National
Trudeau’s Christmas Gifts to Canadians: Unaffordable Housing, Inaccessible Health Care, Out-of-Control Immigration and Sagging Productivity
From the C2C Journal
By Gwyn Morgan
On Tuesday Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s population leapt by 430,635 people from July through September of this year, after previously reporting that our nation added 1,050,110 people in 2022. That was the largest such annual number ever recorded and the nation’s highest percentage growth rate since 1957. The ostensibly non-political federal agency proclaimed this result as “certainly cause for celebration.” Ninety-six percent of the growth came from international migration. People accepted as new permanent residents accounted for 437,000 of those immigrants, while 613,000 were classified as non-permanent. In November, the federal government announced plans to grant permanent residency to 465,000 this year, with a goal of half a million by 2025. Combined with a high rate of non-permanent arrivals – such as students and temporary foreign workers – this means Canada will continue to have by far the highest immigration rate of any G7 country.
The Justin Trudeau government says we need all those immigrants to make up for a chronic shortage of skilled workers. Permanent immigrants fall into four broad acceptance categories: economic (and, thus, presumably skilled), family reunification, refugees and protected persons, and a final category described as “humanitarian, compassionate and others.” Economic immigrants make up about 60 percent of the total.
1.1 million per year, nearly 450,000 in the last quarter alone: The Justin Trudeau government vows to continue inviting new immigrants at record rates, allegedly to fill shortages of skilled workers, yet private-sector job creation in Canada is lagging, and many immigrants appear to go straight into government work. (Sources of photos: (top) Diary Marif; (middle) Michael Charles Cole/CBC; (bottom) JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock)
But before one jumps to the conclusion that our immigration system is working as it should, providing Canadian companies large and small from coast to coast with the skilled employees they would otherwise lack, one must pose this question: how many of those skilled immigrants are simply being added to the already massive number of federal, provincial and municipal government employees? The answer to that question is alarming.
A study by the Fraser Institute, released one month ago, with the revealing title Government-sector job growth dwarfs private-sector job growth across Canada, found that governments added far more employees than the private sector in all ten provinces between February 2020 and June 2023 – a period spanning from just before the pandemic set in, across the hard times of Covid-19, and onward for a year after it faded. During this time, the number of government jobs increasing by 11.8 percent compared to just 3.3 percent in the private sector – a whopping total of 446,000 government bureaucrats added.
There’s no doubt that immigrants are needed to help fill shortages of workers in some categories and certain regions. But more than 1 million per year? Of whom tens if not hundreds of thousands have probably ended up on the public payroll, i.e., going straight to being consumers of public resources rather than ever being productive contributors.
Canada’s immigration policy should be (but isn’t) considering two stark realities: a serious housing shortage/price crunch and a disintegrating health care system. Both situations – it’s no exaggeration to call them crises – are getting worse every day. While some housing markets are plagued by chronically slow construction, a lack of home building isn’t the main culprit. Last year actually saw a new national record set for housing starts at 320,000 units. Yet even that is far less than what’s needed to house our surging population.
As bad as Canada’s housing situation is, health care is even worse – and deteriorating rapidly. A bulletin two weeks ago from public policy think-tank Second Street reported that more than 17,000 Canadians died while waiting for surgery or diagnostic scans in a one-year period straddling 2022-2023.
Further, Canada’s population has been increasing by 600,000 or more every year for the past five years, while housing starts are typically far lower than the 2022 record – meaning we are falling ever-farther behind on housing. The Trudeau government’s much-boasted-about Housing Accelerator Fund has been a dismal failure. A recent article in Policy Magazine noted that Canada faces a housing shortfall of 3-4 million units by 2030. While high interest rates, zoning and NIMBYism are all playing roles, the article warns: “Historically high immigration levels will push up demand and drive up housing prices and rental rates across the country.”
While this seems to have all escaped the notice of Trudeau, even some of Canada’s elite are starting to catch on. Last week Tiff Macklem, the hapless Bank of Canada governor whose dithering helped heighten Canada’s pandemic-induced inflation to crisis levels, noted in a speech at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel that, “Canada’s housing supply has not kept up with growth in our population, and higher rates of immigration are widening the gap.”
While housing starts hit all-time records in 2021 and 2022, the new construction was subsumed beneath Canada’s surging population; the national housing shortfall is growing every year and projected to reach 3-4 million units by 2030. (Source of graph: Canadian Politics and Public Policy)
As bad as Canada’s housing situation is, health care is even worse – and deteriorating rapidly. A bulletin two weeks ago from public policy think-tank Second Street reported that more than 17,000 Canadians died while waiting for surgery or diagnostic scans in a one-year period straddling 2022-2023. Second Street’s figure is based on a series of Freedom of Information requests. It was an increase of 64 percent since 2018 and a five-year high.
Because many provincial health authorities provide incomplete data, Second Street believes the true figure is actually much worse: nearly 31,400 preventable deaths. The deceased victims had waited as long as 11 years for treatment. These horrific results are further evidence that Canada’s healthcare system is failing even to tread water and can be described as disintegrating or even collapsing. The situation is quite literally deadly. “We’re seeing governments leave patients for dead,” says Second Street’s president, Colin Craig.
And yet, incomprehensibly, the Trudeau government decided 2022 was the time to bring in nearly 1.1 million newcomers, and vowed to continue immigration flows at similar rates for years. And, as I pointed out near the end of this recent article, the published immigration figure is on top of 550,000 student visas and 600,000 work permits for temporary foreign and “international mobility” workers. Many of these workers are semi-skilled or completely unskilled and go straight to work in fast food or other low-paid services. How could any sane government follow such a foreseeably disastrous path?
“We’re seeing governments leave patients for dead”: According to Colin Craig (left), president of public policy research organization Second Street, the catastrophic state of Canada’s health care is likely responsible for over 30,000 preventable deaths-while-waiting per year. (Sources of photos: (middle) The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette; (right) Shutterstock)
During my long career in the energy sector, our company faced numerous existential challenges (not least how to survive the disastrous “Trudeau Number One’s” National Energy Program). I realized that two essential and entwined priorities were to do whatever it took to retain our highly proficient employees while also reining in expenditures as much possible – keeping the company both solvent and capable. We also developed a priority list for increasing capital expenditures to resume growing when conditions improved (much of which had to do with getting rid of Trudeau Number One). In such a situation, continuing to hire and spend would have been a path to certain disaster.
Sadly for our benighted country, the Trudeau government has done exactly that, following a path that has brought us to the brink of national disaster in several critical areas at once. Now, our unprecedented housing crisis has resulted in even job-holding and fully functional Canadians camping long-term in vehicles and tents. Fellow citizens are suffering and dying on health care waiting lists while being forbidden to access private care by federal legislation (and some provincial policies), with Canada’s courts often siding with government when challenged. And yet the Trudeau government has reconfirmed an immigration goal of half a million permanent residents with no lessening of non-resident immigrants that together will add another 1 million-plus newcomers in 2024.
Down and down: While Canada’s aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) continues to expand weakly, the metric that really counts – real GDP per individual Canadian – has been plunging and is projected to keep falling, signalling a weakening standard of living. (Sources: (photo) Pexels; (graph) TD Canada)
It’s hard to comprehend how much worse Canada’s housing and health care crises will get under these toxic policies. But they most assuredly will.
Adding to these self-inflicted wounds, our country now faces economic stagnation. While Canada’s aggregate (or “headline”) gross domestic product (GDP) has continued to increase, though weakly, the metric that really counts – GDP per individual Canadian – has stalled. Per capita GDP is critical because it is closely tied to individual income; to over-simplify slightly, workers can’t earn more if they don’t produce more. And here the situation is dire. “Real GDP per capita has contracted over the last three quarters,” states a July 15 report from TD Economics. “Longer term, the OECD projects that Canada will rank dead last amongst OECD members in real GDP per capita. Without fundamental changes, Canada’s standard-of-living challenges will persist well into the future.”
Millions of hopeful immigrants entering Canada will find a country not only unable to provide health care and housing for its citizens and temporary residents, but also with a diminishing overall standard of living.
The key to producing more (without simply working more hours) and, hence, to earning more, is to increase the productivity of workers. And that is driven by private-sector capital investment in buildings/infrastructure, machinery/equipment, processes, software and other “intellectual capital,” research-and-development, and anything else that allows workers to increase their output without working more hours. Part of that increased output can be returned to workers in the form of higher compensation. That is how “real” wages grow without spurring inflation.
And in this critical dynamic, Canada has been lagging the U.S. and even Europe for over 20 years. Today our GDP per hour worked is stalled out and may actually be regressing. The TD Economics report cited above forecasts that this key metric will continue to experience “persistent contractions” at least throughout 2024. Meaning Canada’s shortfall in productivity – and personal income – versus the U.S. and leading European countries will continue to increase.
No longer a gap, a chasm: Canada’s invested capital per worker, once comparable to that of the U.S., has fallen dramatically since the Trudeau Liberals came to office in 2015. Says the C.D. Howe Institute: “Businesses see less opportunity in Canada and [this] prefigures weaker earnings and living standards.” (Sources: (photo) The Canadian Press/Paul Chiasson; (graph) TD Canada)
A report last year from the CD Howe Institute, Decapitalization: Weak Business Investment Threatens Canadian Prosperity, points out that the invested capital per worker, key to a country’s ability to produce goods and services, “has been weak since 2015” – the year the Trudeau government came into office. “Before 2015, Canadian business had been closing a long-standing gap with the U.S.,” the report states, before warning, “Since 2015, the gap has become a chasm.” The report’s ominous conclusion: “Having investment per worker much lower in Canada than abroad tells us that businesses see less opportunity in Canada and prefigures weaker earnings and living standards.”
The stark reality is that those millions of hopeful immigrants entering Canada will find a country not only unable to provide health care and housing for its citizens and temporary residents, but also with a diminishing overall standard of living. And a national government that doesn’t seem to care.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
From LifeSiteNews
Internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.
Death by doctor-assisted lethal injection, under the title Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), now accounts for over 5 percent of all deaths in Canada.
In November, Health Canada published the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying, which tracked the expansion of euthanasia in 2024, with 16,499 Canadians receiving MAiD, amounting to 5.1 percent of the total deaths in Canada.
“The Government of Canada will continue its work to help ensure that the legislation on MAiD reflects the needs of people in Canada, protects those who may be vulnerable, and supports autonomy and freedom of choice,” the report asserts.
Health Canada noted that MAiD is not considered a cause of death by the World Health Organization and, therefore, “the number of MAiD provisions should not be compared to cause of death statistics in Canada in order to determine the prevalence (the proportion of all decedents) nor to rank MAiD as a cause of death.”
However, the government agency did admit that 16,499 people received MAiD in 2024, which amounted to 5.1 percent of “people in Canada who died.”
The report noted that that was “a small (0.4%) increase from 2023,” adding that “this percentage may change with final counts of deaths in Canada from Statistics Canada.”
Notably, the year-over-year increase was 6.9 percent, a significant slowdown from prior years, such as the 36.8 percent increase from 2019–2020. Health Canada suggested that MAiD provisions are beginning to “stabilize,” though long-term trends require more years of data.
According to the data, 95.6 percent of the deaths were Track 1, meaning those whose death was foreseeable, compared to only 4.4 percent being Track 2 requests, which end the lives of those who are not terminally ill but have lost the will to live due to their having chronic health problems.
“Although Track 2 provisions represented 4.4% of MAiD cases in 2024, they represented close to a quarter (24.2%) of all MAiD requests that were assessed as ineligible,” the report stated.
At the same time, internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.
The report further revealed that 63.6 percent of the Canadians who were euthanized reported cancer as their underlying medical condition.
Currently, wait times to receive genuine health care in Canada have increased to an average of 27.7 weeks, leading some Canadians to despair and opt for assisted suicide instead of waiting for medical aid. At the same time, sick and elderly Canadians who have refused to end their lives have reported being called “selfish” by their providers.
Meanwhile, the Liberal government has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest growing euthanasia program in the world.
The most recent reports show that euthanasia is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada; however, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.
Asked why it was left off the list, the agency said that it records the illnesses that led Canadians to choose to end their lives via euthanasia, not the actual cause of death, as the primary cause of death.
When the Carney government’s honeymoon is over, and its missteps on a variety of fronts become more evident, the search will begin in earnest for “alternatives”. Looking ahead, what might such alternatives be?
On the fiscal front, the recent federal budget gets off on the wrong foot by attributing Canada’s economic woes to major global events and Trump’s tariffs, without in any way acknowledging the consequences of a decade of mismanagement by the Trudeau regime. The budget also still contains references to Net Zero on the climate change front, a Carney fixation. What an alternative budget might look like is a discussion for the weeks ahead, but it might begin by calling for a federal commitment to an alternative Net Zero: Federal Expenditures Minus Federal Revenues to Equal Zero by 2030.
Balancing the federal budget will require a major downsizing of the massive federal bureaucracy. But the downsizing method chosen by the Carney government is an old and unimaginative approach which simply doesn’t work – charging the bureaucracy itself to define and implement its own downsizing[1]. The alternative? Establishing a completely independent outside agency to tackle the task – an improved Canadianized version of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) or its UK version as being developed by Reform UK.
On the economic front and the need for industrial projects to stimulate an economic recovery, the Carney government predictably puts its faith in its own ability to pick winners and losers, and in a government-run Major Projects Office to guide the winners. A better alternative? Issue a Request for Proposals from the private sector leaders of Canada’s key industrial sectors – especially those in the natural resource sectors which are Canada’s greatest strength – to identify what the market place and the investment community, not politicians and bureaucrats, believe to be the most stimulative and urgently required projects and the conditions for advancing them. Not surprisingly, one of the main conditions will likely be for an over-regulating over-taxing federal government to “get out of the way”.
On the national unity front, federal-provincial relations are being strained to the breaking point by major federal intrusions in areas of provincial jurisdiction, fueling secessions movements in both Quebec and western Canada. The alternative? A federal Act Respecting Provincial Sovereignty which repeals or amends those statutes authorizing such intrusions in areas the constitution clearly assigns to the provinces – natural resources, health, municipal governance, property and civil rights – to eliminate or reduce federal intrusiveness. Insist also that both levels of government “stay in their lanes”, with the federal government focusing on improving its performance in those areas where no one disputes its jurisdiction or responsibility – foreign affairs, trade and commerce, indigenous affairs, defense, and monetary policy.
Then there is the tariff front where US tariffs and Canada’s erratic and ineffective responses are raising prices and killing jobs, as tariff wars always do, while seriously damaging Canada-US relations. Mr. Carney’s approach has been to first impose counter-tariffs and then withdraw them – elbows up then elbows down – while engaging sporadically in high-level elite-to-elite talks in Washington.
The alternative? Be advised, and be accompanied to Washington, by deal-making representatives of the sectors which the US most needs to become energy self-sufficient – one of Trump’s main objectives. Begin to seek the support of Trump’s constituency for tariff-modification policies – on Main Street not Wall street and in Middle not Washington America – the people Trump must listen to in order to satisfy and maintain his political base. Communicate with that constituency through the independent US media and the Rogan-Carlson-Shapiro media that Trump’s constituency talks and listens to. And begin to ally Canadians more closely with American friends and associates seeking to ensure that more tariff-modifying Republicans are elected to the US Congress in the 2026 Congressional elections.
On the leadership front, more and more Canadians are becoming disillusioned with the “one man show” style of political leadership – first from Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney – self-absorbed politicians who want to be “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, just as long as all eyes are upon them”.
The Budget is the Carney Budget, with Finance Minister Champagne merely the budget speech reader. It is Mr. Carney who goes to Washington and gets the photo ops, with Minister LeBlanc, listed as the Minister Responsible for Canada-US Trade, merely carrying the suitcases. It is Mr. Carney who announces the Big Projects and must even participate in the Grey Cup coin toss, notwithstanding the boos of the crowd who came to watch football not political posturing.
The Alternative? A visible, competent Leadership Team at the federal level, with the PM as the captain but visibly surrounded by strong, regional, and sectoral lieutenants with executive experience – Mackenize King’s War Cabinet a possible model to emulate.
Finally, a key question – who will forcefully and effectively represent these alternatives in the federal political arena? Could it be the current Leader of the Official Opposition? If in the days ahead, he were to become more than the Leader of the Opposition but Leader of the Official Alternative, could he not yet become the Leader of the Alternative Government Canada so desperately needs?
[1] The Comprehensive Expenditure Review described in the recent federal budget asked “federal departments and agencies” to conduct a thorough review of their own organizations, programs, and activities – subject to numerous politically motivated limitations – and under the ultimate supervision of politicians – a Cabinet Committee and the Prime Minister. (Budget 2025, page207)
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