So far the only issue is with housing provision in many cities where a small group of people can exercise massive influence to limit housing supply to their advantage.
I think those who bemoan immigration may have a failure of imagination about the effects of a shrinking workforce and falling housing demand.
Pushing immigration as the main solution to a shrinking workforce is lazy and likely doomed to fail given Canada's poor track record in building housing and infrastructure. A more cohesive plan would include:
-pushing people into the workforce at younger ages. The number of people consuming more than four years to get through undergrad degrees is alarming. Lots of people also end up studying degrees of little personal interest in hope of getting into the programs they actually want. Perhaps tuitions should rise to fund additional seats while incenting students to finish as quickly as possible. Finally, lots of professions have suffered credential creep to limited tangible benefit. For example, do four year nursing programs really produce higher quality workers than the former three and two year diploma programs?
-encourage people to remain in the workforce longer by pushing out the OAS and CPP eligibility ages, increasing the penalties for activating these programs earlier and pushing out the age at which RRSPs convert to RIFs. Of all the regressive policy measures inacted at the federal level since 2015, perhaps the most egregious was cancelling the already announced push of OAS eligibility from 67 back to 65. If anything, the feds should have pushed it out to 68 or 69
-public sector employees qualify for ridiculously generous pensions at obscenely young ages. Reducing the amount of these pensions and say increasing the qualification (age plus years of service) by ten years could drastically reduce the new employee demand in public services
-workers on short term disability due to injuries should be able to jump queues for medical treatment to get them back into the workforce as soon as possible
-another policy regression at the federal level was increasing the priority of family reunification for immigration priority. Individuals, particarly younger ones, with scarce skills should receive absolute priority. Family reunification is important, but less so, and especially when it involves older family members and ones who aren't immediate family
-most important of all, would be doing something to overcome Canada's poor track record on private sector investment in productivity enhancing plant, equipment and training. Yet another example of the recurring theme of policy regression at the federal level has been more (instead of fewer) regulatory barriers to investment, be they in the alleged name of indigenous reconcoliation and climate change, as examples