In major U-turn, Canada to cut immigration, cop population decline

Toronto: Canada is set to slash the number of immigrants that it welcomes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced, in a sharp reversal for a country that bet big on immigration to boost economic prosperity and that has long cast itself as open to newcomers.

The about-face comes as public opinion polls show waning support for immigration amid concerns it is worsening long-standing housing shortages, pushing up rents and deepening stresses on an already overburdened healthcare system.

Since his election in 2015, Trudeau has planned to steadily increase immigration levels. In 2022, the country set record targets, in part to plug pandemic labour shortages. “Canada needs more people,” said Sean Fraser, then the immigration minister.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces the changes on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.Credit: AP

That approach has set Canada apart from the US, where Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has pledged mass deportations and blames migrants for crime and disorder, and from Europe, where anti-migrant sentiment has propelled far-right political parties to victory.

Now Trudeau’s government is rolling up the welcome mat and admitting that it bungled the policy.

Canada is to admit 395,000 new permanent residents in 2025, a 21 per cent drop from the target of 500,000 it set last year. That number will fall further to 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027. All are below the goal of 485,000 set for this year.

Officials also introduced the country’s first-ever targets for temporary residents such as international students and foreign workers. Their numbers are projected to fall by nearly 450,000 in 2025 and 2026. In 2023, about 800,000 people held that status.

People walk past banners inviting students to study in Canada and other places abroad at a market in Amritsar, in the northern Indian state of Punjab last week.Credit: AP

The changes mean that after several years in which Canada had record population growth thanks mostly to immigration (Canada has been growing faster than its G7 peers as well as countries with higher birth rates such as India), its population is projected to shrink by 0.2 per cent.

“Our immigration system has always been responsible and it has always been flexible,” Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa. But in attempting to address labour needs and maintain population growth, “we didn’t get the balance quite right”.

Reaction to the reversal has been mixed.

Bank of Montreal director of economics Robert Kavcic said in a note that the new immigration plan would “take stress off the economy and infrastructure that has become almost debilitating in recent years”, citing the housing sector in particular.

Multicultural parliament: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is joined by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller (front left) and MPs at the announcement.Credit: AP

But more than 100 civil society groups, including several of Canada’s largest unions, criticised the U-turn.

“This government was elected on a pro-immigration platform and promised permanent resident status for migrant workers, students and undocumented people,” they said in a letter. “People across Canada are expecting these promises to be honoured. Not delivering on them will be remembered at the ballot box.”

Immigration has long drawn high levels of public support here and it has been viewed as critical for offsetting the economic effects of low fertility rates and an ageing workforce. That consensus, built over generations, has cut across the political spectrum.

Students at the Georgian ILAC campus, Toronto. New Immigration laws drastically reduce foreign students in Canada.Credit: Bloomberg

But there have been signs that consensus is at risk. Last week, an Environics Institute poll found that nearly 60 per cent of Canadians agree that there is “too much immigration”. That is the highest share in 25 years and the fastest shift in a two-year period since it began asking the question in 1977.

“The latest findings suggest the balance of public opinion about the volume of immigration currently being admitted into the country has effectively flipped from being acceptable (if not valuable) to problematic,” the pollster said.

The poll found that more than two-thirds of Canadians agree that immigration has a positive economic impact. The biggest reason they gave for saying there is too much immigration is its impact on housing prices.

Shifting views have added to the troubles for Trudeau, whose Liberal Party trailed the Conservatives by double digits in the polls for more than a year, in part because of housing concerns. At a meeting of his caucus on Wednesday, some Liberal MPs called on him to resign. He says he plans to stay.

Canada’s population grew by more than 1.2 million people in 2023 to over 40 million, up 3.2 per cent from the year before, in the highest annual increase since 1957. About 98 per cent of that came from immigration.

The US grew by about 1.7 million people to more than 335 million, or 0.5 per cent, in 2023, according to estimates from the US Census Bureau. That’s in part because of rising immigration, the agency said.

Most of Canada’s population growth was driven by a massive influx of temporary migrants such as international students. Universities and colleges have sought to recruit them because they pay more tuition than domestic students.

Canada has more than 3 million temporary residents, about 7.2 per cent of the country’s population. In 2022, they comprised about 4 per cent.

Critics, including some economists, have complained the country has botched the management of a system that has long been a point of national pride by admitting too many immigrants too quickly without ensuring the infrastructure could accommodate them.

“It is easy to blame immigrants for everything,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said. “It’s also undeniable that the volume of migration has contributed to affordability [challenges], but there’s some nuances there.”

Bank of Canada deputy governor Toni Gravelle said in a speech before the Windsor-Essex Chamber of Commerce in December that immigrants had alleviated labour shortages.

Housing supply had not kept pace with the nation’s demography, he said, but that was also because of “structural challenges” such as zoning restrictions, permit processes and a construction worker shortage. (Some fall under the purview of provincial and local governments.)

Amid the growing backlash, the government had begun to introduce measures to curb immigration.

It froze the number of permanent residents that it planned to welcome; announced a temporary limit on international student visas; and pledged to shrink the proportion of the population made up of temporary residents to 5 per cent over three years.

Then came Thursday’s cuts.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce praised the “government’s efforts to strengthen and ensure” the country’s immigration system but it said those efforts would be “disappointing” for businesses that had “had to deal with abrupt and constant changes” to immigration policy.

“Immigration is a key driver of economic growth and our only source of workforce growth in the near future,” Diana Palmerin-Velasco, a senior director at the chamber, said in a statement. “The future of Canada depends on getting immigration right. We can do better.”

The Washington Post