Please handle the issue in a better manner

We complain that after they are elected, the politicians don’t do what they promise to do. Ironically, it is sometimes much better for the country that some of those promises are never fulfilled.

Let’s hope, for example, that the promises made by our political leaders to increase the level of immigration and fund more money to the immigrant organizations are not kept.

At present, Canada is taking far too many immigrants and the leaders of all parties are promising to take even more immigrants. The only thing that they care about is gaining a few more ‘ethnic voters’. The fact is that there are already close to a million immigrants waiting in the backlog to come to Canada and they have met all the requirements and must be admitted by the law. There is a backlog of 62,000 asylum seekers and even if they are identified as not genuine refugees, most will be allowed to stay here. In addition to these huge numbers, there are around 200,000 temporary workers present in the country and it is unlikely that many of them will ever go back home.

But still the Harper government plans to raise the immigration intake next year to 265,000. And worse, the Liberals and the New Democrats say that they want even more, at least one percent of the population i.e. 333,000 each year.

These are huge numbers and even in the best of times, this would place a serious burden on the economy. Now, when there is a turn down in the world economy and ominous predictions of serious recession or even worse, it is not the best of times to bring in thousands of newcomers to Canada. In July this year, Ontario alone lost more than 55,000 jobs- so where is the need of more immigrants? The fact is that we instead need to reduce the intake.

The only reason why our political parties are pushing for higher immigration intake is that they see the new immigrants as a potential vote during the election. The behavior is absolutely irresponsible and borders on culpable negligence.

Our politicians justify their thoughts by stating that we have an aging population and immigration is the only answer to this dilemma, but there is no truth in the statement. The fact is that immigration is not an answer to the aging population and a number have studies done in Canada has already proved this.