From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By David Leis

While wealth-generating industries are hindered, subsidies flow to politically favored projects, leaving capital fleeing and IPO activity collapsing.  Canada’s prosperity is at risk unless leaders cut red tape, open trade, reform taxes, and support industries that create real growth.

Red tape, capital flight and anti-growth policies are draining Canada’s economy. Our prosperity is at risk if leaders don’t act now

Canada is slowly dismantling the foundations of its own prosperity. Instead of unleashing our strengths, we’ve layered on regulation, red tape and ideology that repel investment and weaken our economy—one policy at a time.

This isn’t hyperbole. For over a decade, Canada’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has stagnated. Our productivity has fallen behind global peers. Young people are leaving the country, investment is drying up and even our own entrepreneurs are taking their capital—and their ideas—elsewhere.

We’re not failing because of a lack of resources. Quite the opposite. We have everything: land, minerals, oil, gas, water, agriculture and human talent. But whether it’s energy infrastructure, mining projects or manufacturing capacity, the answer from Ottawa is almost always “no”—thanks to layers of red tape, regulation and risk-averse policy.

Bloated bureaucracy, regulatory overreach and ideologically driven legislation—such as Bill C-69, which made it far harder to approve major energy and infrastructure projects, and Bill C-5, which gives Ottawa sweeping veto power in the name of reconciliation—have created an environment so hostile to investment that many firms no longer even try.

One example illustrates this clearly. The Trans Mountain pipeline—a major oil pipeline intended to carry Alberta crude to Pacific markets—was crippled by government takeover and quintupled in cost. We’re now told it might expand further—if regulators allow it.

Meanwhile, 15 per cent of the pipeline sits idle. This portion, set aside for short-term or on-demand shipments—known as spot capacity—is burdened by toll rates so high that shippers can’t justify using it. These prohibitively high fees, meant to recover the ballooning construction costs, have effectively priced out would-be users, leaving critical infrastructure underused and investment returns diminished.

This isn’t just bad economics. It directly weakens the very foundation of Canadian life—good jobs, innovation and upward mobility. Without strong investment in productive sectors like energy, mining and agriculture, we lose the wealth and opportunity that support our way of life.

Yet we continue to subsidize politically fashionable projects such as pumping billions into electric vehicle plants while punishing the industries that pay the bills.

And the message to innovators is just as bleak: new companies are staying private, avoiding public markets like the Toronto Stock Exchange, where new listings—known as IPOs—have all but disappeared. Bloomberg has reported just one large IPO in Canada so far this year. That’s unthinkable in a country that once marketed itself as a global financial hub. It’s part of a deeper problem: productivity is flatlining, and capital is fleeing, with hundreds of billions of dollars quietly leaving Canada in recent years.

This is why the average Canadian feels poorer—at the grocery store, in job prospects and when trying to save for a home. When investment dries up, so does the future. Our middle class, once the backbone of this country, is being squeezed from all sides: by inflation, stagnating wages, rising taxes and the shrinking availability of meaningful work.

Even our national identity is eroding. What kind of country punishes its wealth creators? What kind of government claims to support Indigenous partnerships while vetoing resource projects that offer Indigenous communities real economic independence? What kind of democracy penalizes companies for speaking openly about their environmental performance?

Canadians are starting to feel it. Young graduates are leaving. Parents are unsure how their kids will afford homes—or futures. We’re told this is the cost of progress. But the truth is simpler: we’re managing our decline.

There is another way. Open internal trade. Restore industrial freedom. Reform taxation to reward innovation and risk. End the obsession with slogans and deliver real-world results.

Canada still has every advantage for renewal. But it will take leadership willing to act. Canadians are ready. It’s time for our policies to catch up.

Renewal begins with the conviction that this country can thrive again—not in theory, not one day, but now. It begins with a government willing to say “yes” to building, producing, investing and competing. It begins with citizens who understand that prosperity is not permanent—it must be earned, protected and made possible by policy.

Without a vibrant economy, there is no middle class. And without a middle class, there is no Canada.

David Leis is President and CEO of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and host of the Leaders on the Frontier podcast.

News release from the Conservative Party of Canada

Today, the Hon. Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the Official Opposition, and the Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner, Shadow Minister for Immigration, announced their plan to tackle the Liberal unemployment crisis by permanently scrapping the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program and immediately ending new permits.

“Prime Minister Carney has failed to meet his own already excessive immigration targets and now he’s on track to issue the highest number of TFW permits ever in a single year,” Poilievre said. “It’s time to take decisive action to protect our youth and workers.”

Under the Liberals, too many corporations are relying on cheap foreign labour while Canadians pay the price. Recent data shows a 7.4 percent increase in Employment Insurance requests since Carney took office (504,110 in March to 541,430 in June), while almost 400,000 Canadians have been searching for work for over two years – outside of the pandemic, this is the highest share of long-term unemployment since February 1998.

Youth employment is at its lowest in more than a quarter-century (outside the pandemic), while an oversaturated job market continues to suppress wages even for the gainfully employed. Companies like Tim Hortons, the once beloved coffee shop that gave a first paycheque to countless Canadian teens, have hired an almost unimaginable number of TFWs – 1,131 percent more for Tim Hortons over just four years alone.

“We know why a foreign-owned mega chain wants to be greedy – it’s good for their corporate profits – but our immigration system doesn’t exist to pad their bottom line,” Poilievre said. “That’s why the government should immediately stop issuing new TFW permits, and end this wage-suppressing, opportunity-stealing program.”

“Not long ago, young Canadians could gain vital skills in entry-level jobs, earn enough to pay for school, and build a future,” said Rempel Garner. “In return, employers built a skilled domestic workforce. But the Liberals broke that deal, leading to staggering youth unemployment and heartbreaking stories of graduates sending hundreds of resumes without a single callback.”

Over the last decade, TFWs have ballooned to almost two percent of our total private sector workforce. The impact is dramatic, considering that nearly three-quarters of these temporary immigrants earn less than the median income and exert downward pressure on wages.

That’s as Canadians struggle with an unemployment crisis that CIBC says matches “levels typically only seen during recessionary periods.” In June 2009, the height of the Great Recession, 684,200 Ontarians were out of work, 16,300 fewer than the 700,500 reported this July.

Yet, we are still bringing in record amounts of predominantly low-skilled foreign labour. Carney’s government has issued 105,000 new Temporary Foreign Worker permits in the first six months of 2025 alone. Despite a promised cap of 82,000, the Liberals are on track to issue the most TFW permits ever.

“As Canada’s economy slides into recession, productivity hits rock bottom, and AI disrupts the job market – all while we grapple with housing and healthcare crises – Canadian youth are trapped,” Rempel Garner added. “They can’t buy homes or start families without good-paying jobs, but they can’t get those jobs without experience, lost to competition from temporary foreign labour.”

Under this urgently-needed plan, the Temporary Foreign Workers program would be permanently abolished with a separate, standalone program for legitimately difficult-to-fill agricultural labour. For ultra-low-unemployment regions, there will be a transition period of, at most, five years while the program winds down, but no new permits will be issued anywhere in Canada.

It’s time for Canadian jobs for Canadian workers. If Mark Carney is serious about fixing the immigration system his party broke, he would immediately enact these reforms. Conservatives will always fight to protect our youth and all Canadians from reckless policies that lock them out of work and suppress their wages.