Canada’s Trudeau Wants MORE Migrants amid Crisis in Housing, Wages, Births

trudeau
Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP
Neil Munro

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is again raising his inflow of legal immigrants — which has already spiked Canadians’ housing prices, crashed birthrates, slashed productivity, and trashed public support for migration.

Trudeau’s inflow will rise from 465,000 in 2023, up to 485,000 in 2024 and then 500,000 per year after, immigration minister Marc Miller said November 1.

The extra “newcomers” per year are needed to build houses and provide healthcare for the migrants already imported by Trudeau’s government, Miller said.

The government will legally import “workers to Canada who can help alleviate social pressures in key areas like housing and health care,” an October 31 report said.

But Canada’s government also hides much additional migration by not counting migrants who are defined as supposedly short-stay foreign students. Roughly 700,000 supposed students arrived in the first six months of 2023. With this sleight of hand, the government pulled in a million migrants in 2022, inflating Canada’s total population to 40 million.

Trudeau’s long-term immigration plan would annually add five extra permanent migrants — not counting foreign “students” — for every four youths who graduate from Canada’s high schools.

Trudeau’s investors-backed policy is doing vast damage to ordinary Canadians — and is now driving down the birth rates because young Canadians cannot afford decent housing. Overall, Trudeau’s progressive policy is helping investors convert the civic foundations of Canadian society into higher stock values.

Housing

Trudeau’s immigration has produced a “demand shock” for housing in Canada’s non-arctic regions near the U.S. border. The result is a dramatic spike in the costs of homes and rents far beyond what Canadians can pay.

For example, the average home price in September 2023 was $475,000 in U.S. dollars. Half of Canadians earn below $50,000 per year.

“The dream of homeownership is quickly turning into a nightmare for an entire generation of renters,” Ipsos researcher Sean Simpson told Canada’s Global News in October. He added:

Two-thirds of Canadians who are currently renting who don’t have a home are giving up on the dream of homeownership … The acknowledgement from most Canadian that owning a home is only for the rich is also up from earlier in the year and you don’t get that level of consensus in Canada without renters and owners, older people, younger people all agreeing that there is a housing crisis in this country.

“Houses are already too expensive for many Canadians to afford, and based on our research, it looks like that problem is going to get even worse,” said James Orlando, the top economist at TD Economics, told BBN Bloomberg in September.

“Last week in Toronto, a shared bed for rent was advertised for $900 a month,” op-ed writer Tony Keller wrote in the Globe and Mail newspaper on October 31:

Not a room in a shared apartment. A shared bed in a shared room. Half of a 60-inch-wide mattress. Yours for just $10,800 a year.

In 2o23, Trudeau blamed the housing shock on regional and city governments.

 

Homelessness

“Visible homelessness did not exist three years ago in Granby … [but] rents are very high now compared to two years ago,” Mayor Julie Bourdon told AFP for a report on October 4. The article spotlighted a homeless blue-collar employee in the once-prosperous town:

Danny Brodeur-Cote has lived for months in a makeshift camp in woodlands near a cemetery in Granby, a town of 70,000 inhabitants 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Montreal, after being evicted in June from an apartment he rented with his girlfriend.

“I work five days a week,” the janitor with dishevelled brown hair told AFP, pushing a shopping cart to the campsite.

At age 39, this is the first time in his life that he has found himself living in the streets. “What little housing there is is much too expensive,” he said.

The housing disaster is so bad that many migrants are going back home, according to an October 31 report by Canada’s Financial Post:

“We are now seeing people who are coming to Canada and then saying, ‘Ah, no thanks,’ and moving on,” Daniel Bernhard, ICC’s chief executive, said. “And the number of those people are increasing. We have to believe that the lack of availability of housing, of health care, of other types of services are part of it.”

 

Productivity

Trudeau’s policy of flooding the labor market with migrants allows businesses to profit by creating low-tech, unproductive jobs for the incoming workers.

In September, Reuters reported:

Canada’s record of declining productivity over the past three years is likely to make it more difficult for the Bank of Canada to tame inflation, raising the prospect of additional interest rate hikes even as the economy slows.

…

“Rapid wage gains are not occurring because folks are more productive. Output per hour worked has been in freefall,” Derek Holt, head of capital markets economics at Scotiabank, said in a note.

The imported labor minimizes employers’ incentive to divert their profits into projects that raise workers’ productivity, said Orlando at TD Economics:

The policy has been, “Okay, we’re going to bring in temporary foreign workers to take take a [low wage] job that that hasn’t been able to be filled in Canada.” My question is how much are we incentivizing businesses to make those necessary, productivity-enhancing technologies to be able to grow their business and grow the country in a sustainable way? … We want growth that is just a top line thing or do we want actual people’s well beings to improve?

“The temporary-immigration stream has exploded,” Keller wrote in the Globe and Mail, adding:

 Most of the people [dubbed “students”] in that stream are coming to flip burgers, stock shelves and deliver food. Big business loves this endless supply of minimum-wage workers.

…

One of Canada’s biggest problems, and a growing drag on our living standards, is low productivity growth. Canadian businesses don’t invest enough in new technology and innovation – the things that spell more goods and services produced for each hour of work. A bottomless barrel of low-wage labour further discourages Canadian business from making those capital investments [in productivity].

“That’s really the question [for politicians],” said Orlando. “We need to incentivize businesses and governments to make that [productivity] investment … [because] you don’t improve the well-being of people without making them more productive.”

Wages

Trudeau’s migration is driving down Canadians’ wages, partly because the flood of new workers ensures that CEOs face little pressure to boost productivity or wages.

“Despite rapid growth in nominal wage, labour costs became effectively cheaper in real terms for most of the period since early 2021,” ScotiaBank.com reported in August 2023.

In 2023, wages grew at 4 percent — but inflation was almost 6 percent. The result is a one-year, two-percent drop in real wages.

“Past generations of young Canadians entering the workforce could look forward to favourable tailwinds lifting real incomes during their working lives — that’s no longer the case,” said David Williams, a policy analyst for the Business Council of B.C., said in December 2021. He added:

If the [38-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] OECD’s long-range projections prove correct, young people entering the workforce today will not feel much of a tailwind at all. Rather, they face a long period of stagnating average real incomes that will last most of their working lives.

The value of wages is also being slashed by inflation which is spurred by migrants’ demand for a wide variety of consumables, such as grapes, apples, and eggs:

Births

Canada’s Central bank is pushing up interest rates to counter the inflation that is worsened by migration. In turn, the higher interest rates make homes even more unaffordable for ordinary Canadians who want to start families.

“More than a third of young people say they are foregoing children because they can’t afford a proper home for them,” Canada’s National Press reported on October 5,

“The Canadian birth rate is continuing to drop to historical lows … Statistics Canada confirmed last week that 351,679 babies were born in 2022 — the lowest number of live births since 345,044 births were recorded in 2005.”

In 2005, Canada had a fertility rate of 1.57 births per woman. The fertility rate has now sunk to 1.33, even though women want almost two kids each.

Numerous reports show that migration spikes housing prices and that high housing costs shrink birth rates.

“Birth Rates are Falling Most where Homes are Appreciating Fastest,” Zillow.com reported in 2018:

The rate of babies being born is dropping the most in counties where home values are appreciating the fastest, according to a new Zillow® analysisi. An extra 10 percentage-point rise in home values is associated with an extra 1.5 percentage-point drop in birth rates for 25-to-29 year old women.

“The birth rate was up in counties where home value growth is weaker,” Zillow noted. “In Pima County, home to Tucson, Ariz., home values have essentially remained unchanged since 2010, but the birth rate is up 5 percent, which accounts for 340 more babies than expected.”

“When the cost of housing rises, fertility falls …  certainly that’s not really something that’s even necessarily debated anymore because it is so obviously the case,” demographer Lyman Stone told Breitbart News. The cost increases are felt most by younger renters, he said, adding that homeowners are slightly more likely to have extra kids as house values rise.

Other studies show the same cause-and-effect in the United Kingdom and Miami, Florida.

The cost of housing could drop if smaller houses are added with the help of rezoning rules, said Lyman, who works with the Institute for Family Studies. But when people crowd into cheaper and smaller houses, they also have fewer children.

Canada’s birthrate has fallen so rapidly that Trudeau’s migration is actually raising the average age.

 

Polling Support for Migration

Multiple polls show that Canadians’ trusting welcome for migration is being crushed by housing costs, stalled wages, and inflation.

A September 20-22 survey of 1,500 Canadians by Ipsos showed that 57 percent of Canadians blame high housing costs on immigration, and 73 percent  say that “Canada should cut immigration targets until the housing shortage eases.”

The gap between supporters and opponents of migration has plunged from 42 points in 2022 to just 7 points in 2023, according to the business-backed lobby group that is most responsible for kick-starting Canada’s migration wage.

The Century Initiative’s September 4-14 survey of 2,002 Canadians showed that the share of people who said there is “too much immigration”  jumped from 27 percent to 44 percent, largely because of rising housing costs. The “too much immigration” view is endorsed by 64 percent of the conservative party voters, up from 43 percent in 2022.

Thirty-eight percent of respondents blamed immigration for out-of-control housing prices, and 25 percent said migration is bad for Canadians, according to the initiative’s poll.

 

The Business Lobby

Canada’s migration flood was launched by two investors who created the Century Initiative, which has a goal of tripling Canada’s population to 100 million.

The expansion makes sense for investors and businesses. The inflow of more workers, renters, and consumers grows the pool of private profits for investors, regardless of the public damage, such as spreading poverty, diversity, and chaos, declining productivity, and reduced births.

So pro-migration businesses immediately complained when Trudeau said he could cap migration at 500,000 a year. Reuters reported:

A report by RBC economist Cynthia Leach said that while the labour market will not feel the pinch in the short term, the current rate of immigration to Canada is not sufficient for long-term growth.

“Canada needs immigrants over the long term. Even the annual immigrant intake of 1.3% of the population is not sufficient to stabilize the age structure of the population, which would require about 2.1%,” the report read.

Banks, such as the RBC, usually want more migration because they profit as migration expands economies, even when wages, birthrates, and productivity drop. For example, builders must pay interest payments when they borrow funds to build new homes and hospitals sought by immigration minister Miller.

Since Trudeau’s election in 2015, his pro-migration policy has helped to spike Canada’s stock market by 23 percent, after discounting for inflation:

 

Politics

Pro-migration lobby groups — and its many business supporters — have a stranglehold on Canadian politics because immigration is massively profitable for investors and the wealthy.

For example, the head of Canada’s opposition conservative party, Pierre Poilievre, wants to accelerate migration even as he campaigns against Trudeau’s expensive housing:

His fix to the housing problem would clear away local zoning rules and regulations to help investors build more houses within existing community developments. “Poilievre’s housing solution: fight cities that don’t build homes,” P9litico reported in September.

“The People’s Party of Canada is the only national political body that is for a lower level of immigration,” party founder Maxime Bernier told Breitbart News in September 2021. “All the other parties are always for more and more,” he said with an accent that echoes his upbringing in Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec.

Canada and the United States

Canada’s immigration policy would be great for the United States, says President Joe Biden’s immigration chief.

Alejandro Mayorkas told ElPasoMatters.org:

Our immigration system as a whole is broken. It hasn’t been updated or reformed in more than 40 years. We look to our partner to the north that has a much more nimble immigration system that can be retooled to the needs at the moment. For example, Canada is in need of 1 million workers and they have agreed that in 2023, they will admit 1.4 million … immigrants to fill that labor need that Canadians themselves cannot. We are stuck in antiquated laws that do not meet our current needs.

In January 2023, Mayorkas told a White House reporter:

The labor shortage in the United States is one powerful example of how desperately we need to fix our broken immigration system.  You know, we look to the north … Canada realized that it has a 1-million-person labor shortage there, and they are bringing in approximately 1.4 million migrants this year to address that labor shortage.

Those views are echoed by other Biden appointees.

“As our economy grows, we need workers that we just don’t have enough of,” Katie Tobin, Biden’s senior director for transborder security on the National Security Council said in May 2023.  “So it is in our interest to bring people in and to stay competitive globally.”

“The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people,” Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said in December 2022.

Since 2021, Biden’s team has imported roughly at least 4 million southern migrants, at least 2 million visa workers, and at least 2 million legal immigrants.

 

Extraction Migration

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the consumer economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claimed.

Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say immigration under President Joe Biden is making life harder for all, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,415 adults in September. That number is up from 48 percent in July 2023. Fifty-seven percent of independents agree with the “harder” view, while just 17 percent “strongly” disagreed.

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