By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
Kicking off an election rally in Osoyoos on Saturday, Apr. 12, Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), bemoaned the fact that his party’s focus on immigration has been swept off the table by Trump’s trade war on Canada.
Bernier pointed to immigration as one of the party’s early positions on which he says the PPC was correct in singling out well before the issue reached its peak last fall, resulting in a sharp pull-back in immigration numbers.
“It was a bit tough in 2019 – we were supposed to be racist because we wanted fewer immigrants at that time. We were right,” he said before going on to claim the party was also correct on the COVID-19 vaccine, stating it was neither safe nor effective, despite substantial evidence to the contrary.
“I wanted this election to be an election on mass immigration, because it’s causing a lot of problems in our society, our standard of living is going down. You know, we cannot integrate all these people,” he said.
Citing statistics (fact checked by the Times Chronicle as essentially correct) for what he describes as “mass immigration”, Bernier stated Canada’s population growth last year was 2.7 per cent as compared to “all the western countries,” which he says averaged 0.5 per cent.
“So the growth of our population was five times bigger than the average of the western countries,” the bulk of which – 97 per cent – came from immigration.
Describing it as “cheap labour for big business,” he reiterated his party’s belief that these immigrants are not integrating into Canadian society, “they are not speaking English or French, so they’re living in ghettos.”
Bernier went on to say, “You have ghettos here in BC, we have ghettos in Ontario, let’s stop that,” he said, claiming that “70 per cent of our population agree with us, including the immigrants,” without saying how he reached that number.
The PPC, he said, is the only party focusing on these issues because the other parties are busy trying to get votes from immigrants.
“Poilievre and Carney are saying that our enemy is Donald Trump with the tariffs. That’s not the case.
Our enemy is our government, it is the Liberals and the Conservatives,” Bernier said.
“We know that people are losing their jobs. The inflation is not two per cent, it must be five, six per cent, the real inflation.
And like I said, our purchasing power is going down, our standard of living is going down. So Canadians think that everything is going down, and it’s not going well.”
While Bernier did not indicate an end to all immigration, rather, he told the party supporters he wants to hit the pause button for an unspecified period of time.
Sitting down with the Times Chronicle he was asked whether the PPC would be selective, retaining an inflow of immigrants with certain in-demand skills, such as medical workers, to which Bernier said, “No, there’s no exception”.
“We want to make a pause, for a couple of years,” he said before going on to say that there are doctors in Canada who are driving taxis because of the difficulty in having their experience and credentials recognized.
“We need to have that pause on immigration and being sure that all these people who came in the last 10 years will be integrated into our society, and after that, we’re open for immigration,” he said.
He added that with the current housing crisis, both Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney “want to build more houses for the new foreigners that will come here – no, that won’t solve the housing crisis.”
“Poilivre would bring 1.5 million foreigners over the next three years. That is mass immigration. We need to stop that.” Noting the issue of supply and demand, Bernier says, “We are working on the demand. You stop the demand for a couple of years, and that will solve the problem.”
The PPC leader earlier had told the gathered PPC supporters that deportations would also be undertaken. The Times Chronicle asked Bernier if this would include, for instance, international students involved in protests over Israeli abuses against the Palestinian population for instance, as has happened in the US under the Trump regime.
“We will deport people who don’t have a permit, like international students, who are coming here and after their permit [for studies], they don’t want to leave the country, we will deport them. At that stage, they are illegal,” he stated.
Maxime Bernier held a rally in Osoyoos on Saturday, April 12.
Bernier noted there is today between 25,000 to half a million undocumented people in Canada (fact checked as correct). “We need to deport them. We need to put the resources to know who they are, where they are, and deporting them.”
The PPC also wants to see the number of international students cut by half “to have real international students”.
These students would be allowed to study, work only on campus as a teacher’s assistant, etc., and then, when they graduate, ensure they return immediately to their home country. He added that universities and colleges “must not use international students to finance their operation”.
The PPC still sees value in retaining these graduates but Bernier says the system should return to what it was previously, whereby these students would return home and then apply to come to Canada under favourable terms because of the time they spent here and the fact that they studied and graduated here.
As for the trade war that bent the PPC’s laser focus on immigration, what strategies would Bernier pursue if he were in the driver’s seat?
“I’ll do the opposite of what Carney and Poilievre are doing and what Stephen Harper wrote in a letter to the National Post three weeks ago, saying we must impose counter tariffs.
“That’s what the government is doing, Poilievre agrees with that. We know that it will hurt Canadians, and it may create a recession, but we must not do that. We cannot win a trade war with the US,” he said.
He went on to say imposing tariffs is simply imposing a tax on ourselves, and it is “hurting Canadians more than the US because they’re so big, the impact of that would be almost nothing.”
His solution: “I will call President Trump and say, ‘I want to have a renegotiation of the free trade agreement right now, not waiting for 2026, right now’.”
And in a significant departure from the other parties, the PPC would put “everything” on the table, including the supply management system covering milk, dairy and eggs in Canada, which Bernier says results in Canadian consumers paying more.
“But if Carney and Poilievre don’t want to put supply management on the table, they won’t be able to have a deal.”
He said that when Liberal and Conservative leaders refuse to include the supply management protected sectors, they are “working for a small cartel instead of working for every Canadian.”
He went on to argue, “Let’s abolish that and like that, we’ll be able to have a good deal. The question is, why are we protecting a little cartel?”
He added that by scrapping the supply management, Canadian farmers would have a larger market by virtue of being able to sell into the US market, although with Trump in the equation, that is far from guaranteed.
The PPC is represented in the local riding of Similkameen – South Okanagan – West Kootenay by long-time local businessman Barry Dewar.
