A majority of Canadians want the country to accept fewer immigrants and temporary residents next year, according to a new Nanos Research survey commissioned by CTV News, as the country continues to grapple with immigration levels and their impact on housing, services and the economy.
The survey found that 52.3 per cent of respondents believe Canada should accept fewer immigrants and temporary residents in 2027, compared with 33.5 per cent who want the numbers to remain about the same.
The problem isn’t immigrants. It’s the god damned businesses and the govt.
“InDiAnS took my TiMmY jOb”
Oh the Indian family that bought the franchise? You go buy one then. Oh wait you drive a lifted 90k truck but can’t afford to invest in your own business and can’t find a job? Sounds like someone needs a financial literacy class.
Basically this. I live in a rural community in SW Ontario and the locals here hate anyone from elsewhere but especially the South Asian community so my vote is that a lot of this is fueled by racism.
The lifted truck epidemic is truly out of control, I will never understand it. Are people really this insecure?
A lifted truck is still cheaper than investing in your own franchise. I looked into it because the current job market is a joke. And I can’t even drive a lifted truck so that’d be wasting my money.
Yes, I have a job. I couldn’t afford a lifted truck even if I could drive one. That’s how I know I can’t afford to invest in a franchise.
Did someone take your Timmy job?
The framing of these kinds of questions is questionable. Ask people if they would want more doctors, nurses, teachers, trades people, scientists, etc and see what you get. The word “immigrant” is opaque and evocative of the shameful Temporary Foreign Worker program.
Canada will always need immigrants and we should maintain our openness to immigration and multicultural culture as a central national identity markers that distinguish us from the US.
What we need is to reform our immigration system and abolish the TFW program. This along with a Green New Deal to expand public housing, walkable cities, and get folks working in the care sector. The problem for the citizens of Mouseland has never been foreign mice. It’s always been domestic cats.
multicultural culture as a central national identity markers that distinguish us from the US
That is more of a US thing. We’re just a bunch of British and French people sitting on someone else’s land.
The Americans go crazy about bringing in immigrants for the American dream and take pride in being a melting pot.
I agree with the rest but immigration won’t distinguish us from the yanks.
Considering Ontario in particular has been underfunding the training of new medical professionals, I’d advocate for that over bringing in a doctor from a country who’s education standards don’t align. We don’t need more Uber drivers.
That’s not a real dilemma. Both increased funding and faster recognition of credentials. And I’m not talking about doctors only. And there is no reason to believe our doctors are “better”.
nah, poor experimental design. maybe pass into research methods first and try again.
Shut down diploma mills and review the student visa pipeline as well.
There is a big mix of reasons that is easy to understand.
- Racism, of course.
- Still a housing crisis going on. The recent downturn in prices only reflects interest rates, not availability and affordability. We’ve never tied immigration to housing completion rates, so without anywhere new to put new people, the housing crisis gets worse. We got a bit of a wheezy cough of relief with the fraudulent student loophole being closed.
- They hinted that millenials and genx were relatively more for lower immigration while older genx and boomers were less so. The most likely reason is people out of the workforce don’t have to worry about competition for jobs, and the older groups are more likely to need immigrants for medical nursing and geriatric services as there is an accute shortage.
This poll doesn’t bother looking at any of this. CTV is largely a conservative voice (used to be liberal) and they want to group them together to legitimize conservative positions which are based on racism.
If racism was a significant driver of this, I don’t think people would have shiften in opinion so much, especially in correlation with the economic conditions. Racism tends to be stable and change over longer periods. I think it’s mostly 2 and 3.
It’s never simple and straightforward. People have a mix of 1, 2 and 3 in varying amounts. Those who are mostly 1 didn’t change over time. This poling doesn’t distinguish them from the other groups who do. It is the 2 and 3 that account for the changes.
The problem is that until very recently, if you questioned Canada’s immigration policy you were called racist. You don’t hear as much of that now because the people who used to call those people racist agree.
But a LOT of it is racism. It’s how and why someone questions immigration policy that gets called out.
Canada used to have an excellent immigration program, it was envied by other countries. It was fair, and made sure Canada got decent qualified candidates and at a rate that Canada could easily absorb.
Justin and the Liberals decided to throw it out and open the flood gates, and mostly from only one particular country. To make matters worse, we also have / had the scam foreign schooling going on here as well as the TFW debacle, and it was / is a recipe for disaster.
You can’t have that many people from only one country, in the numbers that were done, without uproar. It’s not racism, it’s just common sense.
You didn’t amswer my question. You said “people like me”. What did I say that triggered you to lash out at me?
Also, now I’m starting to see the point. You actually are framing the discussion in a probably racist way. <-feel free to be triggered now. It might not be intentional, I have no idea. But just fyi if you want to know why people say that to you -
If the immigration system was built on rules and selection criteria, why does it matter where they come from? Qualified is qualified. That you choose to single out Indians is why you are getting called out. It’s not common sense at all. It’s racist. You aren’t pointing that the rules are bent for India, which would be a legitimate complaint. You just say too many of those people.
It is not odd that India represents by far the single largest immigrant source. Being not only one of the most populous countries, but a commonwealth country with a very high rate of english as a second language and as a developing country with heavy poverty, inequality has a lot who want to leave.
You can make an argument about the total numbers of people we can absorb. Like my point about a country in a housing crisis not tying immigration numbers to housing completions only adds to the crisis.
The proverbial floodgates were opened because of our demographic crisis - an aging population won’t have enough young workers to support pensions a d healthcare let alone a changing economy. In trying to solve one crisis (demographic), they exacerbated two more (housing) and affordability (labour wage suppression.)
The abuse of the student loophole with sham “colleges” is a legit complaint. These are people who don’t qualify as permanent residents going to false front schools just to live here and work full time at the jobs qualified Canadian youth can’t get.
The abuses of the TFW porgram, where people can’t get interviews or jobs while businesses are filing obviously bogus TFW applications claiming that they can’t find anyone skilled for high paying jobs is also legit criticism. Nothing racist about that. Brutally bad policy where Trudeau was asleep at the wheel and Carney hasn’t yet and likely won’t fix.
The student loopholes are mostly closed and only the TFW abuses and the housing crisis remain.
Notice how I didn’t need to single out any particular group? That’s not racist. Picking on Indian immigrants because they’re too many from one country? That is indeed clearly racist, even if unintentional.
Edits for clarity and spelling.
Racism is a factor but conversations on this topic used to be immediately shut down as racism by default all the time. Not the case as often now.
Precisely.
Person: “We should slow down our immigration rate.”
Someone else: “Don’t be racist.”
That’s the conversation, more or less, for most of Trudeau’s time in office. Now that Carney’s starting to do that, it’s not.
I’m kinda new here so I can’t comment on thread locks and overzealous modding. But legitimate arguments should be discussed. Its the bad faith actors, and conservative and Russian trolls who latch on to any real argument to shoehorn in their hate and disinformation. Look at how well it worked in Brexit.
Saying that we want immigration from MORE than just ONE country is not racism, I’m so tired of that shit. We can’t have an homest conversation about immigration because most people like you only see the rest of us as being racists.
My wife is an immigrant from the Caribbean, there are lots of other places that have people that would like to immigrate here. The problem is Justin opened the flood gates to only India, and with absurd numbers.
You can’t let in over 20 million Indians in a short time and honestly expect everything to be hunky dory.
What did I say exactly that triggered you?
Imagine thinking passion is bad 😔
Not triggered, I just hate the racism word being tossed into every article, poll, or whatever when someone disagrees with immigration.
I think this is very important to realize. People look for someone to blame when they can’t afford food and, unfortunately, it tends to be people who don’t look like them. It’s hard for any democratically elected politician to state they’re not going to do what 50% of the voting population believes will solve all their problems.
Progressive candidates have a huge uphill battle if they’re ever going to be seen as “electable”. They have to convince 50% of the population that minorities aren’t the cause of all their problems.
Immigrants are not the problem, you’re right. Canada’s current immigration system, that Trudeau weakened, is. You can solve the latter without blaming the former.
Trudeau weakened
Can we please blame corporate greed and the wealthy? Trudeau, whatever he was, is absolutely a red herring thrown in by conservative media to prevent right leaning people from thinking too hard about civics.
edit; blame the LPC as whole even. But lets not feed into the bumper sticker politics.
Justin was instrumental in he decay of Canada’s immigration policy.
Nah I’ll do both. Timmigrants exploiting LMIA loopholes was only allowed through Trudeau’s administration. They used to have policies where they wouldn’t allow this when unemployment was above a threshold, which was removed post covid. Only after the batshit insane influx of 1M+ tfw in a single year was massively swinging people away from LPC did they decide to reverse it, but the damage was already done.
Okay, Harper cracked the door and Trudeau tore the door off. And during Trudeau’s two minorities, Singh supported it.
“Corporate greed” is what the people who voted for Trudeau and Singh say to excuse themselves for what they voted for.
blame the LPC as whole even.
The same LPC that is pulling back from those immigration numbers at Carney’s direction?
Less is a pretty open ended response.
Like I would probably vote in that category, not because I hate Sikhs/Filipinos but because the average immigrant is not able to build a life and ends up leaving after several years and thousands of dollars lost.
Immigrants can’t ‘assimilate’ if they’re effective forced into indentured servitude full time where their employer effectively controls their lives. (I’ve worked with people in that situation and its fucking brutal on their mental health)
There is real exploitation going on and the simplest solution is to reduce the supply of exploitable people until we have a plan and capacity for everyone coming to Canada.
There were immigration consultants telling people overseas they’re guaranteed citizenship if they pay them to apply to a Canadian institution as an international student.
Women were forced into sexual slavery because going back home wasn’t a valid option for them. Their family had spent every penny they had to chase a better future in the West for their kid. I’m sure it’s still happening but more hush hush after it became obvious that the majority of Canada isn’t onboard with such high immigration.
Any and every single conversation on immigration used to be immediately accused of ulterior motives few years ago. We built a permanent underclass of mostly non-white people and you’d get accused of racism if you point out the obvious exploitative nature of our government’s policies.
While agreeing with most of the above, progressive candidates don’t have to convince 50% of the population that minorities aren’t the cause of their problems. They have to talk about the big, obvious inrerests picking people’s pockets and offer solutions to that, as well as solutions to the material problems caused by 50 years of state abdication from fulfilling people’s needs which markets refuse to fulfill. In other words the progressives have to describe the whole problem and let people make the obvious conclusions themselves. I bet that over time, not all, but enough of them will.
Painting conservatives that question immigration policy as racists is absurd, but incredibly common on lemmy due to lemmy’s left-wing bias. There can be no open discussion / dialogue on this topic, especially not on left-leaning sites that sometimes interpret discussing immigration policy with hate speech, and subsequently ban/censor people.
The survey in this context, mostly highlights how abnormal lemmy’s bubble is.
You know where else I heard this complaint?
Reddit.
You know who else Conservatives say is a left-leaning platform?
Reddit.
I think it’s conservatism.
Also, just for the record, it is possible to discuss immigration and not be racist. You should try doing that.
The problem is that it seems too many people see “immigrant” in a line of text and translate it to “people of colour” and therefore translate it to “racism”.
Well, when folks blame immigrants for taking the jobs the youth should be doing, they’re not talking about the ones from Europe.
Plenty of people are also against immigration that aren’t the ones complaining about them taking jobs.
And those are probably not the ones being accused of being racist by reasonable people.
I still see it, even if it’s not about jobs.
I said reasonable people. If your comment is discussing immigration policy and can be read as discussing immigration policy, then it’s not racist. I haven’t read any of your comments that may have set someone off, so that’s all I’ve got.
Are you implying I’m being racist already, by saying I should try discussing it without being racist? Was my previous post, highlighting how dissenting comments towards immigration policies gets typecast as racist… somehow racist? Dafuq?
Lemmy brands any conservative-sounding comment as racist on the subject. You can see that sort of trend even in this thread, where there are some people saying ‘conservatives are racist’ as a preface to trying to say they agree with lowered immigration levels. It’s like they need to pre-emptively defend their opinions against being called a racist, just to discuss the non-lemmy default position, which is absolutely batshit insane, considering that the study your post linked to shows that it’s the most common / average opinion amongst Canadians.
Are you implying I’m being racist already, by saying I should try discussing it without being racist?
No, because you haven’t been banned for being racist - at least on this account. If you have an alt you were banned for racism on, however, then yes.
lol tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link.
52% of Canadians want less, and that number is static. But the number of people who were unsure but now want more or the same have increased.
All this highlights is that most people from lemmy are part of the 44% of Canadians who want the same or more immigration.
I don’t know where you’re getting this conservative angle. Well I do but I’m not gonna bother.
Yes, the majority “at large” wants less. Lemmy vehemently supports more, and declares people who support the majority position as racists, and will often ban/censor such commentary. The “average”/“majority” opinion is type cast as ‘racist’ on lemmy.
That’s… the point I was making. Not sure where the disconnect is, or why you think I didn’t read the material.
I’d like to see a source that says Lemmy matches the 44%. I’ve heard people say the same thing about Reddit and there were no sources for that either.
