The conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is asking for a tougher posture about immigration, saying that on Monday he wants to see “very hard caps” in the number of newcomers allowed in the country.
Speaking to journalists at a press conference in Ottawa, Pailievre said that the country has fought to integrate newcomers and wants to see more people who leave “while we update.”
“We have millions of people whose permits will expire in the coming years, and many of them will leave,” he said. “We need more people to come over the next two years.”
Pailievre has been critical of the management of the last liberal government of the immigration archive. In the last elections, he promised to “restore order” to what he called a “broken” system.
The conservative leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters on Monday that there must be “more people who leave” from Canada to enter, without specifying how many.
And while promising during the campaign to “drastically” reduce the number of temporary foreign workers and international students if you are chosen, Pailievre now says that Prime Minister Mark Carney should go even further by asking for a negative net migration.
Immigration has been at the center of its post -election messages on social networks and in their public comments.
“Our country is divided and we cannot integrate people at this rate,” Poilievre said on Thursday over high levels of immigration that led to record growth rates in the era after covid.
In Calgary Stampede earlier this month, he said that the liberal government has conducted a “failed experiment with open borders.”
“Immigration must be controlled. It must be in numbers that we can absorb,” he said.
While the last government did not have an “open border” policy, the number of people admitted levels of blows not seen in decades.
In 2022 and 2023, for example, the population grew by 2.5 percent and 3.1 percent respectively, growth rates that were double or triple what was reported in past years, according to the data of Statistics Canada.
According to population estimates, the country has grown by about 3.6 million people since the beginning of 2020.
This growth has been fed by an increase in non -permanent residents, many of whom were low -wage students and workers.
Amid signs of stress (records of record rental, higher prices in the house, unemployment of high young people and immigrants and the worrying access data to medical care, the last liberal government marked the number of temporary foreign students and workers.
These changes seem to be having an impact. Statscan reported that the population growth rate was 0.0 percent in the first quarter of this year, the second consecutive trimester with a net fall in non -permanent residents.
Carney has promised to keep those limits in place, and limit the number of non -permanent residents to five percent of the total population at the end of 2027. That would be well below where it was at the beginning of the year.
Federal data suggests that there were three million non -permanent residents in Canada in the third quarter of 2024. With a population of approximately 40 million, which comes to approximately 7.5 percent.
The impulse to reduce that five percent figure means that even fewer international students will be admitted and will be denied to companies to import labor, if the Carney Plan is completely implemented.
Pailievre said the deepest cuts are justified.
“Our immigration policy should invite adequate people in the correct numbers in a way that first puts Canada and Canadians,” he said.
