Housing minister denies he ignored warning about immigration levels and housing supply
OTTAWA – Housing Minister Sean Fraser said he didn’t ignore warnings as immigration minister about the number of new Canadians the country was accepting exceeding the number of houses the country was building.
The Liberals immigration targets set to plateau next year at 500,000 permanent residents are twice what the targets were when they came to office in 2015.
Fraser appeared at the House of Commons finance committee, where Conservative MP Jasraj Singh Hallan demanded to know why he had failed to act on that warning in his last cabinet post as immigration minister.
There is no “labour shortage” – Canada’s much-touted labour shortage is mostly a mirage
… Despite that apparent shortage, wages are not rising in response. That could be explained in part by a lack of pricing power by some employers. They may not be able to increase their own prices enough to absorb the cost of higher wages.
The heart of the answer, however, is the rise in the number of temporary foreign workers who are willing to work for cut-rate wages and are not as able to shift jobs nearly as easily as Canadian residents. The number of such workers has exploded since the pandemic, jumping to 120,000 at the end of 2022 from 73,360 at the end of 2019.
Our Captains of Industry loved indentured servants.
