'Reckless and naive': Trudeau's immigration policy works for no one, says former Alberta premier Jason Kenney

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Is there any denying that Justin Trudeau’s arms-wide-open approach to inviting immigrants, refugees, foreign students and foreign workers into Canada is a radical departure, a shock change from past practice?

To grasp the enormity of the shift, let’s look at the previous three prime ministers — Liberals Jean Chretien and Paul Martin and Conservative Stephen Harper — and compare where they ended up on immigration intake numbers in their final years in power to what Trudeau did in 2023, the last year we have full statistics.

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In 2003, Chretien’s final year in power, Canada allowed 469,000 newcomers in total. This was made up of 164,000 study permit holders, 32,000 refugee claimants, 34,000 foreign workers and 239,000 immigrants, according to data from Statistics Canada.

In total, Martin let in 488,000 people in 2005, Harper 678,000 in 2014.

Trudeau in 2023? He let in 1.84 million.

If we dig one layer deeper we see that in their final years in office, Chretien, Martin and Harper allowed a one-year average of 222,000 study permit holders, 22,000 refugee claimants, 57,000 temporary foreign workers, and 245,000 immigrants. That’s an average total of 545,000 per year.

In 2023, Trudeau allowed 1,041,000 study permit holders, a 370 per cent increase over the one-year average of the other PMs this century, 144,000 refugee claimants, a 563 per cent increase, 184,00 temporary foreign workers, a 222 per cent increase, and 472,000 immigrants, a 92.7 per cent increase.

Again, Trudeau’s total added up to 1.84 million, a 238 per cent increase over the average of Chretien, Martin and Harper.

This astronomical increase happened in a country where there’s a crisis around people finding housing, where inflation has shot up for food and other essentials, where many young people are struggling to find employment, and where hospitals and schools strain to meet needs.

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A new Angus Reid poll found that Canadians’ concern over immigration has risen four-fold over the last two years. And a new Leger survey showed 65 per cent believe the Liberals’ immigration targets are too high.

“All the lights on the dashboard are now blinking furiously that this has to be slowed down,” said former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, who under the Harper government held the job of federal immigration minister longer than anyone else in Canadian history.

“The main overall problem is the massive numbers, the volume,” Kenney told me in an interview. “Totally unmanageable. Total incompetence on their part to jack all of these categories simultaneously with no apparent regard for the overall impact it would have on Canada, the job market, the housing market, the health care system or anything else. It was literally reckless.”

Kenney said he strongly suspects Trudeau is going against the advice of expert immigration bureaucrats, who tend to be cautious. “They were protective of Canada’s national interest because many of them are lifers in that system. They’ve been mugged by reality. They understand what naive Liberals apparently don’t, that there’s an enormous global migration market and people will pay huge sums of money to get into a developed democracy like Canada. And many people are willing to break the rules in order to do so.”

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Almost all of the people who arrive here on a temporary basis have the hope, expectation and intention to stay permanently, Kenney said, but they are in line behind the huge number of new permanent admissions allowed by Trudeau. This will lead to hundreds of thousands staying here illegally. “This will create its own massive problems.”

There was a huge backlog in refugee claimants when he took over as immigration minister, Kenney said, which he was able to reduce by removing endless appeals and by stopping bogus claims from democratic nations with independent judiciaries such as Czechia and Mexico.

If a system is overwhelmed by numbers, as we now see under Trudeau, more bogus claims get through and the government can’t properly do security checks on everyone, Kenney said.

Kenney speculated that one driver of Trudeau’s aggressive, post-COVID immigration push has been to stir up opposition from conservatives, and thus brand them as racist and xenophobic for opposing this huge intake of newcomers. If this was the plan, the plan backfired, Kenney said.

“Catastrophically they have taken the most broadly pro-immigration consensus in the developed world and jeopardized it. They have moved public opinion, broadly speaking, against immigration.”

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Kenney noted it is new immigrants themselves who are often most opposed to these extraordinarily high levels of immigration, in part because they are the most vulnerable to the negative impacts in terms of trying to get housing, a job, a family physician and affordable food. “New Canadians know most what the consequence of the irresponsibly high levels are.”

In the end, Canadians want immigration, just manageable levels of it, Kenney said.

Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, for Trudeau and his Liberal government, it is.

dstaples@postmedia.com

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