Demo held by aspiring immigrants
Immigrants who came to Quebec and participated in the Programme de l’expérience québécoise were left high and dry when the program was halted by the Quebec government in its haste to lower immigration levels earlier this year. A demo was held Monday where La Presse talked to people from Cameroon, China and Switzerland who had re‑established their lives here with the expectation of staying.
H. John 17:30 on 2025-11-17 Permalink
Both governments (federal and QC) stances on immigration are difficult to follow. They use different terminology, and don’t often speak clearly about the different categories: permanent, temporary, or refugees.
Tony Keller, who writes for The Globe & Mail, was invited by the Max Bell School of Public Policy (McGill) to give this year’s lecture series (three lectures in different Canadian cities, and publish a book) on the topic of immigration.
He gave the first lecture in Calgary, and it’s available on YouTube:
How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong • Tony Keller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6YMYAylfPg
I found it fascinating. The charts he shows explain how we went so wrong since 2015, and why this really is the fault of the Trudeau government.
I also took the time to read his book “Borderline Chaos”. It’s a very short, easy read (around 100 pages).
Some numbers from a recent column of his explain why its coming to a head now:
“In the year 2000, there were 67,000 people holding a temporary work
permit. By the end of 2024, there were 1,499,000.
In 2000, there were 123,000 student visa holders. By the end of 2023,
there were more than one million.
Between 2011 and 2015, the number of refugee claims made in Canada
averaged about 17,000 a year. Last year, there were 190,000. This year,
claims are on pace to hit 110,000.
In 2015, there were 10,000 people in Canada who had applied for
refugee status and were awaiting a decision. The figure is now 296,000.”
PatrickC 09:52 on 2025-11-18 Permalink
Those figures are astounding! Thanks for sharing them, H. John.
Ian 21:58 on 2025-11-18 Permalink
I really don’t have the time or attention span to watch a 1:46 video with completely undivided attention, so forgive me if I don’t entirely grasp the arguments here… I am happy to be correcteed if I misunderstood the main points.
Basically our GDP & economy as a whole over the last decade had minimal growth, in part because we had this massive immigration influx baased on immigrants that not only don’t meet the actual needs we have as a coutnry but replace canadian workers, and said immigrants are hard to get rid of if they overstay.
Did I get that more or less right? Lousy freeloading immigrants flooding into our country and taking jobs away from otherwise hardworking Canadians?
I am inclined to ask cui bono, as work visas & general immigration policy revisons over the last decade reflect corporate involvement, or so I thought.
Joey 16:20 on 2025-11-19 Permalink
I think the evidence points in the other direction. AFAIK, the general conclusion about economic growth in the last decade is that Canada led (or was second among) the G7 in growth overall, but came last once you adjusted for population. See charts one and three here: https://www.nbc.ca/content/dam/bnc/taux-analyses/analyse-eco/mkt-view/market_view_240903.pdf
This means that the only reason we’ve had any kind of economic growth since 2014 (at the least) is due to immigration – the exact opposite of Ian’s assumption that we’ve had minimal growth due to immigration. We’ve had minimal growth due to the Canadian economy’s inability to do anything other than import cheap labour to produce stuff.
This presents a major wicked policy problem – the only way to achieve growth is to import cheap labour, but we’ve far passed the point at which we can allow for responsible immigration, since we have very little housing capacity and not enough growth to fund expanded social services for immigrants.
Sooner or later, Canada will have to reckon with the fact that we seem to be incapable of generating growth ‘on our own’ – which is related to all sorts of other problems (declining educational performance indicators, embarrassingly low levels of business investment in R&D – see chart four in that link – and stagnating productivity). Moreover, partly due to COVID and partly due to Justin Trudeau’s realization that once he broke the seal on deficit spending the sky was basically the limit, we don’t have much in the way of fiscal capacity to spur the kind of economic innovation needed to improve our performance without relying entirely on cheap imported labour.
At some point in the last 25 years successive Canadian governments (Liberal and Conservative) decided that the only thing that mattered to voters was “affordability” and basically spent every election cycle bribing us with our own money – refusing to make strategic decisions that would encourage private sector investment in sustainable areas. Trudeau made a minimal effort with the carbon tax and some really boneheaded ideas, like the infrastructure bank and the superclusters, but nothing meaningful ever came from them, and Carney has ended the carbon tax and is all in on things like liquefied natural gas development, which from what I can see is a risky bet with not a lot of upside beyond ‘we’re spending money on big projects.’ Add in populist-y right-wing governments looking for scapegoats and you wind up with a country that owes basically all of its accumulated strength to waves of immigration turning its back on non-Canadians.