After years of maligning anybody who raised concerns about the Liberal’s mass immigration agenda as racist, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released a recent video on how immigration has gotten out of control.
In the video released on YouTube, billed as a tell-all on his government’s mistakes and why the Liberals are correcting course, Trudeau blamed labour shortages during the COVID-19 lockdowns and “bad actors” for many of his policies’ shortcomings. Notably, Trudeau did not take personal responsibility for the crisis.
“In the last two years, our population has grown really fast, like baby boom fast,” he said. “Increasingly bad actors, like fake colleges and big chain corporations, have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests.”
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre put the onus on Trudeau himself, however.
“Classic Trudeau, he creates a problem, then he says he should have solved it sooner,” Poilievre said on X. “He blames bad actors for immigration problems. No. He is the bad actor.”
Trudeau said these bad actors are why his government will reduce the number of permanent and temporary immigrants to Canada in the next three years. He explained that the feds will now set targets for permanent and temporary residents going forward and that immigration will largely be tied to Canada’s economic need, much like Poilievre has advocated for previously.
Trudeau said that after the pandemic, his government needed to ramp up immigration to address labour market shortages.
“After two years with closed borders, we needed more people, more workers, fast. So we brought in more workers,” he said. “It was the right choice.”
Trudeau admitted that after the economy began recovering and businesses no longer required additional labour, his government “could have acted quicker and turned off the taps faster.”
“Now it is time to make the adjustments to stabilize the immigration system that we need and get it working right for Canadians. Right now, immigration is primarily a federal job,” he said. “We have the levers to rein it in, so we are.”
During an interview with Global News, Poilievre said Trudeau couldn’t be trusted to fix the problem caused by increasing Canada’s population by 300% in a matter of years. He noted Trudeau’s admission that these policies caused exploitation, abuse of the system, and shortages of healthcare, housing, and social programs.
Poilievre noted that Canada needs to improve its border security and ensure that newcomers arrive and stay legally.
“This rampant incompetence has caused human misery, both for newcomers and for multi-generational Canadians,” he said. “We have to make it clear that it is not allowed for people to just walk across our borders, and we have to look at legislative changes if necessary to prevent people from abusing our system.”
Sergio Karas, an immigration lawyer, told True North that the Prime Minister’s video was a “poor attempt at political damage control” and that Trudeau is misleading the public.
“While he blames COVID and what he calls “an economy that came roaring back,” the reason for high immigration levels has been the quest for votes by the Liberals,” Karas said. “New immigrants tend to vote Liberal in large numbers.”
“The Prime Minister sees the polls and how unhappy Canadians are with his failed immigration policy,” he said. “He has ruined a system that was not perfect but was manageable, allowing it to become a political tool.”
Karas said Trudeau’s address to Canadians omits that “his vision of Canada” was shaped by the “Century Initiative,” which advocated for Canada’s population to reach one million by the end of the 21st century.
“His immigration policies sought to realize that insanity,” Karas said. “Now he has to cope with the failure of his policies.”
He said the Liberals acted against the advice of their department bureaucrats, who warned about the unsustainable immigration levels, instead hiring more bureaucrats to process the influx of requests.
Karas disputed Trudeau’s claims that large corporations were among the bad actors and that foreign students would simply return home after their studies. He said the record numbers of refugee claims show the lengths that international students will go to stay.
He argued that immigration levels must be cut “far more severely” to fix the housing crisis, as Canada has “never been able to build more than 270,000 housing units a year.”