A new poll commissioned exclusively for OMNI News by Leger has found that nearly seven in 10 new Canadians think politicians are using immigration as a “red herring” to distract from other factors contributing to the lack of affordable housing, like government policies and economic conditions.
With a majority feeling unfairly blamed for the housing crisis.
Montreal experts like Carlos Rojas, the director of the Action Réfugiés Montréal (ARM), who’s been working as an advocate for migrants’ rights for more than 20 years, and Amy Darwish, a community organizer with a Parc-Extension housing group believe government comments and challenges continue to rise for newcomers.
“Every person that rents, even if they are migrants or refugees, when they come to Quebec, they are paying rent and that rent is in many cases going to Quebecois or to corporations,” he said. “We have to take into consideration they’re not stealing anything they are paying,” explained Rojas.
“They are the ones who are most deeply impacted by it”
Darwish added, “It is very much because of inaction on both the provincial and federal government that we are in this mess,” she said. “It is because they refuse to crack down on landlords, it is because they refuse to build social housing, not because there are too many migrants.”
“If anything, migrants are very much on the front lines of the housing crisis.”
The federal government is planning on bringing the share of temporary residents to 5 per cent of Canada’s total population, down from 6.5 per cent.
Andrew Enns, executive vice-president of the central Canada operations of Leger, believes it’s challenging for a political party to forsake the immigrant vote in a general federal election and expect to do very well.
“I think they have to, they have policies that, they don’t have to necessarily be policies that are specifically targeted only to immigrant communities, but I think their policies that they have, have to be, have some traction within the broad base of immigrant populations in the country,” said Enns.
A former policy advisor to federal Immigration ministers, El-Chidiac believes politicians are scapegoating immigrants, despite being the ones responsible for the lack of affordable homes.
“They are the ones who instituted the policies that got us here,” she told OMNI News. “Every level of government has made policies that have made it more difficult for homes to be built in Canada.”
El-Chidiac says if politicians “actually cared” about solving the crisis, “they would come up with ways that allow people to build more.”
Rojas and Darwish say rising costs bring multiple challenges, and when the housing crisis unfolded the rents started to go up during the pandemic when immigration was at a standstill.
Rojas says he wasn’t surprised with the poll numbers as this tone has always been used.
He says immigrants sacrifice a lot and are willing to work and succeed in this country, adding, that he hopes the narrative and tone surrounding this will change.
“The refugees of today are going to be the Canadian citizens of tomorrow and believe me, they are as proud as to be a Canadian and they are pursuing the Canadian dream,” said Rojas.
Responding to the poll finding on Tuesday, however, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told OMNI News that “there’s no question” the volume of temporary residents Canada welcomed the past few years has contributed to the affordability crisis.
“That is not something you can go around denying entirely,” he added. “To what extent it contributes to it, I think, has been subject of debate.”
-With files from Giacomo Burrati, OMNI News