JD Vance Wades Into Canadian Immigration Debate

U.S. Vice President JD Vance says the stagnation of living standards in Canada is due to a rapid rise in immigration rather than to tariffs imposed by the United States.

Vance made the comments while reacing to a post on X indicating that Canada’s per-capita GDP has remained stagnant since 2018. He said the reasons for this trend were “complicated,” but noted that Canada had brought in a large number of immigrants in recent years. He also noted Canada has the highest foreign-born share of the population among G7 countries, which was confirmed by Statistics Canada’s 2021 census.

“With all due respect to my Canadian friends, whose politics focus obsessively on the United States: your stagnating living standards have nothing to do with Donald Trump or whatever bogeyman the CBC tells you to blame,” Vance added.

“The fault lies with your leadership, elected by you.”

Vance’s observations come at a time when the United States has imposed a series of tariffs on Canada. Washington also paused trade negotiations with Ottawa in October after the Ontario government released an anti-tariff advertisement on U.S. networks featuring a 1987 speech by former President Ronald Reagan.

The X post that Vance responded to showed a chart from Ice Cap Asset Management illustrating the living standard rates for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom from 2016 to 2025. The graph illustrates how all three nations experienced a decline in this metric during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, but the United States has seen growth in recent years, while the metric for Canada and the UK has remained relatively stagnant.

Back in 2017, Trump had praised Canada and Australia for having a “merit-based immigration system” and said the United States should adopt a similar policy. He said his country should shift away from a system that prioritized “lower-skilled immigration,” and adopt a merit-based policy that he said would raise workers’ wages and save money.

Canada’s Liberal government announced plans to increase immigration rates in 2020, and further increased numbers in late 2022, saying this would allow Canadian businesses to fill worker shortages. Canada’s population increased from 38 million in July 2020 to an estimated 41.2 million by July 2024. A Statistics Canada report from 2024 showed 96 percent of the population growth in the second quarter of 2024 was almost entirely due to immigration.

In 2024, Ottawa acknowledged high immigration levels were putting a strain on housing and health care and began lowering its target immigration levels  through measures such as reducing the number of temporary residents from 6.5 percent of Canada’s population to 5 percent over the next three years.

Immigration Minister Lena Diab said in the House of Commons on Sept. 22 that the government is intent on “ensuring that our immigration system becomes sustainable, as well as intent on protecting our borders.” She also noted that 100,000 fewer international students arrived in 2025 because of a two-year cap on permits introduced in 2024.

Budget 2025 stated that Canada will aim to admit 385,000 temporary residents next year and 370,000 in the following two years. Last year’s immigration plan said Canada would welcome more than 516,000 temporary residents.

Conservatives have accused the Liberal government of having “broken” Canada’s immigration system with “radical open-borders policies.” Tory immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner has noted that Canada exceeded its immigration targets in the second quarter of 2025, bringing in 105,000 temporary foreign workers compared to a promised cap of 82,000.

Statistics Canada noted in an April 2024 report that Canada’s GDP-per-capita had declined in five of the past six quarters and was currently near levels seen in 2017. It said that while the “pace of economic activity” had slowed, “Canada’s population continued to expand rapidly.”

Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers warned in 2024 that Canada had an issue with low productivity, and that this would lead to inflation ticking higher if it was not addressed. She said the issue had reached “emergency” proportions, and the country needed to see more investment in workers to increase productivity.

Before assuming the role of prime minister, Mark Carney delivered a keynote speech about the issue at a Canada 2020 event in Toronto in April 2024. He said the government would need to “spend because we have become less productive,” and that “unless we turn that around, Canadian prosperity for all Canadians will be severely compromised.”