Social housing should be national in scope, and part of a major income reform. Immigration and refugee support should be regionally based, and there should be incentives for moving to underpopulated regions.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on February 5, 2024.

OTTAWA—Immigration Minister Marc Miller made a $362-million refugee housing announcement last week.

Instead of garnering positive impact, the announcement opened the door for provincial governments and critics to claim that the amount in question is simply too little to deal with the problem.

Quebec is looking for a cheque for $470-million, as outlined in a letter from Premier François Legault last month.

Legault is also asking the federal government to stem the flow of refugees finding their way into the country by land, sea, and air.

Miller’s announcement seemed to reinforce Legault’s concerns.

“I think we owe it to Canadians to reform a system that has very much been a stopgap measure since 2017 to deal with large historic flows of migration.”

Miller is speaking frankly, but his admission simply sets the government up for further criticism.

If 2017 is the date when things went sidewise, the federal government has had seven years to come up with a solution.

Like the housing crisis, the Liberals are taking the full brunt of criticism for immigration spikes.

The link between the two is tenuous at best, but the government doesn’t seem able to convince the public about who is responsible for the housing crisis in the first place.

It is not refugee spikes.

It was bad public policy foisted on Canada when the federal government was convinced by the provinces to get out of the housing field back in 1986.

For 30 years, the provinces had full responsibility, including federal transfer funding, for housing construction in their jurisdictions.

For the most part, they did nothing to fill the gap in social or Indigenous housing, while city hall used housing payments for new builds as a way to finance municipal coffers.

The responsibility for housing was completely in provincial hands for three decades until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the courageous step of getting back into housing in 2017.

The refugee housing problem would not exist if sufficient social housing had been built over 30 years for residents in need. Help should be available to anyone who cannot afford market solutions.

Meanwhile, the cost of market rental housing for those who can pay continues to rise as demand outstrips supply.

That is a completely different issue from the cost of immigration and refugee services.

For the federal government to defend itself against accusations that it caused the housing crisis, it needs a national strategy engaging cities and provinces in the solutions.

There are a few provinces that have continued to support social housing in the past three decades but, by and large, the availability of housing for the poor has not been increased.

The Liberals have worked to tackle child poverty, and some of those direct payments have definitely made a difference.

According to statistics, more than two million Canadians have been lifted out of poverty because of the Canada Child Benefit.

But as incomes grow, the cost of living grows along with it.

The Liberals need a big new idea that goes beyond simply ministers making announcements in their own bailiwicks.

At one point, the government was looking at the creation of a Guaranteed Annual Income for all Canadians.

That idea needs to be dusted off, and the feds need to invite provinces and municipalities to the table to see who can help in what manner with the creation of a guaranteed income.

Basic housing should be a human right for all Canadians, with the guaranteed income built on the cost of housing by region.

Social housing should be national in scope, and it should be part of a major income reform.

Immigration and refugee support should be regionally based, and there should be incentives for moving to underpopulated regions of the country.

A big vision on how to house the underhoused, feed the underfed, and finance the poor would get everyone to the table.

In the current system, everyone is blaming the federal government for a problem that has largely been caused by provincial indifference and municipal greed.

The country also needs to understand what constitutes a basic housing right.

What should be the average housing size for socially funded financing?

Many Canadians live alone these days, which changes the type and size of housing we should be building.

There are no magic bullets. But the federal government needs to think bigger than single housing announcements if it wants to spread the responsibility—and the blame—for the current crisis.

A guaranteed income is the answer.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

Andrew Scheer is leaving, so he won’t have to answer in the next election to the claim that he considers Canadian workers lazy.

By Sheila Copps
First published in The Hill Times on May 11, 2020.

OTTAWA—Andrew Scheer is sounding more and more like Stephen Harper.

Who could forget former prime minister Harper’s claim that Atlantic Canadians were suffering from “a culture of defeat”?

Harper claimed his comments were misrepresented and what he was trying to say was that Atlantic Canadians were subject to Ottawa’s culture of defeat, “I’ve never ever suggested that the people of this region are responsible for the region’s have-not status.

“There is a policy culture of defeat at the federal level and that’s what we want to change,” he told a business group during a pre-election tour.

But Atlantic Canadians did not forget those comments, and for the last few elections, the party has been struggling to overcome that backlash.

During the Justin Trudeau sweep of 2015, Liberals managed to pick up all the seats in Atlantic Canada, including some that had never voted Liberal in the history of the country.

If the Conservatives have any hope of forming government, they need to attract voters in the region.

They also need to reach out to ordinary people. Andrew Scheer’s comment last week that the federal government’s programs were derailing provincial efforts to get people back to work will not help.

For most Canadians, federal benefits have been a lifeline in a worldwide crisis that has no precedent.

It is not as if Canadians quit their jobs of their own accord, and there certainly is no new job waiting for them to fill.

In most instances, when there is a reluctance to return to work, it is based on unsafe working conditions.

Canadian farmers have petitioned the government to approve temporary worker applications because the back-breaking work involved in planting and harvesting is not compensated commensurate to the workload.

A minimum wage farming job is attractive to a Mexican migrant who makes one-tenth of that in his home country. It is not attractive to a Canadian who can usually work at a much less physically demanding job for more money.

The same holds true for workers in meat factories. The person who died at the Cargill plant near High River, Alta., was a 67-year-old Vietnamese boat person. Her family came to Canada as refugees, and with little English, her work options were limited.

According to her husband, she enjoyed the work at Cargill, where she and more than 900 other employees contracted the COVID virus while on the assembly line.

More than half the plant employees were infected, forcing a plant closure which is choking off the country’s beef supply. That single factory is responsible for 40 per cent of Western Canada’s beef production.

Governments moved in quickly to investigate and secure the food supply, as even the Golden Arches were claiming they had to source their 100 per cent Canadian beef elsewhere.

Given the precarious situation of the Alberta economy, it is obvious that an indefinite shuttering would not work.

However, how would most Canadians react if they were asked to return to work within two weeks to a factory that had seen 949 employees infected with the COVID virus?

As a workplace, Cargill is a magnet for immigrant, unskilled labourers who don’t need to speak English or French to work on an assembly line.

It is also a place where union/management disputes and difficult working conditions make it a less than attractive proposition for many Canadian workers.

So, when Scheer says Canadians don’t want to go back to work because they are receiving federal government benefits that are too generous, he is simply feeding a stereotype that has no basis in fact and is politically untenable.

Scheer is leaving, so he won’t have to answer in the next election to the claim that he considers Canadian workers lazy.

That explanation will be left to his successor, whomever that might be. But the anti-worker stigma that he and his predecessor have inflicted on the party the party will be very hard to shake.

And when it comes to election time, workers make up a very important part of the population.

The so-called 905-belt soccer moms whose votes can swing an election are often working at low-paying jobs in the transportation industry, at the Toronto International Airport and in other low-paid hotel employment where fluency and literacy in English is not required.

They are also the ones who are employed as personal service workers, in the jobs that we all now recognize as life-saving and life-threatening.

These are the people who really need to work. And right now, they need help, not insults.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.

By SHEILA COPPS

First published on Monday, August 28, 2017 in The Hill Times.

OTTAWA—Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

Such is the dilemma facing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with the increase in ambulatory migrants arriving from the United States in the wake of American removal rumblings.

News reports say that more than 7,500 people have streamed across the Canada-United States border in the past three months. If that continues, it will mean an additional 30,000 potential refugees annually added to the numbers Canada has already accepted from Syria and elsewhere.

But before we start ringing the alarm bells, let’s draw a small comparison with refugee numbers in major European destinations.

According to the International Organization for Migration, 2015 figures reveal about one million migrants arrived on European shores by sea and an additional 34,900 by land. The European border patrol authorities estimate a higher figure of 1.8 million during the same period.

According to a BBC documentary, Germany received the highest number of refugees in that year. Hungary actually had the largest number relative to population, absorbing nearly 1,800 refugees per 100,000 people.

That figure underscores the relative absorption capacity by population, which is likely the best indicator of how easily newcomers will be able to settle in.

The second highest absorption rate was actually Sweden with 1,667 refugees per 100,000 people.

Germany, with the highest rate of refugees in sheer numbers, received 587 people per 100,000. After all the Brexit fuss, the United Kingdom actually only welcomed 60 refugees per 100,000. The average for the whole of Europe was 260 per 100,000.

Compare those numbers to this summer’s Haitian influx, and you can draw your own conclusions.

If arrivals continue at the current pace, the country will receive 30,000 people in a year, in addition to other refugee applicants. That represents an absorption rate of 111 refugees per 100,000 population, less than half of the European average. Compare that with nearly 1,800 for Hungary and you can see that Canada’s commitment is not as robust as we like to think.

Of course, the Haitian influx is in addition to the Syrian refugee commitment and the general processing of immigrants via family reunification and business migration.

But even adding in the 25,000 Syrian refugees the Trudeau government admitted in its first few months in power, the country still ends up at 273 refugees per 100,000, which is less than half of what Germany has received.

Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel characterized the influx as a “crisis” and both opposition parties blamed the migration spike on a seven-month-old tweet from the prime minister.

Trudeau’s #WelcometoCanada missive coincided with an American immigration crackdown announced on Twitter by President Donald Trump. Trump’s move was eventually overturned by the courts. Rempel called the Trudeau counter-tweet “irresponsible.”

I doubt many Canadians would agree with that accusation. If anything, Canadians are proud of our reputation as a welcoming place, and Trudeau’s January tweet was a breath of fresh air compared to the wall-building and door-closing going on south of the border.

Trudeau’s message of welcome was heard by the whole world, including investors, international students, and others who were analyzing alternatives to American destinations in the face of the crackdown.

Canada’s robust economic growth is probably due, in part, to that viral tweet.

Rempel is careful to claim she does not oppose asylum claims but is speaking out because of the prime minister’s “spectacular failure” in managing the process.

Conservatives must tread lightly on their accusations, because by overstating their criticisms, they run the risk of being accused of mirroring the anti-immigrant stance embraced by the American right.

The sputtering of alt-right demonstrations across Canada last week will likely encourage the Tories to shy away from appearing to oppose immigration. As the Parti Québécois government discovered when it tried to win an election on whipping up division through a Quebec Values Charter, political extremism comes at a price.

Most Quebecers, and Canadians, are proud of our reputation as a welcoming country that can accommodate newcomers and turn immigration into an economic asset.

The government needs to stay the course, and proactively manage the processing of refugees, including accelerating the pace of work permits.

All that to say that the current summer crisis, largely manufactured by a slow domestic news cycle, is not a crisis at all but a trend which good planning and border processes should be able to easily handle.

Opposition parties may try to pin this on the prime minister but they should be wary of success.

An accusation of welcoming the world is one that Trudeau would savour.

Sheila Copps is a former Jean Chrétien-era cabinet minister and a former deputy prime minister. Follow her on Twitter at @Sheila_Copps.