Immigration Becomes An Issue In Canada's Election

Via Breitbart:

Canada’s conservative leader wants to win the nation’s April 28 national elections and is hammering Justin Trudeau’s replacement for supporting the massive legal immigration that has caused massive pocketbook damage to ordinary Canadians.

. . . The two parties are close in the polls as Poilievre slams Carney for supporting Trudeau’s very unpopular immigration policy.

n 2015, the investor-led Century Initiative persuaded Trudeau to grow the economy by inflating the nation’s population from 36 million to 100 million by 2100. Since then, Trudeau has imported four million migrants — or 10 percent of the nation’s population, which is the equivalent of 33 million migrants in the United States.

That huge population of legal migrants — which includes many Indians and migrants who are too old to work — inflicted an economic shock and massive economic damage to 30 million ordinary Canadians.

It cut wages, exacerbated healthcare shortages, and spiked housing costs. It dropped workplace productivity and reduced corporate research. It also imported criminals, unexpected sanitary habits, unfamiliar foreign conflicts, and strange ethnic resentments.

. . . However, Canada’s major investors and older citizens gained enormously. Trudeau’s mass migration inflated the stock market by 40 percent with a flood of consumers, renters, and low-wage workers.

In the run-up to the April 28 national election, Poilievre is wrapping the Century Initiative around Carney’s political neck.

The soft Canadian border will become an increasing problem with illegals crossing from the US as pressure rises on them to self-deport. A former officer in the Canadian Border Services Agency who now researches border security at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Kelly Sundberg, said, “Canada can expect a tsunami of illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities and coming into our country.”

Sundberg attributes the change to the Trump administration’s increasing removal of undocumented migrants, particularly actions such as sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to Guantanamo Bay. Canada’s lax border compounds this, Sundberg said.

“I hope I’m wrong, but it would appear that we’re going to be overwhelmed by the illegal immigrants fleeing American authorities coming into our country,” he continued. “And they very well might be bringing guns and drugs with them.”

As a true crime fan, I've been intrigued by the fact that two of Canada's most notorious serial killers had sideline businesses involving smuggling, something we never saw in the US with figures like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy. In fact, psychological profiles of figures like Bundy and Gacy stress their desire to maintain a respectable facade -- they would never dirty their hands with petty crime.

But Gabriel Wortman, who killed 22 and injured three in a 2020 Nova Scotia shooting spree, was alleged earlier to have smuggled guns and drugs into Canada:

On July 27, [2020,] court documents were unsealed, detailing police interviews with witnesses who claimed Wortman was a drug smuggler who provided people in Portapique and nearby unincorporated community of Economy with drugs from Maine. These witnesses alleged Wortman had stockpiles of guns and drugs, along with false walls and hidden compartments, in his properties. The RCMP confirmed three days later that Wortman had kept hidden compartments in buildings, but they were unable to corroborate the drug smuggling claims. . . . Additional witnesses told police that Wortman and an associate tended to travel to the U.S. and smuggle cigarettes, alcohol, and presumably other illegal items from there, using a sailboat the associate owned.

Paul Bernardo, who with Karla Homolka made up the Ontario "Ken and Barbie killers", encountered Leslie Mahaffy, one of their victims, while stealing license plates on a dark street late at night.

After their marriage, Karla and Paul Bernardo lived in their home on Bayview in St. Catharines. Paul had begun augmenting his income by smuggling cigarettes across the border and needed the stolen license plates to disguise his frequent visits across the American-Canadian line. It was the need for a stolen license plate that brought him into contact with his first murder victim, Leslie Mahaffy.

. . . Leslie had actually gone back to her home to see if there was any way to get in without waking her parents. With the worst possible luck imaginable, she encountered Paul Bernardo who was prowling around the neighborhood looking for license plates to steal.

He pulled a knife on Leslie Mahaffy and forced her to go in his car.

So apparently, smuggling guns, drugs, and cigarettes is a common sort of criminal activity in Canada even among respectable, seemingly middle-class people, whereas tbat sort of activity in the US is much more closely acssociated with the habitual criminal underclass.

At the same time, it appears that in the political debate north of the border, there's at least a strain of opinion that says controlling it is exclusively a US issue, for instance:

Let’s be 100% clear. When you cross the border into the USA, you have to go through US customs, not Canadian customs.

If illegals are making it into the USA from Canada, they’re getting there by going through US customs. They drive over and go through US customs or they fly over and go through US customs. So your question should really be “Why can’t US Customs get control of their border?”

I have the impression that many Canadians have so far been unwilling to look at the big picture and perhaps to minimize smuggling from the US into Canada. But think for a moment -- if Canada were in fact part of the US, smuggling guns and cigarettes would simply disappear, the guns especially would be legal.