Liberals go hog wild on immigration, hoping to secure victory in 2029 and beyond
Maybe the Liberals intended to fling open the nation’s back door and grow the pool of future permanent residency applicants, in the expectation that they’ll always be grateful to the political party that granted them entry to our generous land.
You would think a government that’s down 20 points might want to telegraph an aura of sanity, rather than spend its days finding new ways to eviscerate an immigration policy that has served Canada well since Lester Pearson led the Liberal party.
In a vacuum, some of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s changes might seem justified: whether it be the streamlined $7 electronic visas, or broadening refugee claims beyond the U.N.’s definition of those facing “persecution” to include accumulated “intersectional” experiences.
You can see the logic in extending “citizenship to foreign-born children of parents who live abroad,” as we’re loosely mirroring U.S. policy. Ignoring for the moment that an American citizen who lives abroad must still file a U.S. tax return outlining their worldwide income — unlike we Canadians. Other Liberal policy choices seem manically self-defeating.
The trend started in 2016, when Trudeau made some diplomatic hay by removing the Harper government’s visa requirement for visitors from Mexico. Despite a 70-fold surge in Mexican asylum claims, the Liberals waited until 2024 to reverse themselves. A “majority of claims were abandoned or rejected,” and that single Liberal flip-flop cost Canadian taxpayers $600 million a year for health care and shelter costs.
Until recently, my nomination for the Most Idiotic Liberal Move on Immigration was the change that allowed any visitor visa applicant to “no longer have to prove they have sufficient funds to stay in Canada or demonstrate they will leave the country when their visas expire.”
The government explained the move, which expired in 2023, as an extraordinary measure to help clear immigration backlogs. But the ramifications were clear — two key tests to assess whether you intend to leave when your six-month visitor visa expires were out the window.
Is there a border guard anywhere else in the Western world who would waive you through if you had no return plane ticket and couldn’t prove that you could afford to feed yourself during your “holiday?”
Trudeau changed that particular rule at the exact moment he was amending the “Safe Third Country Agreement” with U.S. President Joe Biden to shut down the Roxham Road illegal border crossing. Trudeau responded to political pressure from Quebec Premier François Legault regarding the “influx” of overland economic migrants yet proceeded to remove the one test we use at Canadian airports to separate bona fide tourists from those individuals too impatient to join a legitimate immigration queue.
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Having made it far easier for economic migrants to enter the country over the past eight years, Immigration Minister Marc Miller recently tabled a plan to “regularize” many of these same people. Like Captain Louis Renault in the movie “Casablanca,” who was “shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” Miller didn’t explain why his government allowed up to 500,000 people to overstay their visas in the first place.
And that was before the news broke that Trudeau is lowering entry standards, giving spots to those who’ve not even earned a high school diploma instead of prioritizing, say, doctors and job-creating tech entrepreneurs.
It all might make sense if Canada had a federal budget surplus, ample affordable rental accommodation, and short emergency ward wait times. But that’s not our reality.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is polite to put this down to mere incompetence.
To me, there’s another possibility. Maybe the Liberals intended to fling open the nation’s back door and grow the pool of future permanent residency applicants, in the expectation that they’ll always be grateful to the political party that granted them entry to our generous land.
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A 20-something recently told me that his grandmother, who fled Argentina for Canada in the 1970s, would “Thank God and Pierre Trudeau” every night as she said grace before dinner: “we owed everything to him.”
Consider that in 2021, Trudeau’s 5.6 million votes weren’t sufficient to secure another majority. His administration has brought in about 3.2 million new immigrants, and consciously allowed the number of temporary residents to swell to 2.8 million — a large chunk of whom have come post the 2021 election. More than any equivalent period in our history.
One has to wonder if Trudeau has weaponized our Immigration system in an effort to build a new base of more than six million grateful future Liberal voters. What might look like “incompetence” may actually be the Liberal 2029 election strategy at work.
Mark McQueen is a Toronto-based entrepreneur, a former board chair of two federal agencies and an advisor in Brian Mulroney’s PMO and a columnist for the Star. Follow him on X: @markrmcqueen
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