Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller are joined by fellow members of Parliament as they hold a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Oct. 24.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
In the past 30 months, the number of immigrants in Canada grew by more than 2.7 million. That’s more than the number of people living in the Atlantic provinces. It’s the population of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, combined. It’s more than the number of people who became permanent residents in the nine years of Stephen Harper’s government, or the decade that Jean Chrétien was prime minister.
And it’s all water under the bridge. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has gone from enthusiastically embracing an open border for visa students and notionally temporary workers – that’s what most of the 2.7 million are – to promising the opposite, namely a negative immigration rate for the next two years. Hundreds of thousands of temporary residents will continue to arrive in 2025 and 2026, but a larger flow is supposed to go in the other direction.
The new policy, promising two years of radical immigration dieting, isn’t ideal. But it’s necessary under the circumstances, namely the government’s previous embrace of the immigration equivalent of binge eating. The new approach can get Canada back to a better place. But it won’t be easy.
Getting to the destination, and arriving in the best shape possible, will call for something that has not always been the Trudeau government’s strong suit: diligent management of a complex file, month after month and year after year.
The details to be sweated fall into two broad categories.
First, Canada has to make the immigration system smarter, by focusing on immigrants who are more educated and have higher earning potential than the average Canadian. That’s how to generate the maximum economic bang. It’s also how to restore popular support for immigration.
Second, because the population of temporary residents has more than doubled since 2022, to three million, and because a large share will never get permanent residency, steps have to be taken to ensure that the latter group does not remain in Canada after their visas expire.
The Trudeau government has made some positive moves on the first item, while finally acknowledging the reality of the second. It is no longer talking about encouraging lawbreaking by “regularizing” people who overstay work, study or tourist visas, and rewarding them with citizenship. Last week’s announcement says temporary residents who do not win one of the limited permanent-residency spots will have to “leave Canada.”
Canada is one of the world’s most sought-after immigration destinations, which is why hundreds of thousands of people were willing to pay tuition to no-name colleges. But because Canada’s pool of potential immigrants is so much larger than the number of immigration spots on offer, we can afford to be choosy. We have no choice but to choose.
And if our goal is raising productivity, raising gross domestic product per capita, and raising prosperity for all, we must focus on raising the skills and education of the Canadian work force. That means focusing our economic immigration stream on the best and brightest.
The Trudeau government – urged on by business, provinces and many lower-quality institutions of higher education – stood the best-and-brightest imperative on its head. The student visa program added record numbers of students, but mostly not at top-level institutions training for high-paying jobs. The temporary worker stream joined in focusing on filling alleged labour shortages at the bottom of the job market. These temporary residents were also increasingly given priority for permanent-residency slots.
It was a system of quantity over quality. One of the not-unexpected results has been two years of declining GDP per capita.
To reverse that trajectory, Canada should do four big things: cancel the Temporary Foreign Worker Program for jobs paying less than $100,000 a year, with the exception of the long-standing seasonal agricultural work program; devote more of the falling number of permanent-residency spots to economic immigrants, and fewer to family reunification; allocate most of the now-limited number of student visas to students at top-flight programs and institutions; and ensure that postgraduation work permits – with their shot at permanent residency – go to students with high earning potential, rather than those filling low-wage jobs.
The United States is mostly not a model for Canada on immigration, but it gets some things right on visa students. Foreign students there are generally not allowed to work off-campus, except in jobs related to their studies. A student in engineering may be allowed to take a part-time job at an engineering firm, which may transition into postgraduation work in engineering. But the Canadian trade of tuition for a fast-food job is not possible in the U.S.
Ottawa has finally begun to address this, but it – and the provinces, notably Ontario – can do more.
The longer-term challenge the Trudeau government has created comes from the record number of people it allowed into the country on temporary permits, but who won’t ever get permanent residency. Taylor Swift’s tour managers don’t let hundreds of thousands of people into a stadium and then ask those without tickets to leave, but that’s basically what Ottawa did.
Unwinding that will not be quick or easy. The challenge will trouble governments, and Canadians, for years to come.