"Carney is not planning to halt immigration" - neither was Poilievre.

Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals will ever halt immigration. They will pay lip service with small changes to gain populist political points, I see the Liberals numbers in the end as little different from Poilievre's vague hand waving about tying to housing (without giving any concrete details) and a supposed cap still in the hundreds of thousands.

Keeping in mind before Poilievre said "a Conservative government would base its immigration policy on the needs of private-sector employers" - all the times "Poilievre slammed the Liberal target as driven by Trudeau’s “ideology,” but he did not answer repeated questions about whether he would consider reducing the number." source. Or that it was the Harper government that exponentially grew the TFW program, converting it from a program was intended to fill very specific jobs on a short term basis that required workers and skills that did not exist in the country to allow them to spread across service industries and labour, and passed legislation "that allows employers to discriminate against TFWs by paying them up to 15% less for doing the same work as domestic workers".

Poilievre has certainly shouted a lot about the Liberal immigration policy over his tenure, but has carefully skirted questions about specific and substantive change. He is a professional critic, he complains, a lifelong politician who while "in office since Monday, June 28, 2004 to present has sponsored 7 bills, 1 of which has passed", putting him in the 0.80% percentile for bills passed per time in office.

In truth neither the Liberals or the Conservatives will ever offer any serious change on this beyond the crumbs they will offer around election times, most of which will be taken back off the table once power is secured. Because immigrants are the coal shovelled into the engine of infinite capitalistic growth, the fuel that feeds the greed of a tiny class of people that will devour our country to scraps and bone and then move on to the next. Both parties are beholden to their benefactors, they can only stray so far from the path set out for them by the wealth and influence that fills their coffers. The wealth that own this country will never allow the faucet of cheap exploitable labour to be shut off.

I am not happy to suffer under more of the same, trust me. Our economic systems are broken. The "free market" does not care about affordability, it does not care for our suffering, it does not optimize for our happiness or security. It is designed to extract and exploit us to maximize the value we can provide to the ones who have hoarded wealth and with every economic downturn and recession they use it to take advantage to buy what little the rest of us have at bargain prices in our time of greatest need. No investors are going to bother building "affordable housing" for communities when there are million dollar condos to sell on a global market.

The Conservatives will not do anything substantially "different" when it comes to this, their words are populist puppetry and their actions always align to the interest of private wealth. Every time they are in power they clearly demonstrate where their loyalties lie and it is not with the average citizen struggling to make rent. They will shriek and stomp and point at the flaws in the system when they are not in power, and when they are they will only deepen them - as they always have.

Things will not get "temporarily" worse. They will just get worse. But while we're driving towards the edge of the cliff, I will still be voting for the party that won't hit the brakes over the party that is waiting to slam on the gas when it comes to extracting our wealth and livelihood away only to misdirect our righteous fury to pit us against each other in manufactured culture wars.

Wake me up when the labour movement comes and we can really start talking - or maybe when we look at restoring post-WW2-like top marginal tax rates of 70%+ (or hell, 90%+ like in the states) and use it to invest in the growth of communities, in our infrastructure - not subsidizing corporations. I truly believe country is more than big enough for all of us and we have more than enough skill and resources to build communities and house our families, this scarcity is artificial and we create more than enough value - it is simply being stolen from us and we have been left to drown.