It's hard to go back to 2016 to figure out where this policy came from, but it seems that the government was heavily influenced by the report of its Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which said that, if we opened the door to immigration, we would have much faster economic growth, GDP would increase faster, as would GDP per capita, and Canada's international stature would improve. We thought that Canada's ambassador to China, when he stood in front of Mr. Xi, would look more serious than if he represented a small country with only 30 million inhabitants.
However, the analysis behind the Advisory Council on Economic Growth in 2016 was flat out wrong. Unfortunately, it was poorly thought out, economically speaking. More or less from 2016 onwards, the government played a bit of a sorcerer's apprentice and caused an unprecedented explosion in migration. It was temporarily halted by the pandemic, but it continued unabated after 2021, which led to the harmful consequences we know about.
The former prime minister himself, Mr. Trudeau, said that this immigration policy had become unsustainable. What's unfortunate is that this became apparent much too late, once a great deal of damage had been done.