Carney signals plan to crank up Canada's immigration intake
· Toronto Sun
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OTTAWA — Time to re-open the gates.
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That’s what Prime Minister Mark Carney implied during a recent interview with the New York Times , suggesting that Canada’s immigration system is ready to start ramping up intake.
“We’ve taken measures to get that under control and we have it under control,” Carney said during his sit-down last week with 10 New York Times reporters.
“(International) students down by 60%, temporary foreign workers down by 50%. It happens to be the case. Part of this is tightening, but asylum seekers are down by one-third on a flow basis, and now the question starts to become: When do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada?”
Immigration cuts came near end of Trudeau administration
After a decade of record-high immigration levels, largely thanks to policies enacted by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in 2024 Ottawa announced massive cuts in federal immigration targets , citing Canada’s affordability and housing crisis.
Indeed, Canada has seen an explosion in immigration since 2015 — consistently breaking records on landed permanent residents (PR), topping 437,000 in 2022, followed by 437.539 in 2022 and 483,000 in 2023.
Prior to that, annual PR intake was typically between 220,000 and 280,000.
As well, the 2021 census indicated that immigrants made up around 23% of Canada’s population, a 150-year record surpassing the previous highs of 22.3% recorded in 1921.
Canada also saw a surge in non-permanent residents — a cohort which includes international students, foreign workers and refugees — growing from under 1 million to over 2.7 million by the middle of 2024.
Instead of his policies, Trudeau chose to blame corporations for Canada’s unsustainable explosion of newcomers.
“Far too many corporations have chosen to abuse our temporary measures by exploiting foreign workers while refusing to hire Canadians for a fair wage,” Trudeau said at the time.
“All while under the watch of provinces, some colleges and universities are bringing in more international students than communities can accommodate, treating them as an expendable means to line their own pockets.”
Canada’s 2025 target of 500,000 new permanent residents was dialled back to 395,000, and further to 380,000 by 2026, with 2027’s target set at 365,000.
That new policy was designed to create a 0.2% decline in Canada’s population until this year, with plans to return to 0.8% growth next year.
Record immigration put pressure on Canada, Carney admits
Carney’s comments came about a month before the federal government is mandated to table its 2027-2029 immigration levels plan in the House of Commons.
In his interview, Carney acknowledged that Canada’s influx of immigrants put pressure on other parts of Canadian life.
“We’re a country of immigrants. We consistently take around one per cent of our population in terms of immigration,” he said.
“The consequence of that was that the pressure on the education system, the pressure on housing, the pressure on other things was very high. We stopped those from being purely demand-driven and capped them. And the fact was that what was also happening on the postsecondary side was there were basically degree factories coming up that were there for the visa as opposed to some of that demand.”
He added that “controlled” increases to Canada’s population are indeed coming.
“That will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control,” he said.