We believe (based on the federal government’s own economic research and Canada’s own previous tradition of adhering to labour absorptive capacity) that there are limits to the number of workers of any type that a country needs or can absorb. Present immigration levels in Canada pay no attention to the principle of economic absorptive capacity, ignore a real unemployment level of over 2 million and seem to assume that Canada can admit a virtually limitless number of new workers without causing wage suppression.
As a result, immigration levels have far exceeded Canada’s economic absorptive capacity. In effect, they are an historical anomaly. In the past, adhering to labour absorptive capacity meant that when Canada needed workers from outside its borders, it looked for those workers. When it did not need them, it did not look for them.
Two aberrations have resulted from Canada’s present immigration levels:
(a) Immigrants have found that, contrary to what they have been told by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, they cannot find work in the areas for which they have been trained. Consequently, many immigrants are unemployed and relying on social assistance or they are under-employed.
(b) More significantly, Canadian-born have found that they are competing for employment with recently-arrived immigrants. One of the most absurd things that has happened is that many politicians and their supporters have initiated “Hire an Immigrant”, “Recognize Foreign Credentials” and “Diversity Hiring” programmes. If these politicians and their supporters had behaved logically, they would have called for a reduction in immigration. In other words, why try to find jobs for unnecessary immigrants (and simultaneously displace Canadians) when the wisest thing to have done would have been never to have brought these immigrants here in the first place?
In addition, Canadians are the victims of their own government’s Employment Equity programmes (known in the United States as affirmative action programmes). Employment Equity measures (really Employment “Inequity” measures) deny many mainstream Canadians equality in job applications, and favour immigrants whose job skills, in most cases, were and are surplus to the labour absorptive capacity of Canada’s economy.
In effect, Employment Equity measures amount to institutionalized discrimination by Canadian employers (both public and private) against Canadian-born. As Dr. Martin Loney has pointed out in his comprehensive study of this issue, Employment Equity measures are not based on evidence, but on ideology. We believe this entire very expensive and unjust programme which benefits visible minorities (immigrants) at the expense of Canadians (particularly white males) has to be abolished.
