I can, absolutely, and thank you, MP Davies, for the question.
We have seen immigrants scapegoated for many of the systemic issues that we have here in Canada. The most recent is housing, but this is not new. Over the years, we have seen many burdens placed onto newcomers to shoulder the responsibility for lack of planning. We have had an infrastructure planning problem in this country for decades.
Housing supply has been neglected. It has been extremely difficult for builders to be able to get permits. There has been a very poor connection between the provinces and the federal government in terms of planning for immigration and looking at where newcomers are going to be able to settle once they get into communities, because once newcomers come into Canada, they settle in communities. Couple with that the temporary worker program and the international students and the lack of planning that has been done there. All of this has led to the culmination of a series of events that amounts to a significant housing shortage that has nothing to do with the newcomers.
This housing shortage is a planning problem. It is an all-of-government problem, and we are seeing more and more people wanting to put this on the shoulders of newcomers.
We know that we are going to have a significant labour shortage in this country in areas where we have leveraged newcomers to fill job gaps. We already have a significant labour shortage in this country, and the only way we have population growth is through the arrival and successful settlement of newcomers.
We're seeing people landing in Canada, after going through very strict processes to get here, who are not able to find housing and are not able to work in the jobs in which they are trained. This brings us to the foreign credential recognition challenges that we are having, which is also a planning problem, not a newcomer problem. We continue to see ourselves going round and round in circles, scapegoating the newcomers we are leaning on in order to keep our country and our economy moving.