Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller arrives to hold a news conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Nov. 1. Miller kept the already-planned immigration target of 500,000 in 2025, but said there’d be no increase in 2026.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Don’t look too closely at the immigration targets the federal government set Wednesday. They’re not the numbers that matter right now.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller kept the already-planned target of 500,000 in 2025, but said there’d be no increase in 2026. But that isn’t Canada’s immigration number.
The figure that matters more is the 2.2 million in temporary residents who are in Canada. That number has surged for reasons that have nothing to do with immigration planning. And the Liberal government should be screwing up their courage to do something about that, right away.
There is a housing shortage in Canada. Reducing temporary immigration, including foreign students paying top dollar to private colleges in strip malls, is one of the few things the federal government can – and should – do about it. Quickly.
That is not an anti-immigration measure. It is one step toward fixing an immigration system that lures many people to Canada where they pay for a false promise of permanent residency.
What Mr. Miller announced Wednesday was something else. It was an attempt at a compromise with the Liberals’ own political conundrum.
There is public pressure to reduce the number of immigrants and it is evident in opinion polls. The Liberals didn’t want to send a signal they were reducing immigration, so they kept the already-known targets for 2024 and 2025. They didn’t want to be seen increasing the numbers, to they froze it for 2026.
But figures for the number of new permanent immigrants aren’t the ones that matter most right now. One reason, as Mr. Miller explained, is that 35 per cent of next year’s permanent residents are already in Canada. But the other reason is that with the surge of temporary residents, it’s not clear that reducing permanent residents would lower the total. And recruiting permanent residents should be about long-term planning.
Yet there are real reasons to trim the surge of temporary residents. One is to fix abuses. Another is to ease a strained housing market.
There are reasons why Mr. Miller doesn’t want to tackle that by capping the numbers. It would be complicated, because not all categories are the same. Universities and colleges would scream if they lost a booming business charging higher tuitions to foreigners. Provincial governments have liked that, too, so Ontario’s, notably, let a problem grow and grow.
Public support for immigration falls sharply amid affordability concerns
No wonder Mr. Miller said he’d rather take time to work with provinces to do “fine surgery” rather than set a cap. But the housing crisis is here now, and the Bank of Canada cites it as an impediment to fighting inflation.
The rapid increase in temporary residents has fuelled population growth, especially in Ontario. Ivey Business School professor Mike Moffat, the founding director of the Sustainable Prosperity Institute, has noted that population surge stoked the housing crisis.
In 2022, the number of foreign students in Canada grew from 617,250 to 807,260. More than half of them were in Ontario, where the numbers have more than doubled since 2016. The number of study permits issued in 2023 is already outstripping 2022.
Dr. Moffatt said he thinks freezing the numbers would cool the housing market. Cutting them by a significant number – say 100,000 – would make rents and house prices fall, he believes.
Of course, Ottawa doesn’t want to scare away foreign university students forever. They are often the people Canada wants to recruit as permanent residents.
But the market for foreign students is lucrative, and private colleges have sprung up to cater to them, sometimes without providing value for the education dollar.
What they are really selling, in the eyes of University of Waterloo immigration economist Mikal Skuterud, is permanent residency in Canada – or worse, a promise of permanent residency that might not come true.
Canada offers “pathways” to permanent residency for some foreign students and temporary workers but the government has muddied the waters about who will actually get status.
The best way to fix that is to make the path to status clearer, so a foreign student knows, for example, if a two-year private college certificate in international business won’t lead to permanent status. Dr. Skuterud notes that would make the system more transparent and cut the numbers.
In the meantime, the temporary resident numbers matter, now. Mr. Miller and the Liberals have to steel themselves to trim the excesses.