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Douglas Todd: B.C. voices did speak up against Trudeau’s migration policies, but were ignored

Red flags about the Liberals' plan to hike the volume of low-skill foreign workers, international students and transnational wealth were raised about a decade ago. But the Laurentian elite paid no heed.

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One of the relatively few books written about Canadian immigration policy in the past decade says Justin Trudeau’s Liberals could have avoided “breaking the system” if they had just listened to some level-headed economists.

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In “Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong,” author Tony Keller, a columnist for the Globe and Mail, reveals how in 2016 then-immigration minister John McCallum invited 11 labour economists to give their views regarding issues such as increasing low-skill temporary workers and international students.

The economists’ ensuing report was utterly ignored by the Liberal government — to the point the authors doubted their paper had even been read.

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“That was unfortunate. The eggheads could have saved the government, and the country, a whole lot of grief,” writes Keller, whose laudable book is based on his Max Bell lectures, organized by McGill University.

Instead “Canada conducted a decade-long experiment” in radically jacking up migration levels.

“The experiment’s principal investigator was the Trudeau government, assisted and enabled by the provinces, the business community and the higher education sector,” writes Keller.

“They were opposed by essentially nobody. Those who suspected things were going wrong mostly held their tongues. The experiment was not a success.”

While Keller is right to remind readers that many stayed silent who should have known Trudeau’s strategies would be detrimental to the country (and lead to two of three Canadians’ saying migration rates are too high), credit should go to those who did speak out.

They did what they could to raise alarms about Trudeau’s doubling of the number of immigrants and, more importantly, quadrupling the volume of low-skill workers and international students — as well as virtually opening the borders to vast quantities of foreign capital.

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Temporary worker warnings

At least a dozen noted people responsibly ignored the Canadian taboo against criticizing Ottawa’s immigration policy — and ran the risk of being labelled “xenophobic,” “racist” or “nativist” by the Liberals and their allies.

They included some of the labour economists McCallum consulted a decade ago, such as the University of B.C.’s David Green, Carleton University’s Christopher Worswick and Waterloo’s Mikal Skuterud.

In 2016 Green, Worswick and UBC’s Greg Riddell published an important article in Policy Options, which was highlighted by Postmedia. They were critical of then-immigration minister Ahmed Hussen, who was trumpeting his “ambitious plan” to drastically increase migration rates to build the economy. The economists cautioned that “immigration cannot be relied upon as a source of higher per capita incomes.”

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Again, in 2019, Green expanded upon his remarks, saying the rapid rise in low-skilled workers entering Canada would likely lower the earnings of existing workers.

Simon Fraser University political scientist Sanjay Jeram also flagged in 2017 that a national debate was needed on immigration economics — and that Canadians’ individual financial well-being would shrink as corporations brought in low-skill immigrants to make up for alleged labour shortages.

Earlier, in 2016, SFU economist Herb Grubel had cautioned high migration rates were not compatible with welfare societies, ultimately imposing a “fiscal burden” on taxpayers.

By 2021, the newly retired head of B.C.’s civil service, Don Wright, took advantage of his new-found freedom to write that Ottawa’s immigration policies were contributing greatly to the abandonment of the “broad middle-classes, by allowing real wages to stagnate.”

By last year, when Trudeau resigned after plummeting popularity, Canada’s GDP per capita, which measures economic growth per person, had dismally inched up only two per cent in a decade. In the same period, U.S. GDP per capita jumped 20 per cent.

International student alarms

As the Liberals were cranking up the number of foreign students, Kwantlen’s Polytechnic University’s Shinder Purewal told Postmedia in 2016 that Canada’s was marketing study visas around the world, creating a giant for-profit business, with hidden costs to taxpayers.

The University of Toronto’s Jane Knight, a specialist in higher education, was cited by Postmedia in 2013, saying Canada’s foreign-student programs were already losing their humanitarian ideals, becoming fixated on “self-interest” and “prestige-building.”

While politicians and post-secondary officials applauded how foreign students spent on retail goods and rent and created teaching jobs, most scholars harbouring critical thoughts felt it safer to stay quiet.

By 2019, however, B.C. immigration lawyer Sam Hyman and consultant Laleh Sahba were among those telling Postmedia how uneasy they were about a Statistics Canada report that up to one in three study-visa holders were not going to school. They described how many international students were being advised by dubious agents they could bypass school to work in Canada while pursuing the dream of permanent resident status.

Although the 11 economists consulted in 2016 by McCallum did not point to how growing migration numbers would increase housing costs, the issue gradually gathered significant attention in Metro Vancouver.

About a decade ago, key B.C. scholars — such as UBC’s David Ley and Daniel Hiebert, and SFU’s Andy Yan and Joshua Gordon — led the way in spotlighting how misguided politicians were allowing transnational migration and wealth to exacerbate extreme housing unaffordability in Canada’s “hub” cities, particularly Metro Vancouver and Toronto.

In 2016, Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland also pointed to the downside of immigrant-investor schemes. Even earlier, in 2013, former Canadian diplomat Martin Collacott was warning of the costs of handing out “passports of convenience” to wealthy foreign nationals who mostly saw Canada as a safe haven in case things went sour in their home country.

The work of some of these figures was noted by B.C.-based journalists such as Ian Young, then of the South China Morning Post, the Globe and Mail’s Kerry Gold and others, including me at Postmedia. Hundreds of articles were written about how the powers that be were failing to see how transnational capital was fuelling housing unaffordability,

So although Keller says Trudeau’s intemperate immigration policies “were opposed by essentially nobody” or that “those who suspected things were going wrong mostly held their tongues,” B.C. experts have long been speaking out.

It is definitely true that only a few Canadian voices raised alarms about what Keller calls Trudeau’s policy of “ever-higher immigration” — and they were paid either little or no attention, at least until recently, especially in Eastern Canada, which is where it counts.

It’s not insignificant many individuals questioning the federal Liberals’ immigration schemes were from B.C.

That puts them outside the so-called Laurentian elite — the influential network of politicians, academics, media and business leaders based in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa — who have long been in the habit of not taking West Coast voices seriously.

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