Canada’s Trudeau Wants MORE Migrants amid Crisis in Housing, Wages, Births
by Neil Munro
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is again raising his inflow of legal immigrants — which has already spiked Canadians’ housing prices, crashed birthrates, slashed productivity, and trashed public support for migration.
Trudeau’s inflow will rise from 465,000 in 2023, up to 485,000 in 2024 and then 500,000 per year after, immigration minister Marc Miller said November 1.
The extra “newcomers” per year are needed to build houses and provide healthcare for the migrants already imported by Trudeau’s government, Miller said.
The government will legally import “workers to Canada who can help alleviate social pressures in key areas like housing and health care,” an October 31 report said.
But Canada’s government also hides much additional migration by not counting migrants who are defined as supposedly short-stay foreign students. Roughly 700,000 supposed students arrived in the first six months of 2023. With this sleight of hand, the government pulled in a million migrants in 2022, inflating Canada’s total population to 40 million.
Trudeau’s long-term immigration plan would annually add five extra permanent migrants — not counting foreign “students” — for every four youths who graduate from Canada’s high schools.
Trudeau’s investors-backed policy is doing vast damage to ordinary Canadians — and is now driving down the birth rates because young Canadians cannot afford decent housing. Overall, Trudeau’s progressive policy is helping investors convert the civic foundations of Canadian society into higher stock values.
Housing
Trudeau’s immigration has produced a “demand shock” for housing in Canada’s non-arctic regions near the U.S. border. The result is a dramatic spike in the costs of homes and rents far beyond what Canadians can pay.
For example, the average home price in September 2023 was $475,000 in U.S. dollars. Half of Canadians earn below $50,000 per year.
“The dream of homeownership is quickly turning into a nightmare for an entire generation of renters,” Ipsos researcher Sean Simpson told Canada’s Global News in October. He added:
Two-thirds of Canadians who are currently renting who don’t have a home are giving up on the dream of homeownership … The acknowledgement from most Canadian that owning a home is only for the rich is also up from earlier in the year and you don’t get that level of consensus in Canada without renters and owners, older people, younger people all agreeing that there is a housing crisis in this country.