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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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