Tory leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters the Trudeau Liberals’ Thursday morning immigration announcement was a desperate attempt to gain support ahead of the next election. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Immigration Minister Marc Miller this morning announced an immigration cap, with 2025 quotas for 2025 falling from 500,000 to 395,000. Trudeau also confirmed he has every intention to stay on as prime minister and leader of the Liberal party. “Suddenly Trudeau made an about-face,” said Poilievre in a press conference an hour after Trudeau’s, emphasizing that Canada has had a solid,” commonsense,” bipartisan immigration system for 150 years and the topic of immigration “was not even controversial until Trudeau came along” in 2016. “Today’s immigration flip-flop is a massive admission of failure by Justin Trudeau,” said Poilievre. “Trudeau has suddenly admitted radical, uncontrolled immigration, and policies related to it, are partly to blame for joblessness, housing, and healthcare crises.” .Poilievre pointed out two million people line up at food banks each month, 1,400 homeless encampments in Ontario, “scurvy is making a comeback” and “we have the worst economy in the G7.”“They increased population growth by 200% over the last several years alone” and “Trudeau called anyone who disagrees with his policies racist,” said Poilievre.“His immigration minister admits immigration is out of control.” Poilievre further slammed the prime minister for leaving Quebec’s Roxham Rd. open to illegal immigrants for a year after the US government asked him to close it, “which caused an explosion of false and fraudulent refugee claims.“He allowed rampant fraud and abuse in the international student program — which has seen as many as 26 kids living in a Brampton basement and countless losing their lives to drugs, gangs and other chaos on our streets, sent back in body bags to countries like India.”“He allowed ISIS terrorists in Canada that tried to attack Jews and other citizens and presided over a 251% increase in police-reported hate crimes.”Poilievre pointed out none of Trudeau’s immigration policies are labour-related, as the prime minister previously claimed.“None of those programs are labour programs! Not, Roxham Rd, refugee claimants and international students are “not labour programs,” he said.“Trudeau’s last minute, pre-election reversal cannot be believed.”The Conservative leader said if elected, his government will “fix what Trudeau and the NDP-Liberals broke.”“We will restore the best immigration system in the world, we will stop the illegal arrival of false refugee claimants by securing our borders, our ports and our airports,” said Poileivre, promising to “end the abuse” in existing programs and “cap population growth” to make sure it’s always below the growth of infrastructure like housing, healthcare and jobs.
