Riley Donovan enumerates some of the most notable losers from the federal government’s belated realization that cutting immigration numbers was politically necessary:
A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message. The PPC has been the only federal party against mass immigration from its founding.
Photo from The Province
October 24th was a tragic day for real estate developers, speculators, cheap labour employers, business lobbyists, slumlords, corrupt immigration consultants, and strip mall diploma mill operators. On that day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reluctantly caved to public opinion and announced that the Liberal government will slash permanent resident levels by 21%.
Less than one week before the October 24th announcement, an Abacus poll revealed that support for immigration restriction has reached 72% – a statistical supermajority. This includes a majority of all four major political parties and every age group. A month before the announcement, a Leger poll found that majorities of both white and non-white Canadians want lower immigration.
It is now impossible to find even one demographic subset of Canadians that registers majority support for high immigration – except perhaps if you exclusively surveyed CEOs, bank presidents, or woke university professors (politics makes for strange bedfellows).
There is no prominent, well-funded immigration restriction lobby in this country – in fact, there is a prominent, well-funded pro-immigration lobby. Columnists – with the exception of yours truly – almost never wrote the word “immigration” before the summer of 2023. The Canadian public was not goaded by public figures into opposing mass immigration by a margin of three to one; this trend was entirely grassroots.
The shift in public attitudes was the result of countless private conversations in which regular people shared worries about job lines full of international students that stretched around the block, Canadian youth outcompeted by foreign workers for positions at Tim Horton’s, seniors living in RVs because of sky-high rent, and hospitals overcrowded by an annual inflow of 1.3 million newcomers.
