A Serious Look at Canada’s Immigration Policies
Immigration Watch Canada is an organization of Canadians who believe that immigration has to serve the interests of its own citizens. It cannot be turned into a social assistance / job-finding program for people from other countries. It should not be a method to suppress wages and provide employers with an unending supply of low-wage labour. It should never be a social engineering experiment that is conducted on Canada’s mainstream population in order to make it a minority. **
But immigration has become those three things.
Why? In particular, why has Canada’s average 250,000 per year immigration intake remained in place for over 25 years, a clear abnormality in Canada’s immigration history? (Furthermore, why has Trudeau increased it to well over 300,000 in the past few years?)
The answer is that for many decades, Canada’s major political parties have assumed that, on the immigration issue in particular, they know better than average Canadians. This attitude and the promotion of political party self-interest manifested itself particularly in 1990 when one political party (the Progressive Conservatives) increased immigration levels to 250,000 per year.
At the time they did this, they actually announced they were doing so in order to capture more of the immigrant vote. This may sound hard to believe because it is so brazenly shameless, but it is a fact. Since then, all other parties have adopted the same policy. All pretend that their actions are helping people in the rest of the world and that this immigration flood is also literally and figuratively enriching Canadian society.
The reality is that Canada’s average 250,000 per year immigration intake since 1990 has been far too high. In fact, Canada’s intake is the highest per capita in the world. And it has obviously been destructive and senseless.
What are some examples of the destruction and senselessness?
First, our high intake has had major negative economic consequences for a minimum of 1.5 million Canadians who are looking for work. At the very least, it has forced many of them to compete (through Canada’s so-called “Employment Equity for Visible Minorities” programme and others) with immigrants for a limited number of jobs.
Second, relentless high immigration has caused two results : (1) relentless demand for a basic human need such as housing and (2) relentless increases in house prices. The urban area which is the best example of this is Metro Vancouver where house prices are now the second highest in the world. (Metro Toronto has also been seriously affected.) Much of Metro Vancouver’s population can no longer afford house ownership. In cases where the existing population has bought housing, they have had to take on huge mortgages. UBC Geography Professor David Ley has clearly shown the connection between relentless, high immigration and Metro Vancouver house prices http://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2014/09/17/immigration-caused-vancouvers-astronomic-house-prices/
Third, the continued pursuit of the “Diversity” social engineering project has led many Canadians to conclude that they are being ethnically cleansed and that Canada is being re-colonized.
Finally, many Canadians see that our governments seem to think that our urban areas can take infinite numbers of people. This attitude has turned many areas of the country into crowded, grid-locked, environmental disasters-in-progress—duplicates of the environmental catastrophes many recent immigrants come from.
We repeat one basic question :
Why Is Canada bringing in 250,000+ immigrants per year? Ottawa and business interests have made wild claims about the economic benefits of immigration, the need to deal with our aging population, and the need for immigration to satisfy current or future labour shortages. But those claims have been refuted by the government’s own studies or by studies done by respected think tanks. In addition, Ottawa and business interests have pretended that current immigration is no different from past immigration. However, a graph of Canada’s immigration intake since 1860 (See above) shows that immigration since 1991 is an abnormality in Canada’s immigration history
We believe Canada should have some immigration, but that immigration levels should be reduced to about 25,000, that is, to about 10% of the current annual 250,000 intake. We advocate that the 25,000 intake level should be kept in place indefinitely to compensate for the immigration disaster that has occurred in the past 24 years.
We also advocate a significant reduction to Canada’s widely-abused Temporary Foreign Worker program which in 2012 allowed well over 300,000 non-Canadians to work in Canada. This program should probably be reduced to nearly zero. In any recession, it is madness for a country to be importing large numbers of immigrants as well as large numbers of Temporary Foreign Workers.
In addition, we also call for major reform to many of Canada’s other immigration policies. (See our Basics section for details.)
** For background on major immigration policy changes made in the 1960’s and 70’s, click on B.C. writer Tim Murray’s excellent historical analysis, “Demolition of a Nation” : http://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2017/06/16/canadas-150th-anniversary-demolition-nation-one-step-time/
and the following summaries of excellent research done by reporter Doug Collins in his book “Immigration : The Destruction Of English Canada” :
Doug Collins: Immigration, The Destruction of English Canada (Part 1)
Doug Collins: Immigration, The Destruction of English Canada (Part 2)
