Poilievre tentatively courts Canada’s dissatisfaction with immigration

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TOP STORY

After years of avoiding any clear position on the subject of immigration levels, the Conservatives have opened the 2025 campaign with a hard pledge to “slow immigration down” to sustainable levels.

“I want people to come here (in) numbers that can actually be housed, employed, and cared for,” Poilievre told a reporter on Monday, adding that he would directly tie immigration levels to homebuilding.

“So we’re always going to be adding homes faster than we add people,” he said.

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Poilievre also lashed out again at the Century Initiative, a pro-immigration non-profit which advocates for Canada to have a population of 100 million by 2100.

The Conservative leader framed the group as advocating a “radical, crazy idea” to “bring in people from poor countries in large numbers, to take away Canadian jobs, drive wages down and profits up.”

It’s not the first time that Poilievre has criticized Liberal handling of immigration. A common refrain of Poilievre in the House of Commons was that the Liberals had “lost control of immigration.”

Last summer, he told a press conference that “we have to have a smaller population growth.” In a podcast interview with psychologist Jordan Peterson, Poilievre said “we’re not interested in the world’s ethno-cultural conflicts.”

At a Holocaust commemoration ceremony in January, Poilievre said Canada needs to start deporting immigrants involved in hate crimes.

“We must deport from our country any temporary resident that is here on a permit or a visa that is carrying out violence or hate crimes on our soil,” he said.

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But this usually stopped short of any specific promises on immigration levels, visa quotas or screening procedures.

In fact, Poilievre’s ambiguity on immigration issues has been slammed by both the Liberals and by his critics on the conservative fringes.

At a media roundtable in Brampton, Ont., earlier this year, then immigration minister Marc Miller defended his government’s sudden turn towards reduced immigration levels, including non-renewal for the visas of more than two million temporary migrants in the country who might have expected permanent residency.

Miller acknowledged this would result in “people’s hopes (being) dashed to some extent” and said it was more “honest” than the immigration plans being proposed by the Conservatives.

“Frankly (Poilievre) has been irresponsible on immigration, promising visas to everyone that he talks to depending on what community he goes to,” said Miller. He also singled out Poilievre’s 2023 pledge to negotiate a direct flight between Canada and the Punjabi city of Amritsar.

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Meanwhile, the People’s Party of Canada has repeatedly framed Poilievre as a sellout on the issue of “mass immigration.”

As one typical statement by PPC Leader Maxime Bernier put it, “Poilievre can’t be trusted to reverse the Liberals’ mass immigration and cult of diversity policies. He’s pandering to immigrant communities even more than Trudeau ever did.”

The Conservative Party of Canada has long stood out for its lack of immigration skepticism, particularly as compared to conservative parties in the U.S. or Europe.

The nine-year tenure of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper saw immigration dialled up to what was then historic highs. In the last full year of Harper’s premiership, Canada brought in 260,400 immigrants, which Statistics Canada called “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years.”

By contrast, the Liberals had been planning for 500,000 permanent residents to enter Canada in both 2025 and 2026, until dropping the quotas to 395,000 and 380,000, respectively.

The Conservative party is also uniquely popular among recent immigrants and foreign-born Canadians represented two of five candidates in the party’s most recent leadership race.

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In an October poll commissioned by the channel OMNI, the Conservatives emerged as the clear favourite among first-generation Canadians. Among immigrants who had been in Canada longer than six years, 45 per cent intended to vote Conservative, against just 24 per cent who were aligned with the Liberals.

Immigration levels went almost entirely unmentioned during the Conservatives’ 2022 leadership race, with Poilievre bringing up immigration only to say he would streamline Canadian recognition of foreign credentials.

At a 2022 leader’s debate, Poilievre was directly asked his thoughts on the Liberals dialling up immigration in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, including raising the number of annual permanent immigrants to 400,000.

“We need the workforce, frankly,” he said.

If the Conservative line on immigration has changed, it ‘s likely because Canadian dissatisfaction with immigration has reached generational highs. An October survey by Abacus Data was one of several to find that a majority of Canadians now saw immigration as doing harm to the country.

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This is due in large part to the fact that Canada is emerging from the single most intense immigration surge in its history, with an average of more than a million newcomers entering the country each year since 2022, causing measurable surges in rental prices.

POLICY CORNER

To find the last federal election where strong national defence was a campaign issue, you’d probably have to go back to the 1960s, when John Diefenbaker lost ground to the Liberals because he refused to station nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. But Canadians are suddenly all-in on a strong military for two reasons: The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the realization that relying on the U.S. for border defence may not be a sustainable plan.

Despite this, Liberal Leader Mark Carney unveiled a defence spending package on Tuesday that didn’t actually boost spending all that much — or all that fast. The package would raise Canadian defence spending to the NATO-required two per cent of GDP, but it wouldn’t do so until 2030. And this is probably where we should mention that the Liberals have repeatedly promised to raise defence spending to the two per cent threshold … and then never done it.

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FRANCOFUMBLE

Mark Carney speaks the worst French of any Liberal leader since John Turner, so Quebec took notice when he rejected an offer to compete in a French-language leaders’ debate on the channel TVA. As to why, the Liberals cited TVA’s demand for $75,000 from each candidate to fund the program. Carney would also cite the fact that Green Party leader Elizabeth May wasn’t invited.

But all the other parties (and much of Quebec media) were quick to accuse Carney of simply weaseling out of an event where he’d be stumbling over his irregular French verbs. “The Liberal leader claims to have the strength and courage to confront Donald Trump, but he doesn’t even have the courage to come and speak to Quebecers,” said Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, offered to pay the $75,000.

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