Applicants recite the Oath of Citizenship as they become new Canadians at a citizenship ceremony in Ottawa in March.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
If deliverology was still a thing in Ottawa, the Carney government’s immigration policy would be earning its first check mark.
In the third quarter of 2025, Statistics Canada estimates that the national population fell by 76,000. There were 18,000 more births than deaths, but net migration was minus 94,000.
In other words, 94,000 more people moved out of Canada than moved in. They were overwhelmingly temporary residents.
The government gets this deliverology gold star because that unprecedented figure is not an accident or a tragedy, but the whole point of a long-overdue plan to right-size immigration. We ate a 5,000-calorie brunch. Now, we’re going on a bit of diet.
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We just had our first quarter of dieting. Several more are to come.
Based on the figures for the last three quarters, Canada’s net immigration level for 2025 should be roughly zero. It may even be slightly negative.
The 2025 permanent immigration target is 395,000 arrivals, and the government is on track to meet that. But there are already 290,000 fewer temporary residents than at the start of the year. If that trend continues, the increase in permanent residents and the decrease in temporary residents will be roughly equal.
That’s the federal plan for the next couple of years. Poll after poll says it’s also what voters want. All Ottawa has to do now is continue delivering more of the same, while resisting calls to change course from business lobbyists, the Century Initiative and the most progressive wing of the Liberal Party.
I published a book on immigration earlier this year, the result of time spent trying to get a handle on what the Trudeau government had done. The system has grown so big and complex, and so opaque, with so many different pathways and programs, that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. Even the government appeared unaware of all that it was doing.
Immigration has to come down for a while because during the Trudeau government it went to the moon.
For a quarter century, from the 1990s until 2015, Canadian immigration was stable, at around a quarter million arrivals a year. As a share of the population, that wasn’t low; it was double or triple the United States’ immigration rate. Those figures include all immigration and emigration – including, in the U.S., estimates of illegal and irregular immigration.
The Trudeau government started boosting immigration as soon as it got into office, but it really supercharged things after the pandemic.
The U.S. experienced the biggest immigration surge in its history between 2022 and 2024, and that helped to re-elect President Donald Trump. Canada’s immigration surge, relative to the size of the population, was three times as large.
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Canada took in 3.1 million new permanent and net temporary residents in just three years. That was four times the pre-Trudeau immigration level.
Immigration shot up so much in part because Canada now has two immigration doors. There’s the permanent immigration stream, which is what most people think of when they hear the term “immigration,” and there’s the side door of temporary immigration. The side door used to be small but by 2023, it was twice the size of the traditional door. Until last year, the number of side-door admissions was not capped, and was effectively unlimited.
The accompanying charts show what happened. By 2024, the number of people in the Temporary Foreign Worker program was more than 10 times larger than in 2000 – and that program, despite all the attention it gets, is a small part of the temporary foreign worker ecosystem. The real action is in visa students – the Trudeau government gave them the right to work full-time while in school – whose numbers exceeded one million in 2023. Then there’s the even larger International Mobility Program, one of whose main components is postgraduate work permits for former students.
By 2024, the estimated number of temporary foreign residents exceeded 3.1 million, or 7.6 per cent of the population. That’s now down to 2.8 million, or 6.8 per cent.
The government aims to continue lowering that, to less than 5 per cent by 2027. Canada’s non-permanent population was less than 1 per cent in the year 2000.
Many temporary residents are going to have to leave – a prospect that was always a condition of receiving their visas. More must leave than arrive, at least for a few years.
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At the same time, however, many temporary residents can exit the category but remain in the country – because they will be chosen to be permanent residents. In 2023, half of those tapped to become permanent residents were temporary residents. Ottawa’s latest immigration plan suggests that share could go higher.
There’s a compelling logic to choosing many permanent immigrants from the temporary resident pool. But with such a large pool, and so many more applicants than permanent residence spaces, Canada can afford to be choosy. For the sake of the economy, we must be choosy.
Unfortunately, that’s not what Ottawa and the provinces are doing. The Carney government gets a small gold star for a couple of quarters of right-sizing immigration quantity, but it gets a question mark, and even a black mark, when it comes to correcting the significant downgrade in immigration quality and selectivity that took place under the Trudeau government.
More on that next week.