{UAH} GOING AFTER ALLAN BARIGYE THE FORUM BULY WITH HARD FACTS ->We will not attack his family but self with facts ->Part 488

FIRST READING: Here's just how high immigration has gotten

Opinion by Tristin Hopper

Sean Fraser, the immigration minister who raised immigration to its highest level ever, and now as housing minister is hinting that immigration might be too high.© Provided by National Post

First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper . To get an early version  sent directly to your inbox, sign up  here . 

A majority of Canadians now seem to think that immigration is too high, according to a recent Nanos poll. Of respondents, 53 per cent said that the government’s plan to accept 465,000 new permanent residents was too high. It’s a sharp turnaround from just a few months prior, when a similar Nanos poll in March found that only 34 per cent of Canadians thought immigration was too high.

Canada has long been one of the most pro-immigration countries on earth, and since at least the 1990s the mainstream Canadian position on immigration levels was that they were just fine. On the eve of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in 2015, an Environics poll found that a decisive 57 per cent of Canadians disagreed with any notion that there is “too much immigration in Canada.”

But if this sentiment is changing, it might be because Ottawa has recently dialled up immigration to the highest levels ever seen in Canadian history. Below, a quick guide to just how many people are entering Canada these days.

Immigration is nearly double what it was at the beginning of the Trudeau government (and way more when you count “non-permanent” immigrants)

In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,404 new permanent residents. This was actually rather high for the time, with Statistics Canada noting it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years.”

But last year, immigration hit 437,180, and that’s not even accounting for the massive spike in “non-permanent” immigration. When the estimated 607,782 people in that category are accounted for, the Canadian population surged by more than one million people in a single calendar year. Representing a 2.7 per cent annual rise in population, it was more than enough to cancel out any per-capita benefits from Canada’s GDP rise for that year.

It’s about on par with the United States (a country which is eight to 10 times larger)

Proportionally, Canada has long maintained higher immigration than the United States. But in recent months immigration has gotten so high that Canada is even starting to rival the Americans in terms of the raw number of newcomers.

Last year, while Canada marked one million newcomers, the U.S. announced that its net international migration was about the same. Given the size of the U.S. (331 million vs. 40 million in Canada), this means that Canada is absorbing migrants at a rate more than eight times that of the Americans.

When these trends first began showing themselves in early 2022, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal credited it with driving down Canadian wage growth. “The last time I checked, the U.S. is 10 times larger than we are,” he said.

Housing construction isn’t even close to keeping up with the influx

In the last few weeks, the Trudeau government seemed to acknowledge for one of the first times that their aggressive immigration policy was helping to worsen the country’s housing shortage, and thus drive up real estate unaffordability.

“We want to better align our immigration policies with the absorptive capacity of communities that includes housing,” was how housing minister Sean Fraser put it to CTV on Sunday. Notably, Fraser was immigration minister before being shifted to the housing file in July.

According to one Scotiabank estimate, Canada would need to build 1.8. million homes to return the housing market to any semblance of affordability. But right now the rate of new homes isn’t even keeping up with the population increase, much less addressing the existing deficit.

In 2022 there were just 219,942 housing completions across Canada. It’s about as many homes as Canada was building in the mid-1970s, a decade when Canada was bringing in fewer than 100,000 new immigrants each year. But with current immigration rates, Canada is now bringing in about five new people for every new apartment or townhouse getting built.

It’s like repopulating all three northern territories every month

In a routine update on employment numbers last week, Statistics Canada announced the good news that the country had added 40,000 new jobs in August — before noting that all this new employment had been immediately cancelled out by immigration. That same month saw the arrival of 103,000 temporary and permanent newcomers into Canada, with the result that the country’s net employment rate actually went down. “Given this pace of population growth, employment growth of approximately 50,000 per month is required for the employment rate to remain constant,” reported Stats Canada.

The rate of 103,000 is a bit higher than normal, and was driven in part by the arrival of international students. But since the beginning of 2023, the influx of newcomers has averaged about 81,000.

For context, the entire population of the Canadian North is about 118,000. Comprising three territories — the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and Nunavut — and dozens of communities, the North has daily newspapers, several dedicated airlines, power plants and even a skyscraper. And on average, Canada is absorbing enough new people every 43 days to completely fill its North.

There are worrying signs that rising numbers of immigrants are dropping almost immediately into poverty

In the 2021 census, the trend seemed to be that poverty rates among newcomers to Canada were going down, in part due to “higher government transfers.” While there’s been no new data to contradict this trend, Canada has seen a smattering of incidents that seem to point towards an immigrant community that isn’t finding opportunity the way they used to.

A report last month found that Toronto-area food banks were experiencing a massive spike in usage among recent immigrants. Feed Scarborough, for one, released a survey finding that three quarters of their users have been in the country for less than a year. “Immigrants are struggling to meet their most basic needs,” it read.

Shelters across Ontario and Quebec have reported being overwhelmed by recent migrants, many of whom entered the country via the longstanding Roxham Road illegal border crossing. A Toronto international student found homeless and living under a bridge recently became the subject of a viral TikTok video. And in July, the Toronto-area community of Brampton was shocked by videos showing a job fair at a local supermarket being attended by massive queues containing hundreds of applicants, many of whom were international students.

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