Fear of Donald Trump and loathing of his tariffs have obscured other vital issues in this federal election campaign. And none is more vital than restoring confidence in Canada’s broken immigration system.

“Broken” is the right – if politically loaded – word. Even the Liberals agree that their open-door policies toward temporary workers and foreign students badly damaged the immigration system.

The issue is whether the Liberals have correctly diagnosed what went wrong and can be trusted to fix it, or whether the Conservatives could better do the job.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau himself admitted the Liberals mismanaged immigration. A lax federal approach toward temporary foreign workers and international students opened the doors to an unprecedented surge.

Fearing labour shortages after pandemic restrictions were lifted, the government permitted hundreds of thousands of new arrivals to flood the country under both streams.

Hundreds of thousands of temporary workers competed for jobs with permanent residents, raising legitimate concerns that they suppressed wages and contributed to housing shortages and unaffordability.

The Liberal government belatedly reduced targets for permanent residents and tightened up criteria for admitting temporary workers and foreign students. The Liberals also set the target of reducing the ranks of temporary residents so that they made up 5 per cent of the overall population, down from 6.5 per cent in the spring of 2023. Since then, that proportion has risen, not fallen, reaching 7.3 per cent of the population as of Jan. 1.

“We made some mistakes,” Mr. Trudeau acknowledged in a video, and his successor, Mark Carney, agrees. “We have not lived up to our promise to those we brought to this country,” he said on Monday. He supports the new lower targets.

The problem for Mr. Carney is that any discussion of immigration reminds Canadians that the Liberals created the mess that they are now trying to fix. He wants Canadians to see him as a trusted guardian of the national interest in a time of crisis, not simply as the Leader of the Liberal Party as it seeks a fourth term.

Mr. Poilievre very much wants people to remember the Liberal mistakes that reduced the party’s standing in the polls to a far-distant second place, before Mr. Carney replaced Mr. Trudeau and revived the Liberals’ fortunes.

The Conservative Leader questions Mr. Carney’s serial Damascene conversions in renouncing past Liberal policies, including the scrapping of the unpopular carbon fuel charge.

A Conservative government, Mr. Poilievre promises, would not permit immigration levels in any given year to exceed the number of new homes built in the previous year. This would take immigration levels down to about 250,000 annually, roughly the level set by the Conservatives under Stephen Harper, and well below the current Liberal target.

An intake of 250,000 may be too low. The revised Liberal plan itself will see Canada’s population decline over the next two years, at least in theory.

We say in theory because no one can be certain whether temporary foreign workers and international students will return to their homelands when their visas expire. Asylum claims processed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada jumped to almost 113,000 in 2024, an increase of almost 42,000 from the previous year.

The NDP is calling for a task force to study immigration policy. Convening a task force is usually an excuse to delay action, though this may indeed be the time for a thorough and dispassionate examination of the system.

Canada is an aging society. Reducing the immigration stream too much could create labour shortages and leave too few younger workers available to sustain the health care, pension and other needs of older Canadians. But the next government needs to ensure that the defects in the immigration system are fixed quickly, or risk further eroding public trust. For the first time in a quarter century, polls show that most Canadians now believe there are too many immigrants coming into Canada.

New Canadians are a huge asset to this country. Support for immigration and for multicultural diversity is, or at least ought to be, Canada’s great competitive advantage over many other countries. Preserving that advantage ought to be one of the most important issues of this campaign.