Toronto Star paints a skewed picture of Trudeau’s immigration cuts
Reporter claims ‘Canada is relinquishing its welcome mat,’ when in fact we are returning to pre-pandemic levels
In 2017, when our fresh-faced prime minister was still under the mistaken impression that incessant virtue-signalling was a reasonable way to run a country, Justin Trudeau issued a proclamation to the world’s huddled masses: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” Canada, in other words, was instituting an open-door immigration policy, in contrast to the United States, where president Donald Trump had just signed an executive order intended to curb Muslim immigration.
In the years that followed, the Liberals continually hiked their immigration targets, first to 400,000 permanent residents per year, then 500,000. It was only after Canadians’ historic consensus around the benefits of immigration started to fracture that the government pulled back, announcing on Thursday that the number of permanent residents admitted in 2025 will fall to 395,000, from the previous target of 485,000. That’s a pretty dramatic cut, but still well above the number of newcomers that were being admitted when the Liberals first took office a decade earlier.
Yet that’s not the impression Toronto Star readers got. The lede in a story published on its website on Thursday claimed that, “Canada is relinquishing its welcome mat to newcomers, ending more than three decades of open-door policy that has earned it the reputation of being the world’s most pro-immigration country.”
That’s the sort of opening paragraph that would make sense in the opinion pages, where clubbing a politician over the head for what the author believes is a foolhardy policy comes with the territory (see how this screed began, for example). But even if Star immigration reporter Nicholas Keung’s piece (which was subsequently rewritten) had been an opinion column, it wouldn’t have held much water, as the Liberals’ new 2027 immigration target of 365,000 is still 40 per cent higher than the 260,404 permanent residents that were admitted in 2014, the last full year that the Conservatives were in power — hardly a sign that Canada is “relinquishing its welcome mat.”
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