the world-famous “points system” in 1967.

Under the points system, applicants were objectively assessed using transparent criteria like vocational/occupational preparation, labour market demand, age, proficiency in English/French and family ties. Implicit was the belief that immigration served the needs of Canadians and our economy. The points criteria regulated only the “economic” immigration stream, skilled workers and their dependants, forming about half of the total. The two other streams – family reunification and “humanitarian”, comprising “government-assisted” and privately-sponsored refugees – were unaffected.

The points-based system would be described by one New York Times contributor as “Canada’s ruthlessly smart immigration policy”. It was emulated by other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Britain. For almost 50 years, points criteria selected most of the 9-million-plus immigrants Canada took during that time.

Then, beginning in 2015 the Trudeau Liberals, as the National Post’s Tristin Hopper recently put it, drove us to “Cuckoo town”.

The Liberals’ immigration failures are almost too numerous to list, with fresh scandals appearing almost weekly. These range from raising the economic newcomer target by 54% to 401,000, fast-tracking processing by lowering standards, or exploding the foreign student and temporary foreign worker categories to 3.2 million people, to not even vetting asylum-seekers. This has resulted in up to 500,000 “undocumented” people at large, almost 300,000 unprocessed refugee claimants and a further 28,000 failed claimants awaiting removal.

After all, in 2017, Justin Trudeau tweeted a global invitation to all migrants. Now the bills are piling up, with asylum-seekers getting generous benefits, and childcare for temporary residents costing over $3 billion in 2021-25.

Unsurprisingly, Canada’s pro-immigration consensus disintegrated. Today everyone from think-tanks to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are proposing reforms. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith plans to take controversial questions about immigration directly to a referendum.

Still, Canadians haven’t really debated immigration’s fundamental questions, like, What exactly is it for? Does it merely serve short-term economics or shape our nation’s future prosperity and identity? What debate there is reveals both regional divides and ideological anger.

Also largely off the radar is our looming demographic collapse. With our average birthrate in 2024 of just 1.3 (versus the bare replacement level of 2.1 live births per woman), without skads of newcomers Canada’s population could halve by 2100.

This prompts the key question: to grow or not to grow. Unsurprisingly, this gets different answers in Quebec versus English Canada.

La belle province seems to favour “cultural preservation” over growth, which means declining population as well as smaller economic and – much to their chagrin – political clout. English Canada is largely on the growth train, if only to preserve our Ponzi-ish social programs. The Conference Board of Canada, for example, extolls immigration for bolstering “expensive social programs by increasing the ratio of employed workers to retirees.” Others like the Century Initiative, just want to grow to 100 million Canadians by 2100. But to what end?

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There’s certainly no shortage of prospective new Canadians. In 2024 Gallup found that 25-30 percent of the entire developing world wants to move. Their top destination is, no surprise, the U.S.A., with 18% choosing that destination. But much smaller Canada came second at 9%. At least 80 million people want to become Canadians right now.

This underscores the importance of Canada choosing – how many, and who – which really starts the political fireworks. Conservatives want to tie admissions to economic indicators and curb excess benefits for newcomers, while the Liberals’ approach has not changed much. The Liberals currently called criticizing the ballooning asylum-seeker-related costs “punching down” on the “most vulnerable” and, of course, racist. The fact that everyone from Justin Trudeau to the current immigration minister think “terrorists have a right to be citizens” reveals their fundamental beliefs.

They appear convinced that, while there’s a rainbow of different cultures, with myriad diverse attributes, these are somehow qualitatively equivalent. This ignores extensive European research that ties immigrants’ economic success and integration to education and skill levels. U.S. economist Garett Jones also shows how immigrant outcomes vary dramatically by source country, while their habits and values (e.g. savings rates, trust of government and personal responsibility) persist through generations.

So history and current research support Canada being choosy, but we are also in a kind of selection trap. If we don’t admit people who will maintain whatever attributes made Canada attractive in the first place, Canada will deteriorate further and fewer will want to come. Consequently, a rigorous, objective selection process is imperative.

Many on the Left, however, believe that the very fact we choose at all with our current system is a “moral failure”. Such thinking extends right to the Liberal government benches, which means profound reforms will be very difficult.

My family’s experience was that it’s better to be a refugee than to be dead. And it’s vastly better to be in Canada than to be a refugee. But we got in through Canada’s choice, based on Canada’s needs, not our hopes. Worked then, and would work now.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.