Trudeau on his immigration policy: Oops

Once again, imprudence fails as statecraft.

A year ago, I wrote in Taki’s Magazine:

… Canada is currently subjecting itself to a bizarre experiment in extreme population growth due to pedal-to-the-metal legal immigration.

Canada’s population rose about 1 percent per year for the first decade and a half of this century. But the Justin Trudeau era began in 2015, and growth was goosed to 1.5 percent by 2019. After a brief pandemic pause, the Trudeau government is now opening the borders extraordinarily wide.

In response, Canada’s annual population growth rate hit 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2023, the kind of rise normally associated with Bangladesh in the 1980s. Over the summer, Canada’s population reached 40 million, up from 30 million in 1997.

But now, even Justin Trudeau has figured out that his policy was a bad idea. Pretty much everything I pointed out last year has been confirmed against interest 53 weeks later. From the Washington Post news section:

Canada to cut immigration levels in major reversal, Trudeau says

The U-turn, on an approach that has set Canada apart from the United States, comes as public support for immigration wanes.

By Amanda Coletta
Updated October 24, 2024 at 4:52 p.m. EDT

TORONTO — Canada is set to slash the number of immigrants that it welcomes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday, in a sharp reversal for a country that bet big on immigration to boost economic prosperity and that has long cast itself as open to newcomers.

The about-face comes as public opinion polls show waning support for immigration amid concerns that it is exacerbating long-standing housing shortages, pushing up rents and deepening stresses on an already overburdened health-care system.

You don’t say? Who could have ever seen that coming?

Since his election in 2015, Trudeau has planned to steadily increase immigration levels. In 2022, Canada set record targets, in part to plug pandemic labor shortages. “Canada needs more people,” said Sean Fraser, then the immigration minister.

That approach has set Canada apart from the United States, where Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has pledged mass deportations and blames migrants for crime and disorder,

Remind me: Was Trump President in 2021-2023 when the incumbent administration was swinging the gates open?

and from Europe, where anti-migrant sentiment has propelled far-right political parties to victory.

Now Trudeau’s government is rolling up the welcome mat — and admitting that it bungled the policy.

Canada is to admit 395,000 new permanent residents in 2025, a 21 percent drop from the target of 500,000 it set last year. That number will fall further to 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027. All are below the goal of 485,000 set for this year.

Officials also introduced the country’s first-ever targets for temporary residents such as international students and foreign workers. Their numbers are projected to fall by nearly 450,000 in 2025 and 2026. In 2023, approximately 800,000 people held that status here.

The changes mean that after several years in which Canada saw record population growth thanks mostly to immigration — Canada has been growing faster than its Group of Seven peers as well as countries with higher birth rates such as India — its population is projected to shrink 0.2 percent.

“Our immigration system has always been responsible and it has always been flexible,” Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa. But in attempting to address labor needs and maintain population growth, “we didn’t get the balance quite right.”

… Immigration has long drawn high levels of public support here and been viewed as critical for offsetting the economic effects of low fertility rates and an aging workforce.

That consensus, built over generations, has cut across the political spectrum.

But there have been signs that Canada’s consensus is at risk. Last week, an Environics Institute poll found that nearly 60 percent of Canadians agree that there is “too much immigration” — the highest share in a quarter-century and the fastest shift in a two-year period since it began asking the question in 1977.

Why do political elites keep making the same mistakes everywhere all the time?