Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi
Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he would set Canada’s immigration targets based on housing, jobs and health-care data if his party forms government after the next election, accusing the Liberals of bringing in more immigrants than the country can absorb.
Mr. Poilievre spoke with reporters outside Parliament’s West Block Thursday, where he criticized this week’s “expensive” cabinet retreat in Halifax and called on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh to pull his support for the minority Liberal government and trigger a federal election.
Liberal ministers announced this week that the government will reverse its expansion of the low-wage temporary foreign worker program and is considering whether to reduce the number of permanent residents that Canada accepts annually.
Mr. Poilievre said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has “destroyed” Canada’s immigration system and vowed to return to the consensus he said existed between previous Liberal and Conservative governments before the Trudeau government increased its annual targets.
The Conservative leader said he would ensure that population growth will be below the rate of growth in jobs, housing and health care.
“If you want an idea of how I would run the immigration system overall, it’s the way it was run for the 30 years prior to Trudeau being Prime Minister. We had a common sense consensus between Liberals and Conservatives for three decades that screened people to make sure they were safe, only brought in the numbers that we could absorb into our housing, health care and job market, and blocked temporary foreign workers where they were taking jobs from Canadians.”
Canada’s population climbed by more than 1.27-million people last year and that growth was almost entirely from international migration. Canada accepted 471,771 permanent immigrants and 804,901 non-permanent residents, according to Statistics Canada data released in March.
Canada’s current immigration levels plan targets the acceptance of 485,000 permanent residents in 2024 and 500,000 in both 2025 and 2026.
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