Asylum seekers board a bus after crossing into Canada from the U.S. in Champlain, New York, in February, 2023.CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/Reuters
There are two Conservative parties at work on the immigration issue. One Conservative Party has a thoughtful, forceful critique of the ongoing failures of the Liberals’ immigration policy, the most prominent example of which is the backlog of asylum claims that has ballooned on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s watch.
Then there is the other Conservative Party, the one that makes fact-adjacent YouTube videos that stoke Canadians’ anger at the immigration system. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is an ardent practitioner, as can be seen in a recent video in which he criticizes interim federal health care benefits for asylum claimants.
“Fact: While you can’t get health care, Liberals force you to pay higher taxes to fund deluxe supplementary health care benefits for asylum claimants who’ve been rejected, who are non-Canadians, non-permanent residents and have never paid taxes in this country,” a striding and strident Mr. Poilievre says, finger stabbing toward the camera.
Fact: Mr. Poilievre’s statement is a series of non sequiturs, leavened by the occasional falsehood. No one would dispute that Canadian health care is in disarray. This space has written extensively on that unfolding debacle.
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And it is true that the interim federal health care program provides (limited) benefits to asylum claimants that most Canadians have to pay for out of pocket or through private insurance, unless they receive social assistance payments.
But no serious person would contend that health care waiting times are due to immigration, never mind the relatively tiny number of failed asylum claimants, the group that Mr. Poilievre wants to strip of most benefits, except emergency health care. Last year, 14,619 asylum claimants were denied refugee status. Even if every single one of those people remained in the country while exhausting appeals – highly unlikely – they are a tiny cohort, spread across the country.
Stating, or at least heavily hinting, that the two are connected is merely scaring up a scapegoat. And Mr. Poilievre is simply wrong when he says that asylum claimants “have never paid taxes” in Canada.
Asylum claimants are eligible to apply for work permits, and many do. They pay income taxes, if their income is big enough. Asylum claimants, oddly enough, spend money on fripperies such as food. Chances are they paid sales taxes, fuel taxes, alcohol taxes – the list goes on. The best case is that the Conservative Leader doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The peril of fomenting anger toward asylum claimants should be obvious. That alone should be enough for Mr. Poilievre to change his approach.
But if the Conservatives need added motivation, here are two: the demagogic tone makes it all too easy for the Liberals to ignore the long list of reforms that the Opposition has proposed, and makes it much harder for any centrist voter to contemplate supporting the Tories.
Many of the reforms proposed by the Conservatives are worth debate, including but not limited to: closing a loophole that courts have used to avoid the deportation of migrants convicted of serious criminal offences; barring asylum claims from anyone who is a national of the European Union or a G7 country, or who transited through such a country to come to Canada; and greater transparency from the immigration system. The party does not lack for ideas; it does not need to indulge in weak rhetorical legerdemain.
And there’s no need to confect issues if embarrassing the Liberals is your goal; the unadorned facts will get the job done. Such as the backlog of asylum claims sitting at 299,960 at the end of January, down fractionally from the record high of 300,154 at the end of 2025. At that rate, the backlog should be cleared sometime in 2155.
What has happened that one-sixth of all new asylum claims in 2025 were from just one country, India – a flawed democracy, but a democracy nonetheless? Why is it that asylum claims from India have surged from 379 in 2015 to 17,835 last year, an astonishing 4,505 per cent rise? And why is it that just 22 per cent of asylum claims from Indian nationals that were finalized in 2025 were successful, about a third of the overall success rate?
Those questions, and many others on the immigration file, are serious issues that the Liberals should be compelled to address. The thoughtful Conservative Party could do that, if the rage-baiting Conservative Party would just get out of the way.