David Olive: Book excerpt: How Justin Trudeau’s immigration ambitions unravelled - Toronto Star

“Justin Trudeau: Power, Promise, and the Fight for Canada,” by author David Olive. ECW Press, 208 pages, $39.95.

David Olive is a Toronto-based business columnist for the Star.

Justin Trudeau has been out of power for a year but as his appearance at the recent Toronto International Film Festival showed, he hasn’t disappeared from view or from the public consciousness. Star columnist David Olive’s new book, “Justin Trudeau: Power, Promise and the Fight for Canada,” looks back on his track record as prime minister; specifically, in this excerpt, on immigration:

On Dec. 11, 2015, Justin Trudeau was at Pearson International Airport to personally greet the first 163 Syrian refugees to arrive by government plane from Lebanon. There would be dozens more planeloads of refugees in coming weeks.

Trudeau had arrived early that night to speak to the staff and volunteers. “We get to show the world how to open our hearts and welcome people who are fleeing extraordinarily difficult situations,” Trudeau told the group. In a classic photo op, Trudeau was filmed helping refugees into warm coats and telling them, “You’re safe at home now.”

Trudeau was a long-time champion of immigration. But he was also conforming with Canada’s decades-long open immigration policies. Worldwide, Canada’s immigration practices were among the best-known elements of its foreign policy.

Then-prime minister Stephen Harper had pledged in early 2015 to bring just 10,000 Syrian refugees over three years. In the 2015 election campaign, however, Trudeau said that with so many of the refugees at death’s door, the time to rescue them was now.

The Syrian intake, which would climb to more than 100,000 by 2024, was remarkably uneventful. The new arrivals soon integrated. Many had been professionals and business owners in Syria before the country was consumed by war. By 2020, nearly half of the world’s refugees came to Canada — the third consecutive year in which the country led the world in refugee resettlements.

Trudeau’s nine-year government began with an immigration challenge, and the issue of immigration would figure prominently in his governance from start to finish.

He could appear a bit starry-eyed in extolling his vision of a social “mosaic” that Canada’s immigration tradition had created. “Countries with a strong national identity — linguistic, religious or cultural — are finding it a challenge to effectively integrate people from different backgrounds,” Trudeau told The New York Times in 2015, a few weeks after he first became prime minister.

“In France, there is still a typical citizen and an atypical citizen. Canada doesn’t have that dynamic.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. These qualities are what make us the first post-national state.”

Trudeau’s conception of diversity wasn’t radical. It was a reality. In 2016, one-fifth of Canadians were foreign-born, twice the U.S. level. Canada was home to the most number of francophones outside of France, including the biggest portion of the Haitian diaspora; the largest number of ethnic Ukrainians outside Ukraine and Russia and the most Sikhs outside the Sikh homeland, the state of Punjab in India.

Trudeau did not come to power with a population-growth agenda. But he equated immigration with greater prosperity and meant to build on Canada’s success in integrating newcomers of all backgrounds. In 1957, Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker declared, “Canada must populate or perish.” In that spirit, Canada scrapped the last of its ethnic criteria for immigration in 1962. Five years later it introduced a points system whose criteria included skills, work experience, education, proficiency in French or English, and family reunification — a formula without ethnic or racial biases that is admired around the world.

“Compared to the citizens of other developed immigration-receiving countries, Canadians are by far the most open to and optimistic about immigration,” Irene Bloemraad, chair of the University of California Berkeley’s Canadian studies department, said in a 2012 study. In his 2016 book “The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Solve the World’s Worst Problems,” Jonathan Tepperman examined government success stories around the world. Among them was Canada’s immigration policy. “The results in Canada have been spectacular,” Tepperman wrote.

According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, while immigrants make up about 26 per cent of the workforce, they account for 35 per cent of the country’s computer programmers, 43 per cent of engineers and 57 per cent of chemists.

In 2016, Trudeau’s Finance Ministry created an advisory council chaired by Dominic Barton, then a consultant at McKinsey & Co., to propose economic growth strategies. It recommended that Ottawa increase the annual immigration level to 450,000, up from 260,000 in 2014.

“Without making significant changes to counteract current demographic trends,” the Barton council warned, “the number of working-age Canadians for every senior is expected to drop from 4.2 in 2015 to 2.7 in 2030, adding significant fiscal strain to the system and threatening the health of the Canadian economy and the social safety net for Canadians.”

Trudeau moved in the recommended direction, but gradually. Only with the acute labour shortages of the post-pandemic economic recovery did he set a target close to the Barton council’s recommendation — a record annual intake of 500,000 by 2025. That decision would soon be regarded as among the worst of any prime minister.

Economic conditions seemed ideal in 2021 when Trudeau set his higher immigration targets. Canada’s economic growth was outpacing that of its G7 peers apart from the U.S. And unemployment was at a four-decade low of 4.9 per cent. However, by 2024, Canada’s economy was slowing, and unemployment rising, as the country was hit by the double whammy of historically high inflation and record-high interest rates to subdue the inflation.

Eventually there was a backlash against immigration among everyday Canadians. Many felt that the 3.2 million immigrants Trudeau had welcomed in just three years’ time were worsening a pre-existing housing shortage and putting additional strain on an overstressed health-care system. Trudeau’s critics accused him of botching a system that was among the world’s most admired. In relatively short order, Trudeau retreated from his ambitious immigration goals just two years after setting them, in 2024. “It’s really a system that has gotten out of control,” Trudeau’s immigration minister, Marc Miller, admitted in early 2024.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre exploited the first popular discontent with immigration in generations as best he could. He said Trudeau “destroyed the best immigration system in the world, a system that had a common-sense consensus of conservatives and liberals for 150 years.”

Yet after Trudeau had slashed immigration levels in 2024, business groups like the Canadian Chamber of Commerce complained that labour shortages remained widespread, notably in construction, tourism and hospitality. And economists and social policy experts began to flip the script. They now said Trudeau had gone too far in cutting immigration numbers, reducing the flow of newcomers needed to build housing, properly staff the health-care system, and bolster Canada’s prowess in artificial intelligence and other tech innovations so often pioneered by immigrants.

“We do have rocks and trees, and oil and minerals,” Kevin Milligan, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, told The Globe and Mail in April 2025. “But it’s the people. Everyone’s been crapping on immigration the past two years, but it’s a huge advantage that the best and brightest want to come here.”

Some critics had complained that increased immigration was reducing growth in per capita GDP, an important measure of productivity growth. But labour economist Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Vancouver, was unimpressed with that assessment.

“Any surge in immigration will normally result in lower average per capita GDP, but that doesn’t mean Canada’s previous residents suddenly become poorer,” Stanford wrote in Policy Options in April 2025. “It simply means that Canada is absorbing new people to lay the groundwork for future expansion.”

Meanwhile, a change was needed in the mix of Canadian immigrants. The Harper government had succeeded with an emphasis on recruiting professionals from abroad — credentialed medical personnel, engineers, computer scientists, and university professors.

But Harper had over-succeeded in the view of the construction industry, whose slow pace of building new homes was largely due to a shortage of carpenters, plumbers, pipefitters and other tradespeople often ineligible for permanent residency because they had not graduated from high school. “What am I going to do with all these professors?” the head of a large construction firm told a trade magazine. He said he needed “helpers,” the general-purpose workers on a job site who refuel bulldozers and direct truck traffic, among other essential odd jobs. In 2024, the Trudeau government re-emphasized recruitment of tradespeople, with or without credentials, as Canada had done in the decades prior to the Harper government.

Trudeau had kept immigration levels stable at an annual average of 303,000 newcomers through the first four years of his government. But labour market analysts at Royal Bank of Canada warned in 2022 that reform was needed. Labour shortages were forcing Canadian businesses to delay or cancel planned expansions.

And Trudeau’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW), designed to supply workers to farms and businesses, was dysfunctional. Work permits were often tied to one sponsoring employer, giving bosses undue control over their migrant employees.

Canada’s refugee system had also become dysfunctional. In the mid-2020s, tens of thousands of people coming to Canada bypassed the traditional application process for permanent residency and arrived on temporary work or study visas, planning to claim asylum status when their visas expired. That way they could remain in Canada for years as their asylum applications slowly made their way through the Immigration and Refugee Board’s clogged refugee claims division. In April 2025 the division had a backlog of 284,715 outstanding refugee cases, almost 30 times the number at the end of 2015.

Canadians were also reacting to pressures on the housing market. Robert Kavcic, senior economist at Bank of Montreal, told the Globe in June 2025: “The population explosion put too much demand in a short amount of time that we couldn’t match on the supply side.”

In 2024, the Trudeau government got to work on fixing what it had broken. In March, it announced a cap on temporary residents for the first time. It set a goal of reducing holders of TFW and study visas to five per cent of the population by 2026, down from 7.3 per cent in 2024. Then, in October, Trudeau slashed the targeted levels of new permanent residents from a previously planned 500,000 in each of the next few years to an average of 380,000. The result was that by 2025, Canadian population growth ground to a halt for six consecutive quarters.

After Trudeau cut back on immigration levels, his earlier surge, if not vindicated, was sorely missed in many quarters. On Aug. 1, 2024, a letter representing the Canadian business community was sent to Trudeau’s cabinet that claimed that Ottawa’s 21 per cent reduction in permanent resident inflows would further impair an already anemic economy. Indeed, the Canadian economy still relied heavily on immigrants. According to Statistics Canada, in 2024 they accounted for one-third or more of the workforce in several sectors.

Restaurants are a $120-billion industry in Canada and a leading provider of entry-level jobs. In the summer of 2025, they were struggling to fill 78,000 job vacancies despite a national unemployment rate of 7.0 per cent. “Current immigration levels threaten the viability of many restaurants, particularly in rural, remote and tourist areas,” said Restaurants Canada, a leading food-services industry group.

Trudeau brought a record number of newcomers to Canada, and that proved to be a test of his governing philosophy. The labour shortages of the post-pandemic gave him the chance to better align economic need with more newcomers. It was a test he failed through miscalculation, but the philosophy was sound.

Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

David Olive is a Toronto-based business columnist for the Star.