Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in Ottawa on Monday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has correctly diagnosed the key problem with how Ottawa sets annual immigration targets: arbitrary numbers that don’t take into account facts on the ground.
But his musings on a new formula fail to differentiate sufficiently between permanent and temporary migrants.
In a recent interview, Mr. Poilievre said migration outflows should be bigger than inflows over the next few years, as the visas of student and temporary workers expire. “We’re going to need more people to leave than to come for the next several years, and that means having negative population growth in that time period,” he told The Hub in June.
It’s not that his math is wrong. Canada’s population surged in recent years, driven largely by a spike in the number of temporary migrants in Canada. But it is that spike – temporary workers and international students – that should be the focus of the effort to reduce the immigration-driven pressure on housing and health care.
There is a danger that the permanent resident program, the foundation of Canada’s immigration success, could be undermined by a clumsy attempt to reduce intake levels.
What’s needed is thoughtful action. Polls show that the Canadian public has lost confidence in Canada’s immigration system. When the government releases projections for future immigration levels this autumn, those targets should come with concrete information as to how the government determined its targets for permanent and temporary residents.
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Justin Trudeau’s government took an aggressive approach to immigration, setting an initial target for 2025 of 500,000 permanent residents, about twice the number brought in annually under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
Citing labour shortages in the wake of the pandemic, the Liberals also loosened restrictions on admitting temporary workers. And they relaxed the maximum number of hours each week that international students studying at colleges and universities could work.
The combined result was an explosion of temporary workers and international students, coupled with a sharp increase in the number of people claiming asylum. The influx contributed to housing shortages and competition for jobs.
The Trudeau government belatedly dialled back immigration levels. Even so, as of April 1 of this year, there were just under three million non-permanent residents in Canada, according to Statistics Canada, accounting for 7.1 per cent of Canada’s population, down from 7.4 per cent in October.
The Liberals have set a target of 5 per cent within the next few years. The government has also sharply reduced the growth in the number of permanent immigrants admitted each year to just under 1 per cent of Canada’s population – 395,000 this year, falling to 365,000 in 2027. (Those levels are still higher than at the start of the decade.)
Mr. Poilievre would take a different approach by applying a “hard rule” in which population intake does not exceed the growth in the housing stock, the job market and the availability of doctors.
There is merit to that approach, although the emphasis should be on using permanent residency as a tool to ease shortages of specific skills, such as doctors. The focus of any effort to reduce the weight of migration on housing and social services should be squarely on temporary residents.
Re-establishing public confidence in the immigration system means restricting temporary foreign workers to areas where there simply aren’t Canadians able and willing to take a job, such as in the agriculture sector. Permits for other businesses should, for the most part, be denied. If those firms cannot operate without the subsidy of indentured labour, then they do not have a viable business model.
Federal and provincial governments must return the international student program to its former role of recruiting highly qualified students from around the world who will make excellent candidates to become permanent residents once they graduate. As this space has repeatedly argued, those students should be limited to on-campus work.
And the government must follow through on its proposals to end the abuses of the asylum system.
Mr. Poilievre’s proposed formula needs work, but the idea is at least a recognition that immigration targets in recent years have been arbitrary – and a big part of the reason that Canadians are losing faith in the system.