{"id":501361,"date":"2026-02-26T18:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T18:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/501361\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T18:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T18:44:11","slug":"smith-and-poilievre-find-someone-to-blame-for-their-problems-immigrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/501361\/","title":{"rendered":"Smith and Poilievre find someone to blame for their problems: immigrants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre have recently seized on the issue of immigration, writes Andrew Coyne.The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Danielle Smith<\/a> has a problem. Her government is heading toward a deficit projected, before Thursday\u2019s budget, at $10-billion. This is only partly because it overestimated oil revenues, with oil prices now projected at roughly $5 to $10 a barrel lower than forecast in last year\u2019s budget. It is because the government set spending at levels that could only be sustained so long as the oil boom continued. She needs something, or someone, to blame for her excess spending.<\/p>\n

Pierre Poilievre<\/a>, too, has a problem. His party is now 10 points behind the Liberals in the polls, and falling. He himself lags Mark Carney by 20 to 30 points. Three of his MPs have crossed the floor. More are expected to follow. He needs something to stop the bleeding. It\u2019s no longer a matter of pulling votes from the Liberals. He needs to keep his own voters on side. He needs a polarizing issue, something that forces people to choose which side they\u2019re on: us or them.<\/p>\n

By a miraculous coincidence, both leaders have lately hit upon a solution to their respective problems. And would you believe it, the solution is in each case exactly the same: blame immigrants. <\/p>\n

Gary Mason: Faced with fiscal woes, Danielle Smith takes aim at immigrants<\/a><\/p>\n

Ms. Smith went on television to tell the public that \u201cout of control\u201d immigration<\/a> was the reason for her government\u2019s fiscal woes. Mind you, she couldn\u2019t quantify the extra costs they had imposed on the treasury, or how much would be saved if her proposed remedies \u2013 restricting access to social services to \u201cAlberta-approved\u201d immigrants; charging \u201cnon-permanent\u201d immigrants a fee to use them; or requiring that they have lived in Alberta for a year to be eligible \u2013 were implemented.<\/p>\n

But then, she isn\u2019t going to necessarily implement any of them. Rather, she\u2019s going to ask the province\u2019s voters whether they would like her to do so \u2013 part of a suite of at least nine referendum questions<\/a> to be put to a bewildered electorate in October. Understand: in the face of a fiscal emergency supposedly so pressing it required commandeering the province\u2019s airwaves, the Premier proposes to wait eight months to hold a vote on whether to do things that are within her power to do tomorrow.<\/p>\n

(That\u2019s in contrast to the proposed referendum questions on the constitution, which mostly ask whether the province should take a number of powers from the federal government \u2013 which it can only do by means of a constitutional amendment requiring, among other things, the consent of the federal government.)<\/p>\n

So the province will consume itself from now till October debating whether immigrants are sponges and how roughly they should be treated. All to solve what is mostly a non-problem.<\/p>\n

Campbell Clark: There is no flood of newcomers anymore, Mr. Poilievre<\/a><\/p>\n

As of last July there were about 290,000 non-permanent residents in the province, or about 5.8 per cent of the population. If they were all expelled, or denied any access to social services, the province might spend perhaps $3-billion less \u2013 on a budget of $74-billion. <\/p>\n

But they do not only consume social services. They also work \u2013 many of them in the social sector \u2013 and pay taxes on their income. So quite apart from the appalling spectacle of withdrawing essential services from a particularly vulnerable section of the population, it wouldn\u2019t even save the province much money.<\/p>\n

Then there is Mr. Poilievre. The Conservative Leader went on social media<\/a> Monday to boast of a motion<\/a> his party planned to put before the House of Commons the next day which would, as he described it, \u201ccut back deluxe benefits for fake refugees and deport non-citizens and foreign nationals who do crime.\u201d <\/p>\n

The accompanying video, featuring Mr. Poilievre striding about angrily, played explicitly to us-or-them resentments: \u201cWhile you can\u2019t get health care, Liberals force you to pay higher taxes to fund deluxe supplementary health care benefits for asylum claimants who\u2019ve been rejected.\u201d <\/p>\n

A torrent of posts followed. \u201cRadical Liberal open-border policies have overloaded our housing, health care and job market.\u201d They are \u201cat their breaking point.\u201d It\u2019s time to \u201csecure our border and put Canadians first,\u201d \u201csend non-citizen criminals home,\u201d etc. etc. You get the picture. The reason you can\u2019t get health care is because they do.<\/p>\n

The pretext for this latest outburst of anti-immigration hysterics is the release of two reports: one by the Parliamentary Budget Office, the other by the C. D. Howe Institute. The PBO report<\/a> looked at the cost of the Interim Federal Health Program, which provides \u201climited and temporary health care coverage\u201d to foreign nationals \u201cwho are not eligible for health insurance from provinces or territories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sure enough, the cost of the program has ballooned in recent years, from $211-million in 2020-21 to $896-million in fiscal 2025, in line with increases in the numbers of claimants. That\u2019s still less than one-fifth of one per cent of all federal spending, and less than one third of one per cent of all spending, federal or provincial, on health care. That\u2019s not only for asylum claimants but resettled refugees as well; and not only for supplemental health care benefits but for basic care.<\/p>\n

All told, it costs about $1,645 a year to provide each asylum claimant with health care \u2013 a fraction of the overall national average. <\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t \u201cfake\u201d or \u201cfailed\u201d claimants: they are people whose claims are still in process, or who have appealed an initial finding against them. Once their appeals have been exhausted \u2013 once their claim truly has failed, which is not the same as saying it was fake \u2013 they lose all funding. <\/p>\n

So that\u2019s what all the health care fuss is about.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

A report this month from the Parliamentary Budget Office found the cost of the Interim Federal Health Program grew from $211-million in 2020-21 to $896-million in fiscal 2025.Chris Young\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

The other report<\/a>, by the C. D. Howe Institute, is seemingly more damning. It found that in recent years the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada exempted certain categories of claimants, depending on their nationality and claim type, from the usual requirement for an oral hearing. Tens of thousands of claims were accepted in this way, based solely on the claimant\u2019s written application. Though advanced as a way of reducing the backlog of unprocessed asylum claims, it appears to have had the opposite effect: the backlog now stands at nearly 300,000, up from 17,000 in 2016.<\/p>\n

Well all right, that\u2019s not great \u2013 though even here the problems have been exaggerated. The claims were not \u201crubber-stamped,\u201d as if subjected to no scrutiny whatever: they just weren\u2019t subjected to an oral hearing. Not every claim is accepted, nor is it even 80 per cent, as you might have heard. It\u2019s 80 per cent of those claims that are decided on their merits \u2013 that is, not counting those that are withdrawn or summarily dismissed. <\/p>\n

But goodness gracious, you\u2019d think the world had ended, from the response. No, people shouldn\u2019t be given asylum who aren\u2019t eligible. Yes, weeding out false claims costs money. But we\u2019re curiously selective about the kind of fare-dodging we choose to get choleric about. If it\u2019s strict adherence to the law that concerns us, or the cost to the taxpayer for that matter, what about the hundreds of thousands of Canadians working on the fiddle, without declaring their income? The underground economy has been estimated<\/a> to be worth about 2.5 per cent of Canada\u2019s GDP \u2013 and to cost governments billions annually in revenue. But for some reason that doesn\u2019t excite nearly as much scandalized comment.<\/p>\n

The broader claims, that Canada has been \u201coverwhelmed\u201d or \u201coverloaded\u201d by immigration, fare no better under scrutiny. Immigration, whether to Canada or to Alberta, is not \u201cout of control.\u201d Certain streams within it, notably the international students and temporary foreign worker programs, may have qualified for that epithet in the recent past, but these have since slowed to a trickle. As of the third quarter of last year, Canada\u2019s population had actually begun to shrink<\/a> \u2013 there were more people leaving the country than entering it.<\/p>\n

Tony Keller: How Canada got immigration right for so long \u2013 and then got it very, very wrong<\/a><\/p>\n

No doubt the late-Trudeau era surge in immigration didn\u2019t help, but it didn\u2019t cause the strains in our health care or housing or labour markets. We did that to ourselves. Wait times for health care have been lengthening for more than 30 years, as meticulously documented by the Fraser Institute\u2019s annual Waiting Your Turn reports. They\u2019re at 29 weeks now, from referral to treatment, but they were already at 26 weeks by 2021, when the great population boom began.<\/p>\n

Housing prices, likewise, had already gotten way out of hand long before the dawn of \u201cradical Liberal open-border policies,\u201d owing to a combination of restrictive municipal zoning laws and loose monetary policy. The average house price in Canada has, in fact, been falling since 2022 \u2013 precisely coinciding with peak immigration. And while it\u2019s easy to point the finger at immigration for recent increases in unemployment, it has surely as much to do with the generalized climate of uncertainty created by tariffs, inflation and soaring public debts.<\/p>\n

The point bears repeating: we had just as rapid population growth in some years in the 1950s and 1960s, without any of the problems that are now so recklessly laid at the feet of immigrants and refugees. Why? Because we were building more houses: we had yet to tie the housing market in regulatory knots. Because the health care system had not yet been turned into an ossified, centrally planned monopoly. Because we were investing more, growing more, hiring more. <\/p>\n

Those are the sorts of things conservatives, and Conservatives, used to talk about, rather than the crude hack of letting fewer people in: the economic equivalent of bleeding the patient. Ms. Smith and Mr. Poilievre themselves were advocates, not so long ago, of a pro-growth population policy. <\/p>\n

But how much easier it is, politically, when you\u2019re in political trouble, to deflect public discontent, to blame all their troubles on outsiders, to play to people\u2019s fears and whip up their resentments. Just so no one compares anybody to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre have recently seized on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[28472,20754,28473,43,44,927,1008,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-501361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-andrew-coyne","9":"tag-column","10":"tag-coyne","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-opinion","14":"tag-pleasemod","15":"tag-top-news","16":"tag-top-stories","17":"tag-topnews","18":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}