Every year, thousands of new citizens take their oaths after a years-long process to get all the freedoms and protections Canada has to offer.Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
For decades, Canada’s immigration system was a model – the model – for the rest of the world. Year after year, hundreds of thousands of newcomers chose Canada as their future.
The remarkable thing was that nothing particularly remarkable happened. There was no crisis, there were no headlines. New Canadians simply went about building their new lives and in doing so, helped to build Canada.
That success rested on three pillars: a competently administered system with clear rules, a clear-eyed approach that placed a high value on attracting the most skilled migrants and a strong consensus that immigration benefited Canada.
All of those pillars have crumbled in the past couple of years, as the federal Liberals ramped up permanent-resident admissions and, even more significantly, allowed hundreds of thousands of temporary residents to enter the country. The idea was to alleviate what the federal government saw as labour shortages, but the unprecedented change came as housing markets were under unprecedented strain.
The results were predictable (although perhaps not to the federal cabinet). The added weight of newcomers further destabilized housing markets, driving up rents in major urban centres – with temporary residents themselves bearing much of the resulting pain.
The federal Liberals have been forced to roll back many of their recent changes to the immigration system. Most notably, Ottawa now plans to massively reduce the number of temporary migrants by the end of 2026. After several years of record growth, Canada’s population is projected to decline in 2025 and 2026, underscoring the magnitude of the Liberals’ about-face on immigration.
But that upheaval in Canada’s immigration system may just be the beginning. The effects of the Liberals’ missteps are continuing to ripple through other parts of the immigration system. And Ottawa also continues to undermine the economic migrant framework that has served Canada so well for decades. This week, this space will look at the pressures on Canada’s immigration policies – pressures that are pushing an already stretched system to the brink.
On the Brink
This is part of a series on the continuing challenges facing Canada’s immigration system.
Labour: Focus on the workers and skills we need the most
Border: Ottawa must change old thinking about a new frontier
Refugees: A new approach is needed, not just more money
Enforcement: Incentives to follow the rules are not enough
One of the biggest pressure points is the refugee claim system. There have been backlogs for years, but they have soared to dangerous levels under the Liberals, with 260,142 cases outstanding at the end of October. Even in the (impossible) event that no new refugee claims were made, it would take nearly three years to eliminate that backlog. The incentive to file a flimsy claim – and remain in Canada for years waiting for it to be heard – is obvious.
Even when all appeals are exhausted, thousands of claimants find a way to remain in Canada, with data from the Canada Border Services Agency showing that people ordered deported even prior to 2011 remain in this country.
The security of Canada’s border with the United States, long taken for granted, is now a pressing issue. Part of that is owing to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump brandishing tariffs as threats, but there is also the worrying scenario of large numbers of migrants fleeing to Canada rather than being rounded up and deported by the Trump administration.
Those are big problems, and the federal government is responding, even if that response may be late and insufficient.
But there are problems of Ottawa’s own making that threaten to further undermine the immigration system. One is the Liberals’ continued insistence on using immigration to micromanage the labour market. That was the foundation of the government’s error on the immigration file in the postpandemic years: buying into the pitch from business lobbies that huge numbers of temporary migrants were needed to close a massive labour shortage.
That same interventionist mindset is still at work, corroding the points-based system for permanent residents. Rather than simply aim to bring in the highest-skilled migrants, the Liberals have whittled down the points system to instead grant permanent residency to less qualified candidates who can fill perceived skills gaps. And then there is the bigger threat to the points system of using it as a vehicle to allow large numbers of international students to remain in Canada, even though they would not have otherwise qualified.
The federal Liberals’ mistakes on immigration have pushed Canada’s once-enviable system to the brink. And their failure to learn from their mistakes threatens to push it even further.
Podcast: A new diagnosis for immigration
How can Canada reach a better balance on immigration, housing and the labour market? Editorials editor Patrick Brethour spoke with The Decibel about the issues explored in this series. Subscribe for more episodes.