Justin Trudeau lays a trap.

O'Toole faces a delicate balancing act on immigration

One of the Trudeau government's most important policy planks has been to aggressively ramp up the number of new permanent residents admitted to Canada. The target for 2021 has been set at 401,000, which Trudeau raised by 50,000 in October. This would be significantly higher than the number of permanent residents admitted in 2020, which fell to 184,370 due to the impact of travel restrictions caused by COVID-19. In 2019, 341,175 newcomers were admitted. Overall, with the exception of 2020, immigration has been steadily rising year after year.

Trudeau's rationale for increasing this year's quota even as COVID-19 was still playing itself out is that new immigrants are needed to power the Canadian economy. While in normal times, that rationale makes sense, it's more problematic in the context of an economy still reeling from the impact of the pandemic and successive lockdowns. Unemployment in 2020 stood at 9.75 per cent, up sharply from 5.7 per cent the previous year.

Unsurprisingly, members of the Conservative opposition have expressed concerns about the government's ambitious immigration targets in the context of an economic downturn. They may be on to something. A Bloomberg/Nanos poll from November 2020, found that 40 per cent of respondents wanted a smaller, not a larger number of immigrants than the previous year, and only 17 per cent favoured more immigration.

The high percentage opposing increased immigration is not purely a function of the pandemic and its economic aftermath. An EKOS poll from April 2019 found that 40 per cent of those surveyed thought that Canada was admitting too many immigrants. Why, then, given its potential unpopularity is the Trudeau government doubling down aggressively on increasing immigration, apart from ideological conviction?

The answer may lie in the twin, related facts, that new immigrants tend to be reliable Liberal voters, and, on the flip side, that those who identified themselves as Liberal supporters are much more supportive of immigration than self-identified Conservatives. According to the same EKOS poll, only 15 per cent of Liberals thought Canada was admitting too many members of visible minorities as new immigrants, while a whopping 69 per cent of Conservatives thought so.

This sets up a self-fulfilling dynamic, where Liberal governments ramp up immigration and gain political support from new immigrants and their political base, thereby setting up for further immigration increases. This is a similar dynamic to the United States, where immigrants traditionally have been staunch Democrats. Conversely, conservative parties have had difficulty in attracting and hanging on to the votes of new immigrants. On the face of it, this is difficult to understand given that many immigrants, especially from traditional societies such as in Asia, share some of the socially conservative values that should make the Conservative party attractive to them.

The problem is, as the poll suggests, members of the Conservative base are not just socially conservative but many have an antipathy to increasing numbers of immigration of visible minorities to Canada. This creates an obvious political problem for the Conservatives.

In 2019, fully 25 per cent of new permanent residents came from a single country, India. India has been a top source country of immigrants throughout Trudeau's time in power. Perhaps surprisingly, China was a source for only nine per cent of new permanent residents in 2019. The Trudeau years have seen India increasingly important and China decreasingly so as a source of new immigrants to Canada

It is not just Canada pulling immigrants from India, but there's also a push factor as India's growth and job prospects for skilled workers have been stagnant for the last decade or so. India's economy crashed in 2020 due to COVID-19 and a harsh lockdown which failed to prevent new infections, so you can fully expect immigrants from that country to be applying to migrate to Canada in larger numbers than ever.

This bodes well for the Liberals, ironically despite Trudeau's mismanagement of the India-Canada bilateral relationship. As for the Conservatives, despite a concerted but ultimately failed attempt by then prime minister Stephen Harper to woo the immigrant, especially South Asian vote, Indo-Canadians broke big time for the Liberals, propelling them to victory in seat rich ridings in greater Toronto and Vancouver, perhaps because of Harper's controversial reforms to Canada's citizenship law in the form of Bill C-24.

Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole has a delicate balancing act if he hopes to move into 24 Sussex Drive, which is to hang on to the party's traditional socially conservative base, while not alienating new immigrants who're going to be increasingly important to Canada's demographic mix and now comprise 21 per cent of the population, as compared to only 13 per cent in the United States.

Trudeau has laid a trap for O'Toole. O'Toole might well see a wedge issue in public antipathy towards increasing immigration quotas while unemployment is high, but overplaying his hand could be a losing card among new Canadians.