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Matthew Lau: Our problem is government, not immigration

Rapid immigration has caused problems in health care, education and housing but where the private sector rules there aren't any shortages

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In a recent address, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Justin Trudeau’s immigration policies have “caused an unprecedented strain on our health care, education, and other social programs.” According to Smith, immigration has always been an important part of Alberta’s growth, but “throwing the doors wide open to anyone and everyone across the globe has flooded our classrooms, emergency rooms, and social support systems with far too many people, far too quickly.”

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Similarly, Jamie Sarkonak observes, “Hospitals are overburdened, schools are struggling with second-language students, job prospects remain poor, birthright citizenship continues to exist and judges routinely help criminals and fraudsters remain in-country.” Higher youth unemployment and worsening affordability reflected by higher housing prices, especially in supply-constrained cities, have also been attributed to immigration.

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Yet in contrast to struggling hospitals and schools, many other parts of the economy and society seem fine. If restaurants are experiencing shortages because immigrants have eaten all the meals, if financial institutions are unable to provide credit because immigrants have borrowed all the money, if software companies are turning away clients because of the immigration boom, if fruit and vegetable shops are unable to keep up with immigration-driven demand, and if immigration has reduced Canadian-born residents’ access to clothing, books and household appliances, then these facts have not been widely reported.

The clear difference is that sectors successfully managing the immigration increase are privately run. By contrast, health care, education, social programs and crime prevention are government-run. Government does not actually run the housing market but is heavily involved in it. And, notably, government was struggling with all of this even before the massive increase in immigration in the past five years.

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Take health care. The Fraser Institute’s annual survey of physicians found the median wait time between a family doctor’s referral and actual medical treatment for various specialties was 28.6 weeks in 2025, more than triple the median wait time of 9.3 weeks in 1993. Yet health-care access deteriorated significantly even before the recent immigration boom: the median wait time was 20.9 weeks in 2019. Just how much of the deterioration since then is due to immigration is difficult to say, since correlation is not causation. But health-care access was clearly declining even before immigration ramped up.

Similarly, the quality of public schools began declining years in advance of recent increases in immigration. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has documented declining test scores in Canada since the inception of these assessments, which was in 2000 for reading, 2003 for math and 2006 for science. Researcher Derek J. Allison wrote in a 2022 study that Canada was the only G7 country with steadily declining scores across reading, math, and science, with results declining “in all provinces in all three subjects.”

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Now consider crime. In recent years, violent crime has become worse and stories abound of foreign criminals who inexplicably are allowed to remain in the country. But, like poor health-care access, violent crime was becoming more severe even before the immigration increase. From a low of 70.71 in 2014, Statistics Canada’s violent crime severity index rose to 93.40 in 2021, and then increased further to 99.87 in 2024 after several years of heavy immigration. The bulk of the increase therefore predates the recent surge of immigration. And immigration itself cannot be blamed for the fact that in our broken justice system some judges give softer sentences to foreign criminals to help them avoid deportation.

The housing market is mainly private but many government policies reduce affordability and supply. Rent control and other so-called tenants’ rights policies significantly reduce rental supply; restrictive municipal and provincial regulations constrain homebuilding; and high taxes and development charges further discourage construction. Homeownership affordability in major cities has plummeted in recent years with higher immigration, but the erosion of affordability — notably in Toronto and Vancouver — began well before 2021.

On youth unemployment, as well, government policies besides immigration have caused considerable harm. Most provincial governments have hiked the minimum wage at approximately twice the rate of inflation since 2005 — despite economists’ warnings this would price many young people out of the job market. Rich government subsidies for university programs that do not actually provide students with useful employment skills are another big problem.

At bottom, if higher immigration seems to have broken things that are government-run or heavily government regulated — but not areas of the economy and society where the free market largely prevails — we may reasonably conclude that our real problem is government, not immigration.

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