Poilievre says he will cap immigration and tie it to housing

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Part of Pierre Poilievre’s plan to deal with Canada’s housing crisis will be to cap immigration. The Conservative leader said if he wins the next election, he’ll bring sanity back to Canada’s immigration system.

Poilievre was speaking with reporters ahead of Parliament’s return from the summer break. He said that when MPs return to Ottawa next Monday, he will try and defeat the government and force an election as soon as possible.

If he wins the election, he promises across-the-board changes on immigration.

“We will cap population growth so that the housing stock always grows faster than the population,” Poilievre said.

In the middle of a housing crisis, at a time when we are bringing in more than 1 million people per year, his statement sounds like common sense. While Poilievre said exact numbers would come before the next election, he said this policy idea is really about math, not immigration.

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“We’re building like 240,000 homes, that’s like a 1.4% increase in our housing supply. You can’t grow the population faster than that, unless you’re going to have worse housing shortages,” he said.

“Under Trudeau and the NDP, we’ve been growing the population by almost 3%, but we grow the housing stock by 1.4%. No wonder we’re running out of homes.”

He also said he’d scale back the international student program.

“We’re going to bring home the international student system we had before Justin Trudeau. Which was a modest number of young people who were extremely promising could come here and study, and if they excel, they followed the law, they learned English or French, they could join the Canadian family,” Poilievre said.

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He noted stories showing more than 20 international students living in the basement of one home in Brampton as an example of how off the rails the program has become the last few years. There were just over 350,00 foreign students in Canada when the Trudeau Liberals took over in 2015, but more than 1 million last year.

It’s not just the housing market that is also being impacted by the massive swell in immigration, both permanent and temporary. The most recent unemployment report from Statistics Canada showed unemployment growing from 6.4% in July to 6.6% in August, and a big part of that was population growth driven by immigration.

We added 96,400 people to the working age population, meaning those 15 and older. That’s a massive number in just one month, but it’s been going on like this for the last couple of years.

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While there were some new jobs added, they were mostly part-time and didn’t keep pace with population growth. There were 44,000 full-time jobs lost last month, and we added 60,000 people to the unemployment rolls.

Statistics Canada has been warning about this for more than a year, noting time and again that job growth is not keeping pace with population growth.

“Given this pace of population growth, employment growth of approximately 50,000 per month is required for the employment rate to remain constant,” the agency warned a year ago.

We haven’t been hitting those numbers, and that’s why our unemployment rate has gone from 5% to 6.6%.

“That’s not even a question of whether you support or not immigration, it’s a question of whether you support mathematics,” Poilievre said when speaking about the housing crunch, but it applies to the impact on the job market as well.

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Last April, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that we were bringing in people faster than we could absorb them. Since he made those comments, we’ve added more than 500,000 people to Canada.

How does it make sense to keep immigration levels where they are when we are facing a housing shortage, a housing affordability crisis due to a lack of housing and growing unemployment.

It simply doesn’t and to carry on isn’t fair to anyone.

The Trudeau Liberals made this mess; they don’t seem to be in a hurry to fix it. Maybe it’s time to give Poilievre a turn.

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