Half of Canadians think too many immigrants are being let in

Half of Canadians think that there are too many immigrants in the country according to a new poll. What’s causing the concern? Let’s take a look at what the pollsters discovered and why it is important for the future of Canada. 

Conducted by the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute with the help of the largest Canadian-owned market research group Leger, the poll discovered a majority of people were worried about immigration. 

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The polling found that fifty percent of the nearly sixteen hundred Canadians surveyed by Leger agreed that too many immigrants were coming into the country. This was a rather surprising finding considering the nature of the issue. 

The National Post noted in its reporting on the new poll that high immigration has had a broad multi-partisan level of support in Canada. But that attitude is quickly changing as the country faces a number of important challenges.

In January 2023, a government survey found that only twenty-one percent of individuals thought there were too many immigrants in the country compared to twenty-four percent who said there were too few immigrants in the country. 

“This concern about immigration has traction and certainly it constitutes a challenge to this consensus,” President of the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute Jack Jedwab explained to the National Post. 

“This suggests it’s a departure from what we’ve seen in the previous decade,” Jedwab continued. But just how have opinions changed so drastically in just a year? The answer is likely to be found in the country’s immigration targets. 

Canada brought in about one million new temporary and permanent immigrants in 2022, a number that helped push the country’s population above 40 million people according to Statistics Canada. But the immigration push hasn’t stopped. 

The federal government has set several lofty immigration targets and plans to bring in a total of roughly one-and-a-half million immigrants between 2023 and 2025, an issue that may be harming the country’s already straining housing situation. 

Thirty-nine percent of Canadians polled by Leger who believed that there was too much immigration in Canada also said immigrants were making the country’s housing problem worse while twenty-one percent said they were “draining the system.”

“They’re all rooted in this idea that our economy is challenged at supporting this number of immigrants, whether it’s housing or services, or so forth—at least for people who feel there are too many,” Jedwab explained to National Post.

For many surveyed, it seems that the problem is not how high levels of immigration are changing the country’s social fabric but rather how these newcomers are affecting many of the most pressing economic issues in Canadian society. 

One of the most important findings that proved the problem with immigration for many is about economics rather than social issues was that only ten percent of those surveyed were worried Canadians would become a minority in their own country. 

“There’s definitely a significant part of the population that has concerns about the economy and another part of the population that may have concerns about the economy, but still maintains immigration is the answer,” Jedwab said. 

Among those surveyed who thought that Canada needed more immigrants, thirty-seven percent reported immigrants were needed to fill job vacancies and twenty-seven percent noted the country needed immigrants to prevent population decline.

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The growing issues among Canadians concerning immigration is “really more rooted in the economy and our capacity to support this number of immigrants with available services,” Jedwab said. It will be interesting to see how these views change in the future.