Trudeau says Liberals ‘making up for lost time,’ cranking up immigration despite housing crisis

"We're asking an awful lot of our systems in general because there's a lot of things Canadians are expecting. We need to do more and faster on just bringing in new Canadians. We have targets of over 400,000 for this year, and with the challenges of the pandemic, we've had our borders closed for a while, we need to make up for lost time in welcoming in new Canadians to grow our economy and create ways to address labour shortages," Trudeau told reporters in Edmonton.

"At the same time, we've committed to welcoming in Afghan refugees by the tens of thousands, we've already welcomed many, but there's much more to do," he said.

Yesterday, Trudeau told reporters in British Columbia that the "population growth in this country hasn't been matched by an equivalent growth in housing supply."

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has made similar statements to the one Trudeau made on Monday. While taking questions at a press conference on affordable housing, Freeland said "the most fundamental fact is our population is growing faster than our supply of housing, it's just a problem of numbers, and of math."

"As a country, we want to be a growing country, and it's great that we are a growing country," she said, but said that more homes needed to be built.

Starting recently, Canada has also been employing the strategy of fast-tracking what may have been temporary workers to permanent residency and providing them a path to citizenship, to ensure that those job positions would be filled. This has helped the country stay on target to counteract a potential worker shortage. "Targeting a pool of talent that exists globally to fill gaps in the Canadian labor force has to be part of the strategy," said Immigration Minister Sean Fraser.

Fraser recently said that the ministry is "more than on pace to hit our target of 401,000 for the year, which I think a lot of people doubted."