Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has said there’s “no question” that Canada needs to have “smaller population growth.”
Speaking in Ottawa to once again demand a “carbon tax election,” the leader of the opposition also went into more detail than usual about his plans for immigration should he become, as polls suggest he will, the next prime minister.
Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, Poilievre said, have “destroyed our immigration system” after decades of “consensus” among Canada’s political parties.
“Immigration was not even a controversial issue prior to Trudeau,” he said. “We brought in hardworking, law-abiding citizens in numbers that our housing market, our job market and our health care system could absorb.”
Canada’s population grew at its fastest rate since 1957 last year, according to Statistics Canada.
The agency said that 1.27 million more people were in Canada at the beginning of 2024 compared with 2023, a 3.2 per cent increase.
As of April this year, Canada’s population is estimated to be 41 million people. When Trudeau was elected in 2015, there were just under 36 million people in Canada.
Since Canada has a below-replacement fertility rate – meaning couples are not having enough kids to sustain the population – the vast majority of the population growth (97.6 per cent) last year came from immigration.
Trudeau this week announced plans to introduce new restrictions on the number of low-wage foreign workers companies can bring into Canada.
The federal government has also said it is considering how many permanent residents to allow into the country per year, with the current quota at 485,000 and set to increase to 500,000 next year.
Poilievre twice refused to specify what sort of numbers he had in mind for immigrants, but did say that, should he become prime minister, “population growth will be below the growth in jobs, housing and health care.”
He added: “We have to have a smaller population growth. There’s no question about it.
“We cannot grow the population at three times the rate of the housing stock, as Trudeau has been doing.”
A Poilievre government would run Canada’s immigration system “the way it was run for the 30 years prior to Trudeau being prime minister,” he said.
Between 1985 and 2015, Canada’s population grew at about one per cent a year.
Statistics Canada said in March that, without temporary foreign workers, Canada’s population would have grown at 1.2 per cent in 2023 (about a third of what it actually grew by).
The prime minister has previously attacked his own government’s migration policies, saying earlier this year that a “massive spike” in foreign arrivals had “far” exceeded what Canada can absorb and had driven down wages.
He is far from the only critic of the government’s handling of the immigration file, however.
Canada’s surging population has been blamed for declining quality of life, stretched public services and extraordinarily high house prices.
Last month, meanwhile, British Columbia Premier David Eby said the province had seen “unprecedented population inflows."
“We’re talking about well in excess of 10,000 people a month,” he said. “Our most recent total for last year was 180,000 new British Columbians.
“And that’s great, and that’s exciting, and it’s necessary. And it’s completely overwhelming. To add a new city of 180,000 people every year to our province is not sustainable. Our schools are full. We are unable to keep up with housing starts.”
A report released by Statistics Canada this year predicted that Canada’s population could, according to its “high-growth” estimate, top 87 million by 2073.
The same study predicted that BC’s population could reach 8.8 million by 2048. BC's population was estimated to be just over 5.6 million in April.
