Poilievre Calls for ‘Smaller Population Growth,’ Citing Strain on Housing, Health Care

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says Canada’s population growth needs to decrease in order to be sustainable, saying the current numbers are putting strain on the country. “We have to have a smaller population growth. There’s no question about it,” Poilievre told reporters in Ottawa on Aug. 29. “We cannot grow the population at three times the rate of the housing stock as [Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] has been doing. We need to have a growth rate that is below the growth in housing, health care, and employment,” he said. Temporary and permanent immigration has increased at a record pace in recent years, with immigration targets set to reach 500,000 by 2025 and the number of permanent residents doubling from 2021 to 2024, reaching over 2.7 million. The number of work permit holders was slightly over half a million in 2021 and climbed to over 1.3 million in the second quarter of 2024. The Conservative leader said the number of international students had grown “almost three times as fast as the housing stock” and that fraud and abuse in the temporary foreign worker program had “destroyed what was the best immigration system in the world.”...