Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is now stepping into the immigration numbers debate, with a proposal to tie the number of newcomers welcomed to Canada with the ability of housing and infrastructure to support them.
It’s a conversation that needs to be had, because right now communities all across Canada are struggling to serve the needs of both their current population base and the needs of newcomers.
“We need to make a link between the number of homes built and the number of people we invite as new Canadians,” Poilievre said Jan. 12 at a news conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Poilieivre’s vision, he explained, is to “get back to an approach of immigration that invites a number of people that we can house, employ, and care for in our health-care system.”
As Bloomberg News reports: “[Poilievre] cited data showing that Canada is now completing fewer homes than it did 50 years earlier, when its population was around 22 million. It’s close to 41 million today.”
The Toronto area is a prime example of this disconnect. The situation has become increasingly tragic. The most obvious aspect is how people just can’t afford to purchase a home or, in many cases, even rent an apartment. It’s a classic case of supply and demand not being in sync.
Young people feel they will never own a home. They pay so much in rent that they have no money left over to save for a down payment. Besides, the homes are so expensive that the down payment needs to be massive and they can’t imagine saving up that much money in any reasonable time frame. Also, no one wants to move from a unit they have lived in for more than a couple of years because the rents for other comparable units would have already gone so much higher.
As I wrote in a recent column, young people are now publicly discussing their plans to leave Toronto and even Canada because they don’t envision a future for themselves here.
The tragedy goes beyond that though. International students are shocked at the cost-of-living and are now using food banks and other social services. Meanwhile, almost half of the beds in the Toronto shelter system are occupied by recent refugees. This displaces the traditional homeless population. These shelters were never meant to be where refugees lived. It’s a phenomenon that only increases the number of homeless people sadly living in parks and under highways and bridges.
It’s not just housing that’s affected by the sheer volume of people who are now competing for a limited amount of resources. We aren’t making any additional major roads in the Greater Toronto Area, and so we have more people jockeying for limited space on our streets. Gridlock expands and road rage worsens.
The same goes for most other forms of infrastructure. This is especially true for health care. There are already millions of Canadians who do not have access to a family doctor. It gets worse by the day. People end up going to emergency rooms for non-emergency concerns, but have no choice because they feel there is nowhere else to go.
We can’t build health-care facilities quickly enough. The City of Brampton has rightly argued for years that they are in need of a second hospital. While plans are in the works for such a facility, it hasn’t opened yet. Meanwhile, census data reveals Brampton is the fastest-growing of Canada’s largest municipalities.
People need services wherever they live in Canada, but these services are woefully inadequate in many cities across the country. We thought we could control the pace of infrastructure development and service delivery, but apparently we can’t. What we can control is the volume of people who come into regions of Canada and how we responsibly manage that intake. We need to do a better job of managing the numbers.
Poilievre’s pronouncement is no doubt the first of many on this theme as the Conservative leader picks up on something that Canadians of all walks of life and political backgrounds are discussing.
