Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said that there is “no question” that Canada is in dire need of “smaller population growth” while speaking with reporters outside Parliament’s West Block on Thursday.
While the opposition leader wouldn’t give a hard number on what his immigration targets would look like if elected, he did say that “we cannot grow that rate of the population at three times the housing stock.”
“We have to have a smaller population growth, there is no question about it,” Poilevre told reporters. “We cannot grow the population rate at three times the housing stock as Trudeau has been doing. We need to have a growth rate that is below the growth in housing, healthcare and employment.”
Canada’ population has been growing exponentially in recent years, with the country seeing a spike of 1.27 million additional people last year alone, the majority of which were immigrants.
According to Statistics Canada, the country took in 471,771 permanent immigrants and 804,901 non-permanent residents in 2023.
Under the Trudeau government, Canada plans to accept 485,000 permanent residents in 2024 and 500,000 in both 2025 and 2026.
“If you want an idea of how I would run the immigration system overall, it’s the way it was run for the 30 years prior to Trudeau being prime minister,” said Poilievre.
“We had a common sense consensus between Liberals and Conservatives for decades that screened people to make sure they were safe, only brought in the numbers that we could absorb into our housing, healthcare and job market”.
The Liberals announced that they would be walking back the amount of temporary foreign workers it will admit into certain regions this week, however, Canada could still potentially break record numbers this year.
Low-wage temporary foreign worker positions have skyrocketed in recent years, up 291% this year, compared to 2018, with the data currently available indicating that Canada is on track to wildly surpass last year’s record.
According to the latest government data, Canada has already seen 28,730 low-wage temporary foreign worker positions in the first quarter of 2024 or 34% of last year’s total volume.
In the first three months of this year, the country created more low-wage roles than all of 2018.
Poilievre added that he would like to return to the previous immigration system before Trudeau which “blocked temporary foreign workers where they were taking jobs from Canadians.”
“When I’m prime minister, the temporary foreign worker program will be used exclusively to fill jobs that Canadians cannot or do not fill, like in agriculture sectors, but never to replace Canadians or drive down wages,” he added.
“That was a common sense consensus that existed before Justin Trudeau and the radical and out-of-control NDP-Liberal government destroyed our system.”