Immigration Questionnaire to All Federal Candidates
Dear Prime Minister Martin and All Federal Candidates:
Immigration Watch Canada is a national organization which advocates major reforms to Canada's current immigration policies, especially to the current level of 250,000+ immigrants per year. We believe these levels should be reduced to the 50,000 level annually. In general, we believe that Canada's immigration levels should place the needs and interests of Canada's citizens first, especially at a time when Canada has almost 2 million unemployed.
We are interested in your responses to the following questions:
(1) Immigration and the Environment:
A. Do you support the general principle of conducting environmental studies to determine the potential effects of industry on an area? Yes____; No_____
B. Would you support future studies to determine the environmental impact of recent and future immigration on the places where about 75% of all immigrants to Canada go: Greater Vancouver, Toronto and
Montreal? Yes______; No______
(Fact: Greater Vancouver has experienced a 50% increase in its population in the last 14 years: 1.4 million to over 2.1 million.
Immigration represented 83% of the increase in the 1991-96 period. Since then, it has been the major factor in Greater Vancouver's population growth. As such, it has also been the major contributor to increases in urban sprawl, traffic gridlock, loss of green space/agricultural land, pollution, etc. Greater Montreal has had a similar experience. Greater Toronto has experienced the largest inflow of immigrants, close to 2 million in the same time period.)
(2) Immigration and the Economy:
A. Are you aware that Canada has traditionally followed a policy of accepting immigrants in times of economic expansion, but of not accepting them in times of significant unemployment? Yes___; No___
B. Are you aware that Canada abandoned this policy (often called a labour absorptive capacity policy) in the early 1990's and adopted a mass immigration policy? Yes___; No___
C. Would you support an Auditor General's inventory of Canada's labour force to determine in what fields Canada may need workers and in what fields Canada has surpluses of workers? Yes___; No____
D. Are you aware that landmark federal research (“New Faces In The Crowd”) done by The Economic Council of Canada concluded that there is virtually no economic benefit to immigration and that two similar studies in the U.S.
and Britain reached a similar conclusion? Yes___; No _____
E. Are you aware that landmark federal research (“Charting Canada's
Future”) done by over 150 university researchers from all across Canada concluded that immigration was a “poor tool” to deal with the aging population issue? Yes___; No___
F. Are you aware that “Charting Canada's Future” concluded that increasing the participation rate in Canada's work force by Canadian women and 45+ year-old men was a statistically superior solution to immigration in dealing with the aging population issue? Yes___; No____
G. Are you aware that the federal government has presented no evidence to prove that Canada will have an overall labour force shortage in the next ten years? Yes___; No___
H. Are you aware that six and one-half million young Canadians (The Baby Boom Echo: Those born between 1980-1995, the second largest population cohort in Canada) will enter the work-force between now and 2015? Yes___; No ___
I. Do you think that these young Canadians should be obliged to compete with new immigrants for scarce employment opportunities? Yes___; No___
J. Are you aware that 500,000 people have claimed refugee status in Canada since 1989? (These people are in addition to the approximately10,000 refugees Canada annually selects from refugee camps around the world.) Yes___; No___
K. Are you aware that large numbers of these people who have been denied refugee status are still in Canada? Yes___; No___
L. Are you aware that the retired executive-director of Canada's immigration service, James Bissett, estimates that Canada spends over $2 billion annually on all refugee claimants? (The costs of aiding selected refugees is separate.) Yes___; No___
M. Would you support an Auditor General's inquiry into whether there is a connection between the beginning of Canada's mass immigration policy and the very noticeable recent rise in the number of Canadian-born homeless on our streets? Yes___; No___
N. Would you support an Auditor General's study to determine the recent and future effects of Canada's mass immigration policy on Canada's health care system? (The general point would be to determine whether health care use
by several million recently-arrived immigrants has had a negative effect
on Canada's health care system.) Yes___; No___
O. Would you support an Auditor General's study to determine how many visible minorities have been hired in Canada's federal civil service since federal equity employment legislation was introduced in the late 1980's?
Yes___; No ___
Immigration And Canadian Culture:
A. Are you aware that immigrants (particularly recent ones) compose almost 50% of the populations of two of Canada's three major immigrant-receiving
areas: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver? Yes___; No___
B. Do you think that sentiments of the Canadian-born (in these areas) that immigration has exceeded culturally acceptable levels, are justified?
Yes___; No___
C. Do you think there are cultural limits to any area's ability to absorb new people? Yes___; No ___
D. In general, do you think the environmental, economic and cultural interests of Canadians should take precedence over the pursuit of mass immigration policies? Yes___; No___
Other Comments:_________________________________________________
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Thank you for your time.
Dan Murray
Immigration Watch Canada
