It’s election day and voters are now more concerned about Canada-US relations, inflation and other issues ahead of immigration. This is understandable but the direction of the Liberals and Conservatives needs more scrutiny because their platform policies could make even more of a mess.
Put simply, they are focusing on the wrong category of migrant. The permanent resident (PR) target should never have been slashed from 500,000 to 395,000 and the Liberal leader should not be supporting this. The Conservatives should not be aiming to reduce PR numbers to 250,000 (about the number which ties PRs to new housing). They have also talked about limiting PRs to the number when Prime Minister Harper was in power from 2006-15 which was around 250,000 to 280,000. But PR numbers were never the problem at around 1% of the population and the Conservatives should really be adjusting their numbers as a percentage of Canada’s *current* population.
By dramatically cutting PRs by 21% and more in future years, the Liberals have prevented provinces from selecting PRs based on regional needs. Their allocations were reduced by 50% and several provinces have already hit their cap for the year. With both major parties promising low numbers, the Department has had to implement narrow targets for select sectors such as health care, skilled trades and education. But what about all the incredibly talented people here on work permits in other fields such as STEM not to mention many high level executives?
We should have left PRs at 1.2% of the population to create some room for people who studied and then worked here and were promised a pathway to PR.
The real issue has been the dramatic rise in international students and their spouses over the past 10 years which has accounted for most of the increase from 300,000 to 3M temporary residents, and the corresponding anti-immigrant sentiment. Fortunately, we now have student caps in place which forced provinces to choose amongst institutions and programs, leading to the end of shoddy private-public partnership colleges.
When he was Immigration Minister, Marc Miller called out the regulator for immigration consultants as he was upset that high numbers of immigration consultants were advising students to make refugee claims. Poor representatives have been learning how to game the system in many ways for quite a few years. Extra points for having a job were removed due to the selling of (literally) ‘arranged’ employment and now even highly desirable prospective PRs have lost these extra points.
We need to raise the number of PRs so that these former students avoid further clogging up our refugee determination system based on poor advice.
Polievre mentioned keeping frausters out of Canada and I hope that whomever becomes PM realizes that we need to restore PR room and bolster integrity when it comes to immigration representatives.
