By Riley Donovan | dominionreview.ca

In an exclusive interview with Juno News released February 13, 2025, Poilievre explained that he supports a permanent resident cap of 200,000-250,000: “It would be a lot more like the Harper numbers that were basically the same for 40 years before Trudeau took office — we were bringing in about 200,000 to 250,000 a year.”¹

This statement comes after years of attempting to avoid the topic of immigration as much as possible. When he couldn’t avoid the topic, Poilievre went so far as to express support for high immigration, going on the record in various interviews and press conferences supporting an open-door, welcoming immigration policy.

In August 2023, I posted a clip on Twitter from an interview on Red FM Canada, in which Poilievre was repeatedly asked whether he believed that immigration should be cut to reduce housing costs.² Both times he was asked the question, he dodged, leading the conversation towards his pledge to dramatically boost housing construction: “If we build the houses, we can accommodate the newcomers”. This is just one clip of many that I posted during that general time period, in which Poilievre either evaded immigration questions or, in some cases, stated his outright support for a generous immigration policy. In one particularly striking clip, he called for a halt to the deportation of 700 Indian international students with fake admission letters: “We have a demographic problem, our population is too old – we need 700 young people.”³

In poll after poll, support for immigration restriction reached new heights in the Canadian population. In November 2023, an Abacus poll revealed that a majority of all age groups, all regions, both sexes, all four major parties, and both native-born and foreign-born Canadians thought immigration was too high.⁴ Poilievre’s position evolved in lockstep with public opinion; in July 2024, I posted on Twitter that Poilievre had pledged to “cap the population growth below the growth in the housing stock.” At the time, I expressed my view of this new promise: “He is starting to feel the pressure from the dramatic swing in Canadian public opinion against mass immigration.”⁵

Poilievre clearly still feels the dramatic public opinion shift and hopes that announcing a cap of 200,000-250,000 will be enough to convince Canadians that he has our back when it comes to immigration. The problem is that even his newfound support for immigration restriction is incredibly modest.

Let’s compare the Liberal government’s current immigration policy to Poilievre’s proposed policy. This year, taking Ottawa’s immigration cut into account, Canada will accept 395,000 permanent residents. The upper end of Poilievre’s immigration cap is 145,000 fewer: 250,000. If there were 250,000 new permanent residents a year under a Poilievre government, this would not include temporary resident admissions: international students, post-graduate international student foreign workers, temporary foreign workers, and asylum seekers. Real population growth would be 145,000 lower than under the Liberals, but it would still number well into the hundreds of thousands—every year, ad infinitum.

Is cutting population growth by just 145,000 an appropriate response to the enormous strain that the open-door Liberal immigration policy has placed on housing, healthcare, the job market, the natural environment, infrastructure, food banks, social services, schools, and roads?

More fundamentally, let’s think about the permanent resident number itself. Poilievre is correct that a cap of 250,000 would constitute a return to Harper’s immigration policy, but presenting this as some sort of panacea carries the faulty assumption that all of Canada’s immigration problems began under Justin Trudeau in 2015. Far from it. The rate of immigration under the Harper government was already exerting a serious strain on Canada’s various systems—notably, our housing market. This graph shows that house prices started to become totally detached from disposable income about the year 2000 and continued to float upwards every year after:

Justin Trudeau’s pedal-to-the-metal immigration policy, which essentially consisted of a massive deregulation of nearly every aspect of Canada’s immigration system, made all of Canada’s immigration problems worse—but the problems already existed. Canada’s economy and social services were already overwhelmed by immigration before Trudeau, and so was our capacity to integrate and assimilate newcomers. This National Post article⁶ written in 2012 describes the astronomic growth of ethnic enclaves since the early 1980s:

“In 1981, Canada had only six neighbourhoods with ethnic enclaves (neighbourhoods where more than 30% of the population is a visible minority). Now, that number has mushroomed to more than 260. In cities like Vancouver, home to nearly half of these enclaves, neighbourhoods are becoming increasingly defined by ethnicity. Unlike the racial ghettoes of the U.S. or France however, Canada’s ethnic communities are often shaped by choice.”

Our immigration problems are more deeply rooted than Justin Trudeau or Stephen Harper. The most significant decision affecting immigration numbers was Brian Mulroney’s rejection of Canada’s historic “tap-on, tap-off” approach in 1990 and his government’s institution of a model of endless population growth. I have written about this in a piece for the Western Standard.

“It’s fair to say that Canada has had what I call mass immigration, or what might more politely be called a continuous and uninterrupted high inflow of immigrants, since Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s government departed from our historic ‘tap on, tap off’ policy in 1990. Under then Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall, high immigration regardless of domestic economic conditions became the new norm—and has only gone up, up, up in the decades since!”

In the space of a few years, Poilievre’s position on immigration has evolved from support for the open-door policy pursued by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to a commitment to reduce annual permanent resident levels to 200,000-250,000. This shows that Canada’s political elite is slowly beginning to cave to the shift in public opinion against mass immigration, but the weakness of Poilievre’s proposed cut indicates that the Conservative Party is as of yet unaware of just how seismic that shift in opinion really is.

1. junonews.com/p/exclusive-poilievre-vows-200k-250k

2. x.com/valdombre/status/1693847072330650033

3. x.com/valdombre/status/1743362404992548928

4. abacusdata.ca/unmasking-public-unease-with-canadas-immigration-goals

5. x.com/valdombre/status/1817316310214418568

6.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-as-immigration-booms-ethnic-enclaves-swell-and-segregate

Originally published at dominionreview.ca