Too Little, Too Late: Liberals Realize They’ve Wrecked The Immigration System After The Damage Is Done

The Liberals are trying to campaign on belatedly addressing the massive problems they created. That’s not nearly good enough.

By Spencer Fernando, Exclusive to the National Citizens Coalition

The Trudeau Liberals of 2024 are running a great pre-election campaign… if they were running against the Trudeau Liberals of 2022.

Compared to themselves from two years ago, the Liberals are at least somewhat aware of the significant errors they’ve made and the damage they’ve done to the country.

Unfortunately for Trudeau & co., the Liberals aren’t running against themselves.

They’re running against a Conservative Party that has nothing to do with Canada’s dramatic decline since 2015.

And that’s why they are losing so badly in the polls and watching once iron-clad Liberal fortresses like Toronto-St. Paul’s and LaSalle Emard-Verdun fall to other parties in byelections.

The latest example of this ‘campaigning against themselves’ behaviour is Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s belated admission that the government waited “a little too long to slow down” immigration.

While that is obviously a massive understatement, you’ll notice that Miller – as the Liberals often do – acts as if the problems facing Canada are somehow a force of nature the government has valiantly struggled to subdue, rather than a direct result of deliberate decisions by the government.

The only reason the government had to ‘slow down’ immigration is because they increased immigration to a completely unsustainable level.

It wasn’t just the post-pandemic immigration surge either, the Liberals had long been shifting the system by weakening language requirements and altering the balance between economic immigration and family-based immigration.

They did all of this despite significant warnings that it would have negative consequences, warnings which they ignored.

The government then crammed about a decade’s worth of immigration into two years, which – unsurprisingly – had a profoundly destabilizing impact on our country.

We can see the consequences all around us.

We are now a more divided and more distrustful country.

Our social services are stretched thin.

An entire generation is giving up on owning a home.

Young Canadians face a brutal job market.

Our per capita income is declining.

We are in the midst of a lost economic decade.

Our once-vaunted immigration system is shattered.

And hate towards immigrants – many of whom were also lied to by the Liberal government – is surging.

These are not small errors.

These are not minor consequences.

Governments can get away with small mistakes.

If a small shift in tax rates backfires, a government can reverse that shift.

If a trade deal leads to negative consequences for a specific sector, a government can amend the deal or provide support to the affected sector.

If a law meant to reduce crime leads to the opposite result, that law can be repealed.

But a government cannot rapidly undo the damage of screwing up the immigration system.

That damage will linger.

And so, a government that realizes it screwed up an immigration system that was once the envy of the world deserves very little credit.

After all, accurately assessing reality is about the bare minimum we should expect from those entrusted with national leadership.

Yes, it’s better that the Liberals have realized their mistake than if they continued to delusionally pretend all is well.

But they are still the government that put Canada in this situation.

And in a democracy, the consequence for a government making such a massive error is for that government to be defeated.

The best the Liberals have to offer Canadians is that they’ll reverse their own failures, and that’s simply not good enough.

After nearly a decade in power, a government should have some positive results to show for its efforts, not just desperate backtracking.

Instead, after nine years of Liberal rule, Canada is poorer, more dangerous, and more divided than before Trudeau took office.

No matter how much they ‘acknowledge’ this, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s time for Canadians to Fire Trudeau and get this country back on a path to prosperity and common sense.

Spencer Fernando is one of the most popular and prolific political voices in Canada. He is a writer and campaign fellow for the National Citizens Coalition. Join the mailing list to receive his exclusive weekly columns in your inbox.

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