Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre have recently seized on the issue of immigration, writes Andrew Coyne.The Canadian Press
Danielle Smith has a problem. Her government is heading toward a deficit projected, before Thursday’s budget, at $10-billion. This is only partly because it overestimated oil revenues, with oil prices now projected at roughly $5 to $10 a barrel lower than forecast in last year’s budget. It is because the government set spending at levels that could only be sustained so long as the oil boom continued. She needs something, or someone, to blame for her excess spending.
Pierre Poilievre, too, has a problem. His party is now 10 points behind the Liberals in the polls, and falling. He himself lags Mark Carney by 20 to 30 points. Three of his MPs have crossed the floor. More are expected to follow. He needs something to stop the bleeding. It’s no longer a matter of pulling votes from the Liberals. He needs to keep his own voters on side. He needs a polarizing issue, something that forces people to choose which side they’re on: us or them.
By a miraculous coincidence, both leaders have lately hit upon a solution to their respective problems. And would you believe it, the solution is in each case exactly the same: blame immigrants.
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Ms. Smith went on television to tell the public that “out of control” immigration was the reason for her government’s fiscal woes. Mind you, she couldn’t quantify the extra costs they had imposed on the treasury, or how much would be saved if her proposed remedies – restricting access to social services to “Alberta-approved” immigrants; charging “non-permanent” immigrants a fee to use them; or requiring that they have lived in Alberta for a year to be eligible – were implemented.
But then, she isn’t going to necessarily implement any of them. Rather, she’s going to ask the province’s voters whether they would like her to do so – part of a suite of at least nine referendum questions to be put to a bewildered electorate in October. Understand: in the face of a fiscal emergency supposedly so pressing it required commandeering the province’s airwaves, the Premier proposes to wait eight months to hold a vote on whether to do things that are within her power to do tomorrow.
(That’s in contrast to the proposed referendum questions on the constitution, which mostly ask whether the province should take a number of powers from the federal government – which it can only do by means of a constitutional amendment requiring, among other things, the consent of the federal government.)
So the province will consume itself from now till October debating whether immigrants are sponges and how roughly they should be treated. All to solve what is mostly a non-problem.
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As of last July there were about 290,000 non-permanent residents in the province, or about 5.8 per cent of the population. If they were all expelled, or denied any access to social services, the province might spend perhaps $3-billion less – on a budget of $74-billion.
But they do not only consume social services. They also work – many of them in the social sector – and pay taxes on their income. So quite apart from the appalling spectacle of withdrawing essential services from a particularly vulnerable section of the population, it wouldn’t even save the province much money.
Then there is Mr. Poilievre. The Conservative Leader went on social media Monday to boast of a motion his party planned to put before the House of Commons the next day which would, as he described it, “cut back deluxe benefits for fake refugees and deport non-citizens and foreign nationals who do crime.”
The accompanying video, featuring Mr. Poilievre striding about angrily, played explicitly to us-or-them resentments: “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.”
A torrent of posts followed. “Radical Liberal open-border policies have overloaded our housing, health care and job market.” They are “at their breaking point.” It’s time to “secure our border and put Canadians first,” “send non-citizen criminals home,” etc. etc. You get the picture. The reason you can’t get health care is because they do.
The pretext for this latest outburst of anti-immigration hysterics is the release of two reports: one by the Parliamentary Budget Office, the other by the C. D. Howe Institute. The PBO report looked at the cost of the Interim Federal Health Program, which provides “limited and temporary health care coverage” to foreign nationals “who are not eligible for health insurance from provinces or territories.”
Sure enough, the cost of the program has ballooned in recent years, from $211-million in 2020-21 to $896-million in fiscal 2025, in line with increases in the numbers of claimants. That’s still less than one-fifth of one per cent of all federal spending, and less than one third of one per cent of all spending, federal or provincial, on health care. That’s not only for asylum claimants but resettled refugees as well; and not only for supplemental health care benefits but for basic care.
All told, it costs about $1,645 a year to provide each asylum claimant with health care – a fraction of the overall national average.
These aren’t “fake” or “failed” claimants: they are people whose claims are still in process, or who have appealed an initial finding against them. Once their appeals have been exhausted – once their claim truly has failed, which is not the same as saying it was fake – they lose all funding.
So that’s what all the health care fuss is about.
A report this month from the Parliamentary Budget Office found the cost of the Interim Federal Health Program grew from $211-million in 2020-21 to $896-million in fiscal 2025.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
The other report, by the C. D. Howe Institute, is seemingly more damning. It found that in recent years the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada exempted certain categories of claimants, depending on their nationality and claim type, from the usual requirement for an oral hearing. Tens of thousands of claims were accepted in this way, based solely on the claimant’s written application. Though advanced as a way of reducing the backlog of unprocessed asylum claims, it appears to have had the opposite effect: the backlog now stands at nearly 300,000, up from 17,000 in 2016.
Well all right, that’s not great – though even here the problems have been exaggerated. The claims were not “rubber-stamped,” as if subjected to no scrutiny whatever: they just weren’t subjected to an oral hearing. Not every claim is accepted, nor is it even 80 per cent, as you might have heard. It’s 80 per cent of those claims that are decided on their merits – that is, not counting those that are withdrawn or summarily dismissed.
But goodness gracious, you’d think the world had ended, from the response. No, people shouldn’t be given asylum who aren’t eligible. Yes, weeding out false claims costs money. But we’re curiously selective about the kind of fare-dodging we choose to get choleric about. If it’s strict adherence to the law that concerns us, or the cost to the taxpayer for that matter, what about the hundreds of thousands of Canadians working on the fiddle, without declaring their income? The underground economy has been estimated to be worth about 2.5 per cent of Canada’s GDP – and to cost governments billions annually in revenue. But for some reason that doesn’t excite nearly as much scandalized comment.
The broader claims, that Canada has been “overwhelmed” or “overloaded” by immigration, fare no better under scrutiny. Immigration, whether to Canada or to Alberta, is not “out of control.” Certain streams within it, notably the international students and temporary foreign worker programs, may have qualified for that epithet in the recent past, but these have since slowed to a trickle. As of the third quarter of last year, Canada’s population had actually begun to shrink – there were more people leaving the country than entering it.
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No doubt the late-Trudeau era surge in immigration didn’t help, but it didn’t cause the strains in our health care or housing or labour markets. We did that to ourselves. Wait times for health care have been lengthening for more than 30 years, as meticulously documented by the Fraser Institute’s annual Waiting Your Turn reports. They’re at 29 weeks now, from referral to treatment, but they were already at 26 weeks by 2021, when the great population boom began.
Housing prices, likewise, had already gotten way out of hand long before the dawn of “radical Liberal open-border policies,” owing to a combination of restrictive municipal zoning laws and loose monetary policy. The average house price in Canada has, in fact, been falling since 2022 – precisely coinciding with peak immigration. And while it’s easy to point the finger at immigration for recent increases in unemployment, it has surely as much to do with the generalized climate of uncertainty created by tariffs, inflation and soaring public debts.
The point bears repeating: we had just as rapid population growth in some years in the 1950s and 1960s, without any of the problems that are now so recklessly laid at the feet of immigrants and refugees. Why? Because we were building more houses: we had yet to tie the housing market in regulatory knots. Because the health care system had not yet been turned into an ossified, centrally planned monopoly. Because we were investing more, growing more, hiring more.
Those are the sorts of things conservatives, and Conservatives, used to talk about, rather than the crude hack of letting fewer people in: the economic equivalent of bleeding the patient. Ms. Smith and Mr. Poilievre themselves were advocates, not so long ago, of a pro-growth population policy.
But how much easier it is, politically, when you’re in political trouble, to deflect public discontent, to blame all their troubles on outsiders, to play to people’s fears and whip up their resentments. Just so no one compares anybody to Donald Trump.