Immigrants who break the law should be deported: Canada Oppn leader
As the incumbent Liberal Party trails in recent polls, Conservative Party led by its leader Pierre Poilievre is in prime position to form the next government in Canada
Toronto: As anti-immigrant rhetoric escalates in Canada, the leader of its principal opposition party has said that immigrants who break the law should be deported while those who make a positive contribution to society should be welcomed.
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre was addressing ethnic media during an interaction in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) on Friday. “The principle should be that if you followed the rules, you’re contributing, paying taxes, following the law, learning one of our official languages, then you can stay, and if you are breaking laws, breaking rules, defrauding the system, then you have to go,” he said, in response to a query about growing noise over deporting immigrants involving in criminality.
He said that neither option, of expelling temporary residents or allowing all of them to remain, “made sense”. He outlined the middle ground principle in that context.
His statement is significant since the Conservative Party is in prime position to form the next government, as it leads the incumbent Liberal Party by nearly 20 percentage points in recent polls. That means that Poilievre is likely to become the next Prime Minister of Canada and will be directing policy, including that for immigration.
Poilievre has already expressed the opinion that immigration intake should be linked to the ability of the housing market, healthcare infrastructure and employment availability, to absorb the newcomers. He said prior to the Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau coming into power in 2015, Canada had “the best immigration system in the world”. That was when the Stephen Harper-led Conservative government was in power when Poilievre was a Cabinet Minister.
“We were bringing people in at a very high rate but at a rate we could absorb into our housing market, our job market and our healthcare system. But over the last three years, it has been absolute chaos and mayhem,” he said.
He placed the onus of that situation developing on the incumbent government rather than newcomers like international students. He said, “We shouldn’t blame the individual students because they are very good, hardworking people.”
However, he said, the current system was “out of control” and there was a need “to end all this insanity and fraud and get back to the commonsense system”.
Immigration has turned into a major electoral issue in Canada. According to a recent poll from the agency Leger, 65 per cent of Canadians believe that the Government admits “too many” immigrants. “A majority of Canadians believe that the current immigration rates are contributing to the housing crisis (78%), to stresses on health care services (76%), and that Canada’s immigration policy is too generous (72%),” it had stated.
Poilievre said a Conservative government would “invite workers for genuine vacancies that Canadians could not fill and brought in students to learn skills that if they succeeded in learning in English or French, could stay here and build a life.”
Immigration analyst Darshan Maharaja said, “Immigration has been a touchy issue in Canada for decades, and any suggestion to lower was sure to invite a lot of criticism of racism. However, the intensity and pace of negative developments resulting from excessive immigration has created space where sensible discussion about the issue is very much possible, and Mr Poilievre is using this space to good effect.”
He also said that Poilievre had been “unfolding his approach in a well-calculated manner”.
Poilievre said that students were suffering under the system in place, as they were “being swindled by consultants who sign them up for fake universities and colleges”. Meanwhile, they arrived to find they could not afford shelter, or find a job as unemployment had risen since last year, with Canada adding about a million newcomers each year and only adding approximately 150,000 jobs in that period.