By Tom Parkin
Unemployment is up in Canada, most sharply in Ontario, where joblessness has gone from 5.1 per cent to 7.9 per cent over the past 39 months.
At a moment when working families need a job creation plan to kick-start a struggling economy, federal Conservatives leader Pierre Poilievre is diverting people’s attention to the scapegoats historically used by conservatives to protect the status quo.
Scapegoating to protect the conservative status quo
Poilievre is complaining about immigrants taking jobs.
Poilievre has recently called for expelling temporary foreign workers. Many temporary foreign worker programs were built to suppress wages. But Poilievre opportunistically hides behind that injustice, one conservative governments never cared about before, as he tries to conflate a demand to end an exploitative wage program with a push to expel immigrant workers.
And notice this is not a job creation plan. It’s a depopulation plan. It’s a claim that kicking out one working person will free up a job for someone else. But economics just doesn’t work that way — and if Poilievre doesn’t know it, he has smart people around him who do. They just doesn’t care.
Economists can explain the theory of why depopulation is a doomed economic policy. In short, it’s less people working and less people consuming. Depopulation shrinks GDP. Shrinking GDP kills jobs.
But the best explanations are from evidence. And right now, as Poilievre blames immigration for unemployment, the fact is Canada has had near-zero population growth for the past year — even as unemployment rises.
Statistics Canada estimates Canada’s population increased by only 389,000 people from July 31, 2024 to July 31, 2025. On a population of about 41.5 million, that’s less than one per cent annual growth. It’s like watching the population of a room increasing from 100 to 101 — over a year. It’s no change.
But though population has almost ceased, unemployment continues its climb.
You can’t argue facts against a feeling
Poilievre’s claim has the benefit of getting him off the hook for having not much of a job creation plan. And it helpfully gives permission to the small group of outright racists to push their race-war agenda under the pointy-hooded guise of Poilievre’s legitimate-sounding argument. Great job, Pierre, I’m sure they appreciate it.
But surely last weekend we all discussed our thanks for being in Canada — and not on the United States where division pushed by the president and his corrupt billionaire friends have everyone wondering whether the mid-term 2026 elections will even happen. Or when confrontations with hooded ICE agents will trigger mass violence. Or if what’s coming are even more catastrophic outcomes that lie on the trajectory they are travelling.
Emotions are running high in America, and when that starts, it doesn’t matter what the facts say. You can’t argue facts against a feeling. And that’s something to consider as we try to stop Canadians from getting swept into U.S. political currents.
Yes, the fact is Canada’s population growth is non-existent. That it may even show negative growth in Q4 2025. That we have controlled boarders. They we have processes to determine asylum cases from those that are not. That claims of “mass immigration” or “mass migration” are completely manufactured fantastical nonsense.
But the feelings don’t stop — not even in the people who may not feel happy or proud about having them. But they still do have them.
For us in Canada, our ability to resist being drawn into the MAGA nightmare rests heavily on developing feelings that displace the MAGA emotion, ones that instead build social solidarity.
Against those in Canada who pit worker against worker using zero-sum stories, pressing political leaders for their plan for job creation and renewed economic growth may be an important project of unity in diversity, of building feelings that we are all together in defending jobs and Canada.
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