The Justin Trudeau government’s many acts of mismanagement on immigration will trouble Canadian policy for years to come. The fallout is already bedevilling its successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
The queue to immigrate to Canada has always been long.
Like a competitive university, Canada has always had more applicants than places. Like a competitive university, Canada developed processes, notably the points system, to decide which applicants to prioritize, and which to sideline.
And like a competitive university, the applicants queued up and competed for admission from outside the fence. Applicants to Harvard aren’t already at Harvard. Applicants to immigrate to Canada were not already in Canada.
Early in the 21st century, that began to change. Slowly at first, and then abruptly and radically under the Trudeau government.
The main queue to get into Canada is no longer outside Canada. The line is now inside the border.
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There are more than three million people in Canada on temporary visas, plus a significant but unknown number whose visas have expired, but who have not left. Most want to immigrate permanently. How many permanent residence spots are there? Just 380,000 a year.
Taylor Swift’s concert promoters are not so thick as to let millions of people into the stadium before realizing that they only have a fraction of that number of seats on offer.
The Trudeau government’s many acts of mismanagement on this file will trouble Canadian immigration policy for years to come. The fallout is already bedevilling its successor.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government released its immigration plan last week, featuring a significant cut to the flow of new temporary immigration. But it also increased permanent immigration, while claiming to be doing the opposite.
Ottawa plans to admit 380,000 new permanent residents – what we traditionally think of as immigrants – each year for the next three years. That’s down from just two years ago, when the Trudeau government was aiming for half a million a year, but up from the early 1990s until 2015, when immigration averaged around a quarter million a year.
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A big share of the 380,000 future permanent residents a year will be current temporary residents. However, the Carney government also announced programs to grant permanent residency to an additional 148,000 temporary residents over the next two years.
The Carney government is also slashing new visa-student admissions. It appears to have no choice. To reduce the stock of temporary residents, you have to reduce the flow of new temporary residents.
The challenge is that for three years the Trudeau government opened the door to what was effectively an unlimited number of notionally temporary immigrants. They came “temporarily” with the aim of staying permanently. (And who can blame them?) They paid tuition to a fly-by-night college and accepted minimum wage jobs in the hope of parlaying that into citizenship.
In the year 2000, there were 67,000 people holding a temporary work permit. By the end of 2024, there were 1,499,000.
In 2000, there were 123,000 student visa holders. By the end of 2023, there were more than one million.
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Between 2011 and 2015, the number of refugee claims made in Canada averaged about 17,000 a year. Last year, there were 190,000. This year, claims are on pace to hit 110,000.
In 2015, there were 10,000 people in Canada who had applied for refugee status and were awaiting a decision. The figure is now 296,000.
I’ll have more to say in future columns about what Ottawa and the provinces should do next. (And if you’ve got some time on your hands, read my book.)
But I want to end with a Remembrance Day story.
Pete Hoekstra is the current U.S, ambassador to Canada. He was born Cornelis Piet Hoekstra, in 1953, in the Netherlands, in the city of Groningen.
Eight years earlier, from April 13 to 16, 1945, the 18,000 troops of the 2nd Canadian Division liberated his hometown.
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In the Battle of Groningen, the division suffered 209 casualties, including 43 dead. More than 5,000 Germans were captured. One hundred and ten Dutch civilians were killed.
That last figure is remarkably low for combat in a fortified city packed with people. Major-General A.B. Matthews, in command of the 2nd Division, chose to refrain from using heavy artillery or air strikes, in part to limit civilian casualties. The city was swollen with refugees, with around 150,000 Dutch in the town at the time.
The Canadians who liberated Groningen came from across our land. They include: the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada, from Montreal, the Calgary Highlanders, the Royal Canadian Dragoons (Petawawa, Ont.), the 14th Canadian Hussars (Swift Current, Sask.), the Royal Regiment of Canada (Toronto), le Régiment de Maisonneuve (Montreal), the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, the Fort Garry Horse (Winnipeg), the Essex Scottish Regiment (Windsor, Ont.), les Fusiliers Mont-Royal (Montreal), the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada (Winnipeg), and the South Saskatchewan Regiment (Estevan, Sask.)
The day before the battle, the Canadians liberated Westerbork transit camp. Between the summer of 1942 until the fall of 1944, more than 100,000 Jews were transported from there to Auschwitz and other murder sites.
From the war diary of the South Saskatchewan Regiment, April 13, 1945:
“Visiting a camp like this brings home to us the reality of what we are fighting for. It makes the average Canadian indignant.”
Lest we forget.