Quote:
Originally Posted by isaidso
+1
Precisely. Demographers and analysts had been warning Canadian governments for 20+ years about the consequences of inaction on the demographic front but were met with next to no response at all. Successive Federal Governments have been tone deaf. They kept punting the problem down the road for so long that these same pundits had to start sounding the alarm bells 10+ years ago. The longer we waited the more drastic a response would be needed.
Finally, a Federal Government took noticed and took action. It was too much too fast but this is what happens when looming issues get ignored for decades.. I'm no fan of Justin Trudeau but it's a bit rich to now be complaining about large scale immigration when NO government till recently bothered addressing this. We've known about this for a very very long time.
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Canada has had pretty large-scale immigration for a long time though. Pre-2015 we still had one of the highest immigration rates in the world and above-average population growth for a developed country.
We've all known that a time would come where the Boomer bulge would retire en masse, and then start dying in large numbers (we've reached the former, but aren't at the latter yet. Natural population growth is still positive in Canada - for a few more years at least), and the Liberals actually had a fairly reasonable plan to address that: by gradually increasing the annual number of permanent residents admitted to the country from about 250,000 in 2015 to 500,000 by 2025 - enough to address the coming labour gap, without totally overwhelming the country's infrastructure & housing supply.
Instead though, we got a bit of a bait-and-switch and got a nearly four-fold increase in the number of students & TWFs, in addition to the above PR growth. I don't recall any pundits asking for this - on the contrary, it's a move that's been almost universally panned by economists and warned against by bureaucrats. The most likely scenario is that this was the result of collective incompetence and oversight, and not some stroke of political genius or necessity.