Why Canada’s making massive cuts to immigration | About That

the federal government just made a major cut to its immigration plan for both permanent and temporary residents with the goal of not just slowing population growth in Canada but actually reducing it to basically zero it's reducing permanent immigration Levels by at least 20% cutting temporary immigrant numbers by nearly 500,000 a year this is a huge about face for the liberal government they basically hit paws on the system for for 3 years it's just unbelievable dramatic Vision downwards the government had been signaling for a while that it was going to make some changes to its immigration

plan but no one we spoke to expected the cuts to be this big so why is such a dramatic U-turn let's go through it when the Prime Minister announced these cuts to Canada's immigration plan he said there was one main priority to give all levels of government time to catch up time to make the necessary investments in health care in housing in Social Services to accommodate more people in the future at its core this is a story about a massive spike in demand for housing for public services and a supply that just couldn't keep up

and here's what I mean on average over the past few decades Canada's population has grown by somewhere between 200 and 600,000 people per year that dropped off during the the pandemic when borders were closed but look what happened since then Canada's population has grown by more than a million people over the past two years that type of population growth in in kind of a rich country is unheard of that that that's just off the charts Canada usually grows by around 300,000 people a year so to be growing by over a million is substantial we haven't

had that sort of population growth in really more than a century and if you look back at the federal government's immigration forecast a few years ago they said the plan was to welcome around 1.2 million new immigrants over a three-year period that was already a record-breaking number that made headlines all over the world but here's the thing that forecast didn't include any mention of temporary residents that would end up coming to Canada over those three years and by temporary we mean International students and temporary foreign workers so after the pandemic um there was a narrative

of a labor shortage crisis there was a belief that you know we're in a in an economy now where we can't have too many immigrants entering the country there can't be too many I mean our vacant job vacancies are so high they've reached a million we just need more workers this was an urgent problem that needed fixing and there was no target No Limit set on how many of these temporary visas the government could hand out so the door was thrown wide open and Canada's population actually grew by about 3 million people in 3 years

almost triple the official forecast and according to statistics Canada if you're comparing natural population growth to immigration 98% of that growth was from immigration it took a lot of people by surprise including the provinces and cities that became home to all of these new people 560,000 temporary immigrants it's too much the number of people coming here is too fast this growth was so sudden and it caught policy makers off guard that there was basically no time to react they lost control of the system it was a runaway train that they they couldn't slow down even

the Prime Minister himself has acknowledged this in the tumultuous times as we emerged from the pandemic between addressing labor needs and maintaining population growth we didn't get the balance quite right now in terms of what exactly local and provincial governments need time to catch up on Trudeau mentioned three specific things Health Care in housing in Social Services let's start with housing when a country's population is growing you need more homes for people to live in right here's what that looked like over the past few decades you can see it's about a 2:1 ratio new people

to new homes which is according to urban planners around where you want to be but the Gap started to grow a little bit between 2016 and the pandemic and then by 2021 it had basically doubled Canada is now building on average one new home for every four new working age people and this mismatch between supply and demand doesn't just mean it's become harder to find a place to live which it has it's also driven up prices you get a big sudden increase in the demand for housing when you combine that with a very what we

call in elastic unresponsive supply of housing then you get big increases in prices in early 2020 right before the pandemic the average cost of a house in Canada was around $540,000 by 2022 that shot up to a whopping $840,000 it since leveled off a little but a home is still almost 200 Grand more expensive than it was pre pandemic and it's not much better if you're renting last year according to the cmhc Canada had the lowest vacancy rate ever on record and what happens when your landlord knows there's a line of people waiting to fill

their unit they bump up the rent play that out across the entire country and you get this a record-breaking jump in the average cost of rent now to be clear house prices in Canada have been high for a while now and yes unaffordability is made worse by high interest rates building costs red tape it's all part of the picture too but even the Bank of Canada has been clear that strong population growth has added pressure to house prices and rents and there was concern among economists that pressure was only going to keep building a recent

CIBC report estimated even if the population continued to grow slightly less than it has over the past couple of years we'd still have a shortage of about 5 million houses by 2030 and building 5 million units in the next 6 years you'd be hardpressed to find someone anyone who thinks that's realistic the reality is that when you add 1.3 million people to the population within the space of the year we can't possibly match that on the supply [Music] side okay so in a free market prices are intimately linked to the balance between supply and demand

that makes sense but what happens when there's a supply and demand problem for public services like healthcare what you get are shortages and cues and lineups people wait waiting longer and longer to get a service now the problems with Canada's Health Care system are wide- ranging and complex it is a system suffering from Regional disparities record numbers of burnt out health care workers an aging population but it also hasn't grown as fast as the number of people who need it in 2019 there were just over 91,000 doctors in Canada over the next 4 years there

were about 6,000 more but for a population that's grown by millions in that time so what does that mean for all those people who need a doctor essentially fewer and fewer have access to one researchers estimate the number of Canadians without a family doctor went from about 4 A5 million in 2019 to about 6 A5 million in 2023 and a recent Angus re survey suggests more often than not it's recent immigrants that are suffering most from this discrepancy more and more people are coming here not being able to access the care they need in a

timely manner and often what happens is if you can't uh see your family doctor you end up having to go to emergency because of of a lack of options and let's talk about the ER last year there were a million more emergency room visits in Canada than the year before which has meant those admitted are now waiting about 40% longer than they were in 2020 and it's really put a tremendous amount of pressure on the hospital system but also Primary Care big population swings like this can also have a big impact on infrastructure take Pei

last year the province saw a 33% jump in Immigration the highest on record and its Regional power provider Maritime electric says it hasn't had time to update its grid and it's about to reach capacity this year we're over 9 ,000 customers that's a new threshold for us if we get into cold weather events for extended periods of times it could be challenge for us we've seen massive econ and massive population growth over the past years particularly in the area of temporary workers and temporary residents and we are now saying okay we need to let our

communities our po our our infrastructures catch up to the population and that's the Crux of this Canada's population grew by a lot really fast housing infrastructure Public Services they've been buckling under the pressure and everyone including and often especially new immigrants have been suffering because of it but one other thing that might explain why the government acted so drastically so suddenly public support for Canada's immigration system has been dropping fast the consensus in around immigration is one that is that is under threat in Canada Canadians have some legitimate questions about the increase and the rapidity

of the increase a recent National survey suggests around half of Canadians now view immigration as harmful to the country that's up 10 points from last year and what's driving this shift a so-called scarcity mindset according to the survey authors when it comes to housing healthare and social services so solving this problem quickly might be as much a political matter as it is a pragmatic one for the liberal government they really realize that it's a weak spot for them that the immigration file has become something that a lot of Voters are talking about and so they're

sending a message to voters saying we hear you we are going to respond in a big time way we understand that we didn't get this right AIA kulpa it's very clearly AIA kulpa the big question is now to what extent will slashing immigration fix the problems that we've mentioned and what of the reason that Canada welcomed so many new immigrants in the first place how will this affect the economy that's only avoided a recession over the past year or so because of immigration [Music]