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Prior to Trudeau, Stephen Harper was Prime minister for 9 years. There's pretty much an unbroken trendline that started in the 90s between Chretien/Martin/Harper's time in office and Trudeau's in terms of the proportion of the population that are immigrants. Ditto for the fraction of 'visible minorities'. The graphs like this one, which I imagine gets spread in your circles, conflate temporary workers with immigrants. After COVID, the government panicked due to inflation and a labor shortage a brought in a bunch of temporary workers before clamping down on it late last year and announcing reductions in immigration over the next few years.
Am I missing something? Do you have any data showing that Trudeau was significantly different from Harper, Martin or any of his other predecessors in recent history?
Declaring something does not make it so. If a car salesman calls a car "a great bargain" nobody batts an eye if you say prove it, but somehow if it's the government it's considered true unless proven wrong. After their visa runs out, they have the choice to stay in a first-world country illegaly or go back to the third world legally. Would you go back? I certainly wouldn't, so I don't even blame them very much. Are they incentivized to go back? Not really, since not giving them support in line with first world standards despite their illegal status is ruled inappriopriately cruel by the courts. Are they getting deported? Not unless they cooperate, since they have first have a long time to legally fight any deportation order (unless the government can prove they have money, the government will have to pay both legal sides, which will be horrendously expensive) and even if they lose they still have a long time to vanish before a deportation order is processed (and of the already-existing illegal immigrants most aren't ordered to begin with, anyway). It's obviously hard to prove how many exactly it's going to be, but the legal realities in canada mean that any temporary worker who wants to stay will simply do so. And similar experiences from other western countries have shown that this will often be a large percentage, and unfortunately usually the least desirable to boot. It's just terrible incentives all-around.
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Harper faced significant legal battles over his attempts to reform immigration an asylum claims.
One major case was "Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care v. Canada" where the Government tried to cancel extended prescription drug coverages rejected refugee claimants received while appealing their rulings. Keep in mind that Canadian citizens didn't get drug coverage.
The judge ruled that cutting the program was "cruel and unusual treatment" and thus a charter violation. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that.
Things are a little more interesting if you look at immigration by year by country,
https://x.com/AmazingZoltan/status/1875985574429184020
There were prior trends, but Trudeau vastly increased immigration from India and Pakistan.
Instead of total number of immigrants, the key fight is really "how many poor Muslims?".
The left sees bringing in poor Muslims as key to their political success. They end up dependent on government programs and are loyal voters, or at least were before the split over October 7 in the US.
Harper did various things to tilt the balance towards economically viable immigrants. He upset a lot of Liberals by resetting the immigration backlog queue. I could go on but it was really mostly minor things that he could do with out the left going to the courts.
Trudeau tried to flip that around. Early on he brought in large numbers of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan without giving any thought about how to house them. He ended up paying for hotels and upper-middle class homes in some cases. Per head spending was enormous.
Ultimately Trudeau's problem was that he's one of those people who believes leftist academics have everything figured out and we just need to what they say. Mass immigration is always good. New housing construction is bad. So Canada has an incredible housing crisis. Also infrastructure wasn't expanded to support the additional population, so there are problems everywhere.
At least previous Prime Ministers could muster up a better response to "we need more housing for this immigration" than "shut up you racist".
What sort of leftist academic would say that new housing construction is bad? I would think that, almost by definition, if you think that new housing construction is bad than you are not a leftist.
Those that believe in the labor theory of value.
Is there a concrete example where self-defined Canadian marxists/communists/socialists have been against building new housing?
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Lots of "leftists" and actual leftists (i.e. people following an ideology derived of Marx or Bakunin) oppose new building done for-profit. That means big corps, small landlords, whomever. If it is for-profit, it is exploitative. They say that building some big new apartment building isn't going to make housing more affordable, it's just more money for landlords and developers. And if it's city housing or low-income or whatever, they'll protest that it's not the right neighbourhood, of course it's a great idea but not here, there are heritage concerns, etc.
If you go to into community development meeting you will see these types. Very often they own multi-million dollar homes.
I'd be happy if you could provide any examples - news articles, maybe even social media posts. The reason I'm asking is I've been to community development meetings in multiple cities in Canada and I've never seen anyone but nimbys opposing new builds and rezoning changes. The main concerns I've heard in those meetings is that high-rise buildings bring crime, put less tall houses in their shadow, change the character of the community, pose threat to children due to the increased traffic.
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Your Statscan link seems to show a pretty big slope inflection point in 2021 tho?
(I don't think the immigrants are actually the main problem, although concentrating ~all of them in two cities has been a big mistake -- destroying the economy over covid is either the problem in itself, or pushed the issues caused by ever-increasing numbers of immigrants to the point where the camel's back just snapped. Somehow this is even harder for politicians to admit than blaming immigration policy however!)
Why? All you need to swing an election in Canada are those two cities; if you can demographics-are-destiny your way into having a permanent majority there, then nothing your political opposition does matters.
Of course, that also depends on the corresponding socioeconomic consequences not pissing off the existing voters in those cities too much. Which is why the Boomers will continue to vote Liberal (and is why the "muh racism" angle is mostly focused on them), because the immigrants prop up their property values, and why everyone else will not.
50% + 1 provincial separation is officially approved policy in Canada; you can only push so far.
Liberals are currently polling sub-20% -- I haven't looked at the crosstabs lately, but I don't think this is all Boomers. The ones I know are more likely to vote Green/NDP.
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Temporary workers are immigrants and the vast majority will stay anyway.
There's already been stories of people rejected by the normal system requesting asylum.
I'm not convinced the Canadian state has the will to send them all back.
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No they won't.
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I'm aware of the temporary workers. I don't think they return. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will.
And, yes, the trendline was there pre-Trudeau. As I mentioned, Conservatives went along for the ride because they too believed the myth that migration was good for the economy. I believed it too! They were wrong. I was wrong.
Moreso, I'm sure the counterfactual Conservative government would have been largely the same as Trudeau regarding immigration, if much less insufferable. Certainly, the UK (led by conservatives from 2010–2024) witnessed the same toxic combination of mass immigration, crime, coverup, and authoritarianism.
But, still, the two parties aren't the same. British citizens didn't like the Tories, but now that they see Labour, they realize how much worse things can get. Similarly, in Canada, the Conservatives see the problem and want to fix it. The Liberals don't.
Both parties in Canada were wrong about immigration. What's inexcusable is to persist in the error.
I have no idea what will happen, but is your position based on anything beyond vibes? Do you live in Canada, or spend a lot of time there? Why do you believe the things that you do?
This article claims that only one in three that have arrived since 2010 have received permanent residency. There seem to be a number of articles claiming that 1.2 million visas are set to expire in 2025; how many will actually leave versus try to claim refugee status or just stay illegally, I don't know.
So...why is it Trudeau's legacy? Are you saying that it will be because people never bothered to put the least amount of effort into researching the topic, and will just say liberals bad? Are you saying he deserves it? But then, according to you, it's your legacy as well as the last 30-40 years of Canadian politicians as well? At that point, it seems nonsensical to pin this on the scapegoat du jour for continuing the status quo.
I don't follow Canadian politics in any meaningful way, and I don't have real contacts with anyone on the ground. From what I can tell, Trudeau wrecked his legacy with scandals, stupidity and bad luck. But come on, your initial take was absurd and poorly researched, no?
From my contacts that run in Canadian circles, immigration was huge. When I went back to visit not too long ago now, it came up, unprompted by me, in almost every conversation I had. Even from people who were otherwise good lefties. You could just watch how their brain was trying to thread the needle, avoiding saying that it's outright bad, but talking about how it's "changing the culture" and surprising that when you go to Sobey's, you might (voice gets quieter) "be the only white person there, ya know? It's different." I've had other recent conversations with a family who lived in a different part of Canada, but recently moved to the states. Sure enough, immigration was the topic du jour there, too. How the neighborhoods were composed now, which ethnicities owned all the houses (and they rented from), etc.
Trudeau may only be the current face of a longer trend, but he is absolutely the face of it right now, in the moment that people are thinking about it. Perhaps they should be smarter and thinking about the longer trend, but I kinda doubt it. From the perspective of a fair number of people, it's almost as if they disappeared into a hole for COVID (longer than in the US), and when they emerged, at some point, they suddenly noticed that something had changed. That moment of realization happened during Trudeau, and that's likely what's going to stick.
Of course? For the purposes of buying a house or getting a doctor or being employed in Tims this century it doesn't really matter to people that they're TFWs and allegedly will leave at some point. They're still people, making use of limited resources today.
I'm not sure how that distinction is supposed to change anything about how Canadians manifestly feel, even before we get into whether those TFWs were always going to stay temporary. Guest worker programs have become fait accomplis before and Canada especially has limited anti-immigration antibodies.
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Perhaps it's much like how a President tends to own a bad economy, whether they want it or not, and whether or not the trends/conditions actually began before they took office. Trudeau has been in office for quite a while, and it was under his administration that the issue got to the Threshold of Complaint.
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First time seeing that, and it looks about right. We can handle <1% population growth due to immigration, but not >3%. Why would you call that "conflating" the issue?
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