TORONTO — U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Canada is “destroying itself” by taking in “millions and millions of people” he called “essentially unchecked and unvetted,” and that the strain is already showing up in unemployment. The post went up on Truth Social Wednesday morning and was quickly circulated on X.“Canada is destroying itself by allowing millions and millions of people into the Country, essentially unchecked and unvetted, and who are causing problems that will soon be too big to handle,” Trump wrote. “It is a Liberal takeover that will end very badly. Already showing up in their numbers. Big unemployment. ‘Oh Canada!’”The surge Trump is describing was built during the Trudeau years where Immigration was especially out of control. Temporary immigration under Mark Carney is already in decline, even if the housing and labour backlog from the Trudeau-era surge is not gone. The remarks land in the middle of a trade fight, in which talks collapsed earlier this summer, U.S. tariffs followed, and Ottawa answered with its own duties. Carney is in New York for a United Nations-week event with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and has not replied to Trump's post at the time of this publication..Statistics Canada said Wednesday Canada’s population reached about 41.8 million on July 1, up 0.5% from a year earlier, as growth cooled after Ottawa tightened intake. Permanent residents admitted in the second quarter fell 4.2% from a year earlier, and the non-permanent resident count dropped by 154,614 year over year to 2.78 million, or 6.7% of the population. Carney’s government has targeted a more than 40% cut to temporary-immigrant entries in 2026 and 2027.Unemployment is higher than it was in the tight labour market of 2022–23, but it is not a national collapse on the books. The jobless rate was 6.4% in August, unchanged from July, after employment fell by about 42,000 jobs that month. Youth unemployment was 12.9%.Trump did not table new data in the post.
