This is a popular conservative talking point. Do this to any massive degree and we're in a recession. Immigration is keeping the economy stable
1) our job market will tank (guess who's doing those jobs that "old stock" Canadians aren't? Remember the lacking employment in the middle of covid?)
2) our post secondary institutions will tank (they're already severely underfunded and rely on immigration - provinces aren't footing enough cash to them)
3) our non-immigrant populations are ageing and in decline, and birth rates have fallen - where does Canada grow as a country? Guess who gets the blame
The feds aren't getting into the housing building game anymore. That will be true of any party, including our most left leaning NDP. And really, should they? Houses are the responsibilities of municipalities, who are creations of the province. Most of Canada's problems are entirely on the provinces, but here we are with Trudeau getting the blame for everything. There are nimrods in Ontario protesting our ANNUAL SUMMER BLEND GAS INCREASE with "F Trudeau" signs... Hilarious.
I'm no slumlord, and I work in IT myself. But what does Canada offer the world? We're not building weapons like the US. We're not building... everything else in the world like China. Which political party is going to willfully tank our real estate based economy and drive us into a full blown depression? Whether this actually needs to happen to fix stuff is a different discussion because I don't think anyone's going to tank the country's economy to find out, right? Certainly not now.
I'll preface this by saying I've literally never voted Con in my life lol.
We absolutely need to go back to pre-2015 levels where we were accepting around 200k a year. It had been that way for like 30 years so even a slight increase would have been fine - but the govt went wild and ramped up the numbers by more than 500% with us hitting over 1M new people in 2023. That is not sustainable for public services and housing concerns. Immigration is not keeping the economy stable - it's simply flooding the market with cheap labour as the VAST majority are non-permanent residents.
All the points you made regarding the immigration topic are the faults of the governments in power over the years - be them Liberal or Conservative. I honestly believe we need a true recession to root out all the bad policies that have compounded over the years - that's literally what a recession provides as an outputted result - a policy reset. If the businesses that rely on these imported and exploited workers cannot survive without them, I say let them fail.
Post secondary are just artificially inflating costs for students and are purposefully pricing out domestic students (my tuition from my university I paid in 2012 has gone up by over 90% in that time - almost double in ten years with zero changes/additions/expansions in the university as a whole). In addition, a ton of these people coming in are going to degree mills and are getting scammed anyway - the common newcomer (which are the majority) aren't going to Queens or UoT.
Birth rates a low and citizen pop is ageing out, but the older and reasonable immigration levels covered these numbers and would be completely fine. The Canada 100M by 2100 people are loons.
Should the Fed get into housing again? YES. Canada needs a national housing strategy - and we had one - until the provinces started crying about overreach. If we can vaccinate like 85% of population in a coordinated effort, we can no doubt put together a home building plan (insane number of homes per year required aside...approximately 4M more than we currently do, which is like less than 300k). Get CMHC back to design-builds and have a limited number of designs that are easy for any subbed GC. Have them Rent-to-Own from the GoC and we could actually fix the supply WITHOUT cratering our own RE market. If the Feds want to throw money around to get elected like they are right now into un-thought out programs, toss the money to this.
As far as producing, we have to start leveraging our natural resources - oil, gas, uranium, etc. We used to be good at this, and actually had a sovereign wealth fund (for Alberta) similar to Norway (sitting at like $1.5T USD at the moment by the way) until the Cons out there plundered it back in the 80s and 90s. We still do great sustainable forestry which is getting back to normal now...much better than when Covid was going on and Trump was putting tariffs on us.
To be honest - no politician at the moment is up to the task. They are more concerned with being elected and brokering post-politics careers than actually improving anything. Liberals will drown under Trudeau, Cons will keep pushing nobody candidates, and NDP will fall further into obscurity.
Trudeau during his majority could have done some insanely good things with almost zero pushback and squandered it. Him and Singh could have made great legacies for themselves as a coalition govt, but they just don't care - both silver spoon upbringings and it shows. And now both are throwing money at the crowds hoping it's enough to win JT another election and Jagmeet can keep his role as remora fish. Cons are just patiently waiting to win so they can put the "for sale" sign on anything and everything.
We are in rough shape.
