Immigration Levels: Permanent Residents

Immigration Dept: David Olive's column on immigration includes several factual errors. He writes that Ottawa has cut the inflow of immigrants from an annual 250,000 to 225,000, trapped by a recession-era mindset that is obsolete. The opposite is true. The average intake of permanent residents under the previous Liberal government from 1994 to 2005 was 222,000. Since taking office in 2006, our government has welcomed an average of 254,000 new permanent residents per year, an increase of 14 per cent. This represents the highest sustained level of immigration in Canadian history, and the highest per capita level of immigration in the developed world, adding 0.8 per cent to our population per year, according to The Star. Olive also writes that Ottawa has slashed its funding of immigrant settlement services for Ontario by $70 million. Again, the opposite is true. The $70 million has been reallocated to other parts of the country, where immigration levels have increased massively, to ensure fair per capita funding across Canada. But even after that change, we are spending three times more on settlement services in Ontario than the previous government did in 2005, moving from $111 million to $347 million. That's a huge increase, not a cut and re: Skills shortage highlights faulty thinking on immigration, Column, March 5 Prime Minister Stephen Harper has repeatedly pointed out that, unlike previous Canadian governments and many other developed countries, we maintained high immigration levels throughout the recession precisely because we understand that one of the greatest challenges facing the Canadian economy is a large and growing labour shortage. For example, in 2010 we welcomed 280,000 newcomers, the highest number in six decades, notwithstanding the global economic downturn. By comparison, the Trudeau government slashed immigration levels from 143,000 to under 90,000 during the recession in the early 1980s, and the Chretien government cut intake from more than 257,000 to 174,000 in the mid-1990s. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.