Canada's Collapsing Immigration Consensus

How The Liberals Can Save Their Values

It wasn’t supposed to happen here.

There’s always been a somewhat smug Canadian superiority on immigration, fueled by the trio of countries we most are alike all facing political crises about the topic in the last 15 years. In Australia, the US, and the UK, immigration and asylum have been political footballs, and we’ve always prided ourselves on the fact that this wouldn’t happen here. That even our right was pro-immigration was an argument for our glory, as opposed to those irredeemable right wingers to our south, across the pond, and down under. 

Now, we’re faced with the political consensus for immigration collapsing, and the only question is how it collapses, not whether it will. There’s majority support in the country for reducing immigration levels, and this support is coming from plenty of Liberals who a decade ago would have sworn on their closest dead family member’s grave that they’d never support lowering immigration levels. It’s arguable that this will be the political debate of 2024, and nobody is prepared for it, really. The Conservatives are leaving themselves open to the PPC on this by refusing to come out for reductions, and the Liberals leave themselves open to massive rhetorical damage if they backtrack in the wrong way - and more political damage if they don’t backtrack.

Done wrong, this could end Canada’s consensus that high levels of immigration are a good thing in most circumstances. More concerningly, done wrong we could, in trying to solve a piece of our housing crisis, breathe life into a movement that opposes immigration as a matter of course, and multiculturalism as a whole. Which is why the Liberals have to get their immigration pivot right in 2024 - or else their failure will be their lasting legacy.

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I rarely have the capacity to get romantic when it comes to this country anymore. Outside of Montreal, my deep cynicism has beaten out most of the true romanticism I used to have for it. We are not the US, a country poisoned to the extent of incoherence, or the UK, a country whose political class treats their people with complete contempt, but we aren’t the version of Canada we like to pretend we are. We’re not pro-immigration because of the enlightenment of our views, but because we’ve not been a country that has the luxury of turning back people who want to be here. The romanticized notions of our tolerance are post-facto explanations for the fact that we’ve used immigration as a salve to help us avoid the underlying issues of a complacent country.

We’ve gotten away with it for this long in part because of the fact that the Conservatives here have been eager to win Brampton and eager to please big business, but we now have a policy problem that can’t be helped - and can be significantly hurt - by masses and masses of immigration. It’s a problem not just because hundreds of thousands of new people means hundreds of thousands of new people needing housing at a time when we don’t have any of that, but because it’s the first time the liberal (and Liberal) consensus has been breached in this way. The party and its supporters have used their support for higher and higher immigration as a way to signal their own morality, and to force the Conservatives into a wedge. Come out against higher immigration, and the Tories could have written off more heavily non-white areas. Come out for it, and there was always the chance that the right would splinter, locking the right out of office.

Now, the Liberals have to turn off the taps. Severely limit student visas, especially to for-profit colleges (like Mike Moffatt is illustrating well), limit temporary foreign workers to cases where they’re necessary for skilled reasons and not just when they’re here to lower wages for Canadians, and bring in a temporary reduction in family reunifications. We cannot affect a solely supply-side housing solution, and the biggest source of rising demand is the seemingly endless number of people who are coming right now.

Yes, it’s to our credit that so many people want to make Canada their homes, we should be grateful that so many people want to live and work and study here, all of that’s true (though less so than we like to tell ourselves). We’re also one of the only ports in a storm. The EU is a stagnating economic disaster, the Americans have somewhere between 45-50% of their country wanting to elect a guy who tried to steal an election, and the British are well and truly fucked beyond repair. But if you care about immigration and immigrants there’s two choices - pretend everything’s fine and risk a permanent change in attitudes on housing, or turn off the taps for now until we can onboard some fucking housing.

I’m sure the Liberals will pretend that their pivot is in some ways about immigrants themselves, some bullshit about us not being able to help them help themselves if we continue to allow appalling conditions, and that’s true but bullshit. If the Liberals are to save the longer term consensus on immigration they have to own this. Their decisions to be as liberal on this issue have become a threat to what we stand for. It’s become a looming disaster for the government. And it’s become a test of their willingness to put what’s best for the country ahead of their own egos and vanity.

If the Liberals want to fix their polls, help the housing crisis, and not give opponents of immigration in general ammunition, they have to eat some proverbial shit. They have to own their failures, they have to admit that they failed to provide adequate infrastructure to support the rising levels of immigration, and they have to accept that it is their failures and their failures alone that have led us to this point. Anything less is an abandonment of their values, but this has the advantage of both being what the public wants to hear and the truth.

The public aren’t morons, and they aren’t expecting perfection. Much as some on Twitter find it fun to mock backflips, politicians changing their minds from the wrong answer to the right one is a good thing that should be celebrated, not mocked. We should meet the electorate where they are, not where we want them to be, and that is with a bout of Liberal contrition.

What the Liberals cannot do is a modified version of the Mad As Hell tour, when Paul Martin tried to tell everyone that he was just as mad as them about AdScam and that he didn’t know about what was happening in a government he was Finance Minister in. What the Liberals must do is level with the people - their immigration decisions are lengthening and deepening the housing crisis. They have to admit they got it wrong, and that this is their fault.

If they don’t, the best case scenario is they lose an election. Worst case scenario, they’ll poison immigration in this country to the point where the political consensus we once took for granted can’t be salvaged once the housing crisis is solved.