According to estimates released last week by Statistics Canada, the Carney government is making progress on one of its immigration goals – reversing the enormous run-up in the country’s temporary resident population.
However, though the government appears to be making headway in terms of lowering immigration numbers back to historical levels, it’s a very different story when it comes to raising quality.
Ottawa also needs to take steps to ensure that the population drop reported by Stastcan is real, and not a statistical mirage.
Let’s start with quality – who immigrates, and how they are chosen.
Since the 1960s, Canada has used a points system to rank economic immigrants applying for permanent residency. With applicants always outnumbering the places on offer, the system was refined over the years to be increasingly selective.
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Economic immigrants, accounting for nearly two-thirds of those offered permanent residency each year, were chosen through a system like that of a selective university. Applicants with the highest scores got the first offers, and the selection worked its way down the list.
But in recent years, Canada shifted in the opposite direction. It wasn’t just that the temporary immigration stream grew larger than the permanent stream, or that temporary immigrants working some of the lowest-skill and lowest-wage jobs were prioritized. The best-and-brightest aspirations of permanent immigration stream were also undermined.
Ottawa shifted to choosing many immigrants not from the objective points system, but through “category-based selection.” What’s that? It involves government disregarding the points system, and deciding that certain attributes or occupations are to be prioritized. They are often low-skill, low-wage and low-scoring.
Here’s how five academic economists recently put it in a paper for the C.D. Howe Institute:
“Under the [points system], applicants for permanent residency were evaluated on their education, work experience, and language proficiency and the highest scoring applicants were admitted. The result was a continuous inflow of top talent chosen without political influence that benefited the Canadian economy …
But in 2023, the government created a new category-based feature in the system. That feature gave the immigration minister the power to prioritize categories of immigrants and move them to the front of the line. A rules-based system was replaced with a discretion-based system.”
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They describe the result as “an opaque system that is exposed to political lobbying, looks like a lottery to prospective migrants, and squeezes out highly skilled candidates.”
To make matters worse, “provincial nominee programs, which give provinces the ability to prioritize groups unable to meet the standard of the points system, account for an ever-increasing share of immigrant admissions.”
The Carney government is aiming to lower immigration numbers, but it is not increasing selectivity. Nor are the provinces. This makes no sense.
And as for immigration quantity?
The data released last week by Statistics Canada that shows a declining national population, due to the departure of hundreds of thousands of temporary residents, is at best incomplete, and at worst very wrong.
Initially, I was not as critical of this as I should have been.
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The statistics agency reported that in the third quarter of 2025, there were 339,505 “non-permanent resident outflows.” That’s the number of temporary residents that it says became permanent residents or left Canada.
Statscan arrived at this figure by making an assumption that is likely off base. An agency technical backgrounder explains that it “assumes that [temporary residents] leave the country when their permit expires if no extension has been granted.”
As former federal economist Henry Lotin and CIBC economist Benjamin Tal detailed, the true number of visa overstayers is likely quite a bit higher than zero. Two years ago, they estimated that perhaps one-million people were in the country without permission.
That figure was based on an estimate that 30 per cent of expired visa holders remained. If we apply that to the most recent Statscan data then Canada’s population decline of 76,000 in the third quarter never happened. The national population instead increased by 26,000.
What’s the true figure? I don’t know. Nobody does.
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The government keeps an almost perfect count of who enters Canada, but as for who exits, we’re flying blind. Ottawa could easily track who leaves, but it does not.
As a result, Statscan’s estimates of the non-permanent population may be far off the mark, and subject to significant future revisions.
In 2019, Statscan concluded that the 2011 census undercounted the temporary resident population – by 43 per cent. Earlier this year, the agency’s estimates of the temporary resident population for the previous quarters were revised upward, significantly.
To compensate for the massive and unprecedented run-up in immigration between 2022 and 2024, the plan put into place at the end of the Trudeau government, and taken up by the Carney government, includes lowering the temporary resident population to less than 5 per cent of the national population by 2027.
Hitting the target will involve many temporary residents gaining permanent residency, but also a few years worth of negative net immigration. Several hundred thousand people will come to Canada each year, but even more will leave.
Unless Ottawa starts counting who leaves, how will we know if the plan is succeeding? We won’t.