Mr. Speaker, as we get into the details of the budget implementation act, it is important to take a step back to assess the philosophy that has informed the budget itself. The big picture of the budget rests on a single question: Is the government a player or a referee in the arena we know as Canada? Of course, this arena is not hosting a game of hockey or soccer. This is a game of factions. This is a game of competing private interests.
The government, as a referee, would take no sides. The referee gets out of the way. He draws the lines of the arena, and lays down the rules that allow the best players and teams to win. This is the North Star of the Conservative world view. Unfortunately, the red Liberal government sees itself as a player. It is picking winners and losers through that age-old enemy of human progress, central planning interventionism.
As the Liberals see themselves as a player, they have always stacked the game in their favour. They are team asset inflation. They are team rentier economy. They are team feudalism. The Liberals do not believe in a productive economy that works for hard-working Canadians. One of the chief ways team feudalism has empowered its rentier economy with unending asset inflation is through immigration. The immigration file has been noticeably absent from the debate on the budget and its implementation, so I will ask members to please allow me to give it some floor time.
Affordability for Canadians is a core Conservative focus. As a member of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, I have learned over the past several months how the immigration file is deeply affecting housing, health care and employment for everyday Canadians. The Liberals admit, on page 95 of the budget, that, “the pace of arrivals began to exceed Canada’s capacity to absorb and support newcomers”. On the same page, the Liberals further admit, “In 2018, 3.3 per cent of Canada’s population were temporary residents. By 2024, that number had more than doubled to 7.5 per cent, an unprecedented rate of growth that put pressure on housing supply [and] the healthcare system”.
These expressions in percentages do not do the raw numbers justice. Let me take one of the most devastating years on record, that is 2023, and repeat the figures. We issued over 681,000 study permits to international students, 761,000 work permits through the international mobility program and over 183,000 work permits through the temporary foreign worker program.
I grant there is some overlap between these categories, as a single person can be counted under two categories. Nonetheless, we are in a situation where our economy has been flooded with at least an extra million foreigners in any given year. The rapid growth of temporary residents overall in 2022 and 2023 contributed to Canada having the highest annual population growth rate since 1957. These figures are madness when we realize that only 30 years ago, we used to admit around 30,000 international students per year.
Team feudalism across the aisle knows what game it is playing. Just as it engages in deficit spending to map more units of currency to a stagnant suite of goods and services, team feudalism has flooded an increasing number of people into Canada against a roughly steady state housing and jobs situation. What does team feudalism produce in both situations? It produces its time-honoured goal of asset inflation under a rentier model.
The Liberals have used both the temporary foreign worker program and the international mobility program as a business model to keep wages artificially low, to keep paper profits high and to price Canadians out of the job market. The interventionist red Liberals pick their winners, and they have chosen to give a discretionary government subsidy to unproductive rentier businesses that can only function on the modern equivalent of slave labour.
I wish this were the end of my immigration critique, but there is another unfortunate layer. I do not know whether this is a tragedy or a comedy. We know, for instance, that nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were not studying at any Canadian university or college, but rather working and attempting to settle here. This finding is confusing unless we realize that we have not been matching our international student intake to our labour market needs.
The main field of choice for international students has been business studies and, at the college level, nearly 50% of all international students are enrolled in business programs. In the 2022-23 academic year, there were over 90,000 international students enrolled in college business programs and close to 60,000 international students in university business programs. This is not the labour force we need to build Canada strong. A promise was made to many of these students that this would put them on the immigration track in Canada, when the simple fact was that there were not enough permanent resident slots to accommodate the huge volume of students we let into the country.
What conclusion are we now led to? Team feudalism used international students not as a value added to our skills mix, but as a form of quantitative easing to inflate the assets of its rentier economy. It just needed more bodies in the country to boost up rent and housing prices, while suppressing the wages of hard-working Canadians. The Liberals do not represent team Canada. They do not represent the average hard-working Canadian. They represent the most ancient of feudalisms with a fake paper economy bolstered by something that very nearly approximates a slave system.
While over two million Canadians visit food banks each month and 700,000 of those are kids, the Liberals work every day to inflate asset prices, whether through deficit spending or by letting any warm body pass into the country to keep those rents sky-high. Team feudalism has the audacity to run a $78-billion deficit with over $90 billion in new spending, which equates to over $5,000 per Canadian household, yet still says they wish to build Canada strong.
The question is, strong for whom? The Liberals have not been playing as a referee in the great game of factions. They have chosen to play for team asset inflation and they have made us all poorer for this decision. Young Canadians cannot get the jobs they need, the housing they deserve or the health care services they are entitled to. With money printers working overdrive, what future does Canada have under the Liberal feudal regime? I do not see a future here, and it worries me.