Poilievre doubles down on deportations for criminals, vows to fix immigration

Poilievre laid out his plan to “fix” Canada’s immigration system, deport immigrants and “allow” Canada’s housing, healthcare, and job market to catch up with the number of people currently in Canada.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has laid out his plan to “fix” Canada’s immigration system, deport immigrants and “allow” Canada’s housing, healthcare, and job market to catch up with the number of people currently in the country.

After being asked how he would fix the immigration system and deport illegal immigrants by Juno News’ Keean Bexte in Calgary on Thursday, Poilievre reaffirmed his commitment to deport anyone who has been deemed “inadmissible” by Canada’s border security and immigration departments. He also restated his call to have more immigrants leave the country than enter in the coming years.

“Anyone who commits a crime while they’re in Canada, they need to be immediately detained, and when their detention is complete, they need to be deported from the country,” Poilievre said during a Thursday press conference. “We need to track down the roughly 600 criminals that the Liberals have lost track of. That means using all our security agencies to find out where they are, to locate them, arrest them, put them on planes, get them out of Canada.”

He called on the government to “make it clear” to temporary residents that if they commit a hate crime or a violent act against an identifiable group, they will be deported. Poilievre also said that Canada must disincentivize fraudulent asylum seekers from coming to Canada.

“We need a review of all the benefits that go to people who come as asylum claims to make sure they’re not getting more benefits than Canadian taxpayers get. And those that arrive last…their cases should be treated first…If you come to Canada and you’re not a real refugee, your case will be heard in a few weeks, and you’ll be back in your own country,” he said.

Poilievre said the current system offers an often backwards incentive, as even if a person’s asylum claim was found to be fraudulent and was rejected, fraudsters know they will at least have “seven or eight years” of appeal, while they reap benefits from Canadian taxpayers.

“If it was very clear that their benefits wouldn’t be there, that they would be sent back within a couple of weeks, they wouldn’t come in the first place,” Poilievre added. “We need to secure our borders, to stop the crossings, and more broadly, on immigration, we need to bring way down the numbers of international students, of temporary foreign workers that are flooding our markets with low-wage labour.”

Poilievre added that mass immigration of temporary foreign workers primarily helps big corporations, as the high volume in the labour market allows wages for those low-wage jobs to stay low. He said the purpose of the TFW program was once to fill jobs that Canadians wouldn’t take, such as in agriculture, but that the program has long strayed away from that purpose.

“If they’re having a hard time getting Canadian youth working, what they need to do is raise wages,” he said. “So we need to cut back on the temporary foreign worker program.”

Poilievre repeated his call for the overall number of immigrants to be reduced over the next several years.

“We actually need more people leaving than coming. That’s net negative migration,” he said. “We’ve got these millions of people whose visas are going to…run out, they’re not eligible to stay, they need to be told to leave, and if they don’t leave then. Obviously, they need to be deported.”

Poilievre made similar calls for negative net migration last month in Ottawa and during a candidate’s panel discussion for the upcoming Battle River—Crowfoot byelection.