The Government’s Immigration Policies Burned Its Goodwill with Canadians

Canada had built an amazing consensus that immigration is a net positive for our country. But some poor policy decisions have risked burning that goodwill. Check out the full conversation with Ben Rabidoux on the Canadian real estate market in our last podcast episode.

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 How did we get to where we got? I mean I’m very pro-immigration. I know you are. It’s interesting because some people have lashed out at you because you’ve been critical of this and said, he is not pro-immigration. I said, you’re not reading his stuff. He’s very pro immigration.

But to bring that many people in, in such a short period of time, how could the government not see that it was gonna overwhelm our infrastructure, our systems, et cetera.

I would, I would say to anyone that is critical of my public statements around immigration, I would just suggest, you can Google my statements to the standing Committee of finance. I testified twice as far back as I think the first one was 2021 maybe. And at that time, the level of immigration was dramatically lower than it ultimately peaked at.

And the point that I was making is, what we were risking was this amazing, beautiful consensus that we built in Canada around immigration being a net positive. And that’s, that’s not an easy thing to cultivate anywhere in the world. And what was so distressing to me is you could see in real time that these policies would undermine this consensus because Canadians are not gonna make the distinction between the various programs that, that, that run amuck. And there was a couple in particular that really ran amuck. To Canadians it was just, it was all immigration and it was just too much and they weren’t wrong. And so what we’ve seen in the polling is just this kind of dramatic reversal in public sentiment towards immigration, which I would argue is really detrimental to our long term.

Long-term health and, and you know, what’s frustrating to me is I believe right now had Canada not sort of burned that goodwill around immigration on bringing in a lot of temporary workers, international students, um, which was really the programs that ran amuck.

Um, and had we kind of kept that dry powder, that goodwill from Canadians, I think there is so much. Incredible talent that’s just wanting to kind of get out of the US and look at more stability. And we could be in a position to bring some of the best and the brightest here, but we don’t have the political capital to do it because we’ve burned it under these ridiculous programs.