Canada's governing Liberal party is being destroyed in the polls and will almost surely lose in an election that must be called between now and October 20, 2025 at the latest.
The election will almost-certainly be fought over immigration levels and the housing and infrastructure crunch that came with it. Here's a chart to highlight how the doors were thrown open:
Two big avenues were drivers:
- Temporary foreign workers
- College 'students' who used a backdoor via mostly fake colleges
The government has seen the writing on the wall and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a revolt within his party. He's holding a cabinet retreat this week and seen the writing on the wall and announced:
- Places where the unemployment rate is 6% or higher will not be able to hire temporary foreign workers (the national level is 6.4% so this is much of the country)
- There are limited exceptions in agriculture, food processing, construction and health care
- Employers will no longer be allowed to higher more than 10% of their total workforce via temporary foreign workers
- Temporary foreign workers will be limited to one year contracts from two years previously
- Trudeau said government will review overall immigration levels this fall
"We'll be looking at unemployment rates and opportunities to make further adjustments over the course of this fall as we come forward with comprehensive level plans that will respond to the reality that Canada's facing now and in years and decades to come," Trudeau said.
Looking to the long term, the strong positive Canadian consensus on immigration is broken at the moment and that's likely to reverberate in elections and the economy for awhile. It's part of a global trend that should tighten western labour markets could eventually loosen housing markets. It's a tough one to handicap but Canada's 'GDP growth by immigration' model is done.
