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OTTAWA — The federal Tories will “vigorously oppose” any attempt by the Mark Carney Liberals to increase immigration.

In the wake of the prime minister’s comments to the New York Times last week suggesting Canada’s immigration crisis has tempered enough to allow the federal government to start increasing intake, Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner said the country isn’t ready.

“Let me be perfectly clear — the Conservative Party of Canada will vigorously oppose any efforts by Prime Minister Carney and his Liberal government to increase immigration and continue their reckless mass-migration policies,” she told reporters at a Wednesday afternoon news conference in the West Block.

“We will also continue to press for major decreases in immigration levels.”

Questions remain over pending asylum claims

In the interview last week with 10 New York Times reporters, Carney said measures to control Canada’s out-of-control immigration numbers have been successful and suggested it was time to start increasing them.

“Now the question starts to become when do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada?” Carney said.

“That will happen and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control.”

Rempel Garner said her party expects Canada to set immigration levels far lower than they were — the federal government has until Nov. 1 to table its 2027-29 immigration levels plan in the House of Commons.

“That’s because the Liberals keep allowing too many people in too fast for housing, health care and jobs to keep up,” she said.

“While Mark Carney has claimed he has taken back control of immigration, he still has no plan to clear hundreds of thousands of asylum claims, many of which are bogus.”

The government, she added, also has no plans on how to remove the hundreds of thousands of non-citizens who have no legal reason to be in Canada — including illegal migrants and international students overstaying their visas.

“It’s becoming evident that Mr. Carney’s government can’t even accurately track how many non-citizens are in the country, or if they’ve left.”

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‘Immigration levels must go way down’

A scathing Auditor General report earlier this year found that more than 153,000 international students were violating their visas in 2023 and 2024, despite the fact immigration officers only had the bandwidth to conduct about 2,000 investigations annually.

A total of 4,057 investigations were launched in 2023 and 2024 with about 40% stalling because students didn’t respond to requests for more information.

She also pointed to Canada’s youth job shortage, long wait times at Canada’s emergency rooms, strain on social programs and housing crisis as the fallout for Canada’s mass-migration policies.

Canada has also issued 112,000 new temporary foreign worker permits and 174,000 international student work permits between January and July, she said.

“That’s a city roughly the size of Saskatoon that has been added to the Canadian population this year,” she said.

“That’s crazy — immigration levels must go way down, not up.”

bpassifiume@postmedia.com
X : @bryanpassifiume

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