The dream of making it big in Canada is turning into a battle for survival for many immigrants due to the high cost of living and rental shortages, as rising emigration numbers hints to newcomers being forced to turn their back on a country that they chose to make their adopted home.

Trudeau has made immigration his main weapon to blunt Canada’s big challenge of an aging and slowing population, and it has also helped fuel economic growth. That drove Canada’s population up at its fastest clip in more than six decades this year, Statistics Canada said.

But now a reversal of that trend is gradually taking hold. In the first six months of 2023 some 42,000 individuals departed Canada, adding to 93,818 people who left in 2022 and 85,927 exits in 2021, official data show.

The rate of immigrants leaving Canada hit a two-decade high in 2019, according to a recent report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), an immigration advocacy group. While the numbers went down during pandemic lockdowns, Statistics Canada data shows it is once again rising.

While that is a fraction of the 263,000 who came to the country over the same period, a steady rise in emigration is making some observers wary.

  • @[email protected]English
    6•11 months ago

    It’d be great if it was just Conservatives that got us into this mess, but every government for the past few decades has been complicit.

    The federal Liberals cut housing initiatives during the 1990s, which got CMHC out of the non-market housing business. Individual provincial governments did the same thing around the same time.

    • girlfreddyOP
      6•11 months ago

      A lot of that came about because Mulroney left us in deep debt. In '93 the Liberals changed the transfer payment sharing from 50/50 fed/prov split to something far less … and as you said nobody did anything to fix after.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•11 months ago

        I’d call exempting primary residences from capital gains the first major (federal) misstep that lead to the current housing crisis. That was 1971.