What’s dreadful is the rising cost of living and lack of affordable housing, which he failed to address. Moreover he doubled immigration during a time when the average Canadian was struggling to keep up with rising expenses.
I’m pro-immigration but not at an unsustainable rate. Housing construction was not keeping up.
Trudeau pushed beyond the limits of pro-immigration policy. If it was just conservative propaganda, the liberals wouldn’t be looking at a potentially historic election loss based on current polling.
That said, I don’t think conservatives will fix anything.
The immigration system we use today was set up by Harper. I'm an immigrant myself, having moved here on a Harper scheme, but under Trudeau.
You are absolutely right that this wasn't addressed by the current government, but it is a policy of the previous one. The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
It is likely to remain unaddressed satisfactorily under PP, too, since landlords benefit from immigration (especially high turnover immigration) and his primary interest is landlords and business owners.
This is a symptom of FPTP-based Westminster governments. If we had a more equitable electoral system, the blame can be more appropriately distributed and - even better - the issues can be addressed more efficiently.
> The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
No, he was in charge when it got bad. A policy that doesn't harm the country one decade can harm the country the next. And it did, so the one who chose not to repeal it, and rather to make it much worse, gets blamed.
Asking as a non-Canadian: What do you think he could have done that would fix these issues? If there is a clear path, why is it not politically attractive?
Universities have been abusing the temporary student visa as an income stream. The universities are awash with temporary foreign students, being charged higher tuition fees than domestic students. Partly this is greed, but it's also because funding for post-secondary has been getting cut in most provinces. BUT AGAIN - post-secondary funding is a provincial issue, not something the federal government (ie Trudeau) can do much about.
Alberta, for example, cut post-secondary funding, so the universities in Alberta turned to foreign students to make up the shortfall. This increased rental demand A LOT.
The issues were self created by skyrocketing the immigration rates / TFWs.
All they had to do was .... nothing, just keep the system as it was.
With that it seems like there has been a lot of heavy lobbying by companies built on low wage employment to deflate wages across the country. And it worked!
They rapidly expanded the LMIA program which provisions visas for primarily low income work.
Additionally they realllly expanded the international student visa pool, without actually checking who they were granting visas to.
The result was that pretty much non existent colleges were created with the sole goal of allowing people to pay for a backdoor to try and get PR without high level education, skills or even language proficiency.
Lastly there used to be a cap on visas issued based an unemployment rate of 6% they removed that cap so despite unemployment being up to around 10% in major cities they are still granting tons of visas.
So yeah... They really went out of their way to expand the visa program as fast as possible with very little oversight.
Additionally in terms of actual background checks, those seemed to go out the door as Canada in the past few years has given PR to a number of people who are actively wanted terrorists as part os Isis and other terror groups
I’m pro-immigration but not at an unsustainable rate. Housing construction was not keeping up.
Trudeau pushed beyond the limits of pro-immigration policy. If it was just conservative propaganda, the liberals wouldn’t be looking at a potentially historic election loss based on current polling.
That said, I don’t think conservatives will fix anything.