Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.
Despite record levels of polarization, it seems pundits and politicians of all stripes agree on one thing nowadays: no matter the problem, immigrants are the cause.
Housing crunch? Too many immigrants.
Health care squeeze? Ditto.
Wages too low? International students flooding the labour market.
These arguments are lazy, dangerous and, most of all, incorrect. Yet somehow, they’re everywhere.
But even a cursory glance at these arguments shows that the people making these claims haven’t given the evidence even a cursory glance.
For example, the housing crisis far predates the recent immigration boom. In hot markets like Toronto, residential home prices more than doubled between 2000 and 2014. Immigration rates during that period were more than 30 per cent lower than they are now. The last time immigration levels skyrocketed like they have recently was between 1985 and 1995. House prices didn’t boom in those years; they crashed more than 25 per cent.
Let’s put some uncomfortable truths on the table.
Immigrants didn’t subsidize property speculation with public funds by exempting housing investments from capital gains taxes. Successive federal governments did that.
Immigrants didn’t block zoning reform for decades, making it illegal to build more housing. City councils did that.
Immigrants didn’t remove some 130,000 homes from the rental market to become quasi-legal hotels on Airbnb. Profiteering investors did that, often illegally, while governments looked the other way.
Immigrants aren’t responding to recent housing price drops by holding up the construction of more than 8,000 housing units in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area until prices go back up. Developers are doing that.
Immigrants are not causing the cataclysmic deterioration of our health care system. In Ontario alone, an estimated 20,000 internationally trained nurses are sitting on the sidelines, prevented from healing patients because of bureaucratic holdups to their accreditation that provinces have known about forever, but have chosen not to resolve.
Immigrants are not suppressing wages. Companies like Uber did that, performing the world’s greatest Pinocchio routine by claiming, incredulously, that their work force neither wants nor deserves basic protections like minimum wage or a reliable place to pee while on shift. Even more incredulous is the reaction of governments across the land, which just sat back and watched as these American companies boastfully broke the law and drove down wages while paying no corporate taxes. As with Airbnb, governments eventually changed the laws to fit the crime, locking a generation of people, disproportionately immigrants, into low-wage servitude for California corporations.
Increasingly, this labour force is made up of international students, who desperately need the money because provinces permit rapacious colleges and universities to charge outrageous international fees for what is too often a useless education. Why do the students pay? Because post-study work permits are a reliable pathway to permanent residency, which the federal government keeps wide open. When the fees got to be too much, the feds lifted work restrictions for international students. Now they study even less while paying even more to subsidize the rest of us.
Immigrants didn’t cause our failings. We did that all by ourselves.
In fact, strategic immigration is our best chance to solve many of these challenges.
Tens of thousands of immigrant health care professionals have passed their Canadian exams and are eager to reinforce our failing system. If we simply let them contribute, we could relieve huge pressure from the front lines, practically overnight.
The extra 2.3 million new homes we need to build by 2030 won’t build themselves, yet Canada will lose 700,000 skilled workers to retirement between 2021 and 2028. Unless you’re hoping to find a few hundred thousand Canadian-born tradespeople in the couch cushions, immigrant expertise is the only way to get us anywhere close to meeting our housing goals.
Blaming immigrants for our homegrown problems is a double defeat. It opens the door to the horrifying mainstream xenophobia that contemporary Canada has so far escaped, while closing the door on the very people who are our best chance at overcoming these challenges, resulting from decades of made-in-Canada complacency and neglect.
To the many opinion leaders now casually calling out Canada’s supposed immigration excess: please do your homework. Check the evidence. And open your mind to the fact that while Canada’s problems may be far-reaching, their origins are hardly far-flung.