Western Standard - April 04, 2024


Trudeau Canada's Immigration Growth Outpacing Capacity to Manage


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

148.58437

Word count

656

Sentence count

31

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper talks about the need to limit temporary foreign workers in Canada and why he didn t act on it when he was in office in the late 2000s and early 2000s. He also discusses the impact temporary immigration has had on Canadian housing prices and the need for a permanent immigration strategy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 But in fact, reducing the overall portion of the population that's made up of temporary residents
00:00:04.560 could have a positive impact on housing pressures that we're seeing in communities
00:00:07.960 as we continue to accommodate longer-term population growth
00:00:11.500 through a sustained and well-planned permanent residency immigration strategy.
00:00:16.160 Respectfully, Minister, though, those numbers in international students didn't just pop up overnight.
00:00:20.960 In fact, they increased quite substantially while you were minister,
00:00:24.900 and your government didn't pursue any of those policies.
00:00:27.320 I understand what you're saying that it's not the same as permanent immigration,
00:00:30.640 but now you have imposed caps.
00:00:32.420 A policy lever that was available to you earlier, the Canadian press,
00:00:35.520 reported that your department, when you were minister,
00:00:38.260 was warned about the very specific impact temporary immigration
00:00:42.240 as well as permanent immigration could have on housing prices,
00:00:45.160 and yet you chose at that juncture not to act.
00:00:47.640 Is it political that you're deciding now to act, and why didn't you before?
00:00:52.560 Well, in fact, if you go back to some of the interviews that I would have given
00:00:55.400 in the spring before the cabinet shuffle, I was talking very openly about the need
00:00:59.960 to do the kinds of things that Minister Miller now has announced and put in place.
00:01:04.260 If you look at some of the challenges that existed at the time,
00:01:07.200 what we ended up seeing was multiple cohorts of students running into one another
00:01:11.620 at the same time that colleges and universities were increasing international student enrollment
00:01:16.640 far beyond what was projected to deal with revenue challenges
00:01:20.000 that they were having coming out of the pandemic.
00:01:21.600 We had, when the borders were closed, a couple of years where students weren't actually coming to Canada.
00:01:27.160 When the borders opened back up and we saw multiple cohorts come to arrive at once,
00:01:31.700 and the number of student study permits, rather, that institutions were requesting
00:01:36.200 was growing rapidly.
00:01:38.160 We had a huge number of people who arrived more or less at the same time.
00:01:43.280 But you weren't powerless.
00:01:43.600 Respectfully, Minister, you weren't powerless.
00:01:45.040 Clearly, now you've instituted policies that show you weren't.
00:01:47.260 And that's why we started down this path.
00:01:50.500 So upon my appointment to the position, as the borders were first opening up,
00:01:56.220 we started to see that there was an increase.
00:01:58.460 But we didn't project it was as significant as what it ended up had being
00:02:01.760 with multiple cohorts running into each other.
00:02:05.760 It's really important to understand the context around immigration.
00:02:08.820 Every year, we bring in about 450, now close to 500,000 permanent residents a year.
00:02:17.540 And that is part of the necessary growth of Canada.
00:02:20.900 It benefits our citizens, our communities.
00:02:24.380 It benefits our economy.
00:02:26.060 These are the levels that we have stabilized and grown steadily over the past years
00:02:31.960 because that's what Canada needs to continue to have a strong economy and strong communities.
00:02:36.320 However, over the past few years, we've seen a massive spike in temporary immigration,
00:02:45.040 whether it's temporary foreign workers or whether it's international students in particular,
00:02:50.700 that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.
00:02:58.540 To give an example, in 2017, 2% of Canada's population was made up of temporary immigrants.
00:03:05.900 Now, we're at 7.5% of our population comprised of temporary immigrants.
00:03:12.540 That's something that we need to get back under control, both for the benefits of those people,
00:03:19.720 but as international students, we're seeing increasingly vulnerable to mental health challenges
00:03:25.100 to not being able to thrive and get the education they want.
00:03:28.800 But also, increasingly, more and more businesses relying on temporary foreign workers
00:03:34.900 in a way that's driving down wages in some sectors.
00:03:37.680 So, we want to get those numbers down.
00:03:40.220 It's a responsible approach to immigration that continues on our permanent residents as we have, 0.99
00:03:46.620 but holds the line a little more on the temporary immigration
00:03:52.000 that has caused so much pressure in our communities.
00:03:54.920 We'll be right back.