I mean, you said it's been against economic interests. I don't think that's quite true. Many people have benefited from this immigration, in my view. Genuinely, I honest to goodness believe it is the single worst policy error ever. Between 1980 and 2015, total population growth in Canada was 319,000, and in the last three years running consecutively it was 900,000, the vast majority of whom are immigrants and the vast majority of whom are young, low-skilled and low-wage immigrants.
When we look at the youth unemployment rate, that's where it begins and ends. Other people who came to this committee and warned about this in 2014 and 2015 were ignored, obviously. They basically said this exact thing would happen. I would suggest that the committee members go back and listen to those speeches and read those committee submissions. It's simple supply and demand. If you import a lot of young and desperate people, they will displace the young and desperate people who are incumbent to this economy.
The other thing that I think is really important and we often forget about is that it doesn't force businesses to adjust and invest in the workers who are here. I was listening to the previous statements, and they said we need to improve training and we need to encourage businesses to support the training, education and retention of young people. Nothing does that better than having a significant contraction in supply, which is what we were entering into in 2014-15. For the exact reasons those corporations were complaining about having too many vacancies, the attitude from the government should have been, “Tough luck; do something about it,” and those companies would have been forced to do all of the suggestions I heard those well-respected and well-spoken contributors say just a half an hour ago, which is talking about training, retention and providing pathways to secure long-term roles.
Going forward, we need to basically end all of those programs and allow the market to clear. Unfortunately, there's really no fix. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It will take a long time—many years—for this to unwind.