Kara-Great Mugisha, 7, holds the flag that was given to her father Eric, after he became a Canadian citizen in Ottawa, Thursday, March 20, 2025.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
For more than a year, immigration has been at the forefront of the political agenda, and the subject of heated exchanges in the Commons. Polls have shown that Canadians’ long-standing support for increasing the number of new arrivals has dropped in the past two years, amid fears about the cost of housing and strains on health care.
But during the election campaign so far, immigration has been relegated to a second-tier concern. The threat to the economy and job security posed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and other “pocketbook issues” has eclipsed it as an issue, even though border security – fuelled by Mr. Trump’s barbs about illegal migration from Canada – has been in the spotlight for months.
Pollster Nik Nanos said that “immigration as an issue has been falling by the wayside, as all Canadians have been transfixed by Donald Trump.” That includes immigrants themselves.
“Immigrants actually are much more likely to be kind of keyed into issues related to economic prosperity and jobs,” Mr. Nanos said. “That’s why the uncertainty related to Donald Trump has a significant impact. New Canadians, immigrants, recent immigrants are all wondering, what is the future of Canada? Where are jobs going to come from?”
None of the three major parties have yet formally outlined their platform on immigration, although the issue has been raised on the campaign trail.
Both Liberal Leader Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre have stressed the need to cap immigration levels to better align numbers with the availability of housing, while the NDP has said it would set up a panel of experts to examine immigration policy.
The Bloc Québécois wants Ottawa to turn over to Quebec complete control of how many newcomers enter the province.
Mr. Poilievre has been most vocal on immigration during the campaign. At rallies and events across the country, he has tied rising immigration to the lack of affordable homes, setting out plans to dramatically reduce immigration so the number of newcomers annually aligns with homes built the previous year.
He has blamed the Liberals for letting numbers of immigrants increase, seizing on Mr. Carney’s appointment of Mark Wiseman, who co-founded the Century Initiative, to his Canada-U.S. advisory council.
The Century Initiative, a non-profit organization, is sticking to its goal of bringing the country’s population to 100 million people by the century’s end, although public support for more immigration has dropped.
Answering questions at one campaign event, Mr. Poilievre hit out at the think tank’s target as a “radical, crazy idea that’s meant for multinational corporate elites to bring in people from poor countries in large numbers, to take away Canadian jobs, drive wages down and profits up.”
“We will reject the Century Initiative, we will cap immigration so that population never grows faster than the availability of homes, health care and jobs,” he added.
Mr. Poilievre, however, has said Canada will continue to welcome skilled immigrants, including doctors. He has unveiled plans for a “Blue Seal” national professional testing standard to quickly license qualified professionals from abroad, including doctors and nurses.
At one campaign event, Mr. Poilievre stressed that he loves immigrants – and wants more. He has also highlighted his wife Anaida’s refugee background, and how her family struggled but worked hard after arriving in Canada from Venezuela, to pursue a better life here.
“We used to have a great system. You know, people from around the world came here with nothing but a dream and a suitcase, and it worked. But in the last 10 years of the Liberals, it’s gotten totally out of control,” he said.
“I’m going to slow immigration down, and I have a very simple mathematical formula. The numbers we let in this year will have to be lower than the number of homes we built in the previous year. So we’re always going to be adding homes faster than we add people.”
He has also stressed the need to further reinforce the Canada-U.S. border to stop illegal migration, saying he would boost the number of border officers, and look at extending their role so they can support the RCMP and apprehend migrants making illegal crossings across the shared land border. Canada Border Services Agency officers are restricted to enforcing immigration rules at airports, ports and regular land border crossings to the U.S. while the RCMP patrols the rest of the vast frontier.
In an interview with Radio-Canada last week, Mr. Poilievre said he has “nothing against legitimate refugees” but said “people must come here in an orderly manner.”
Last fall, the Environics Institute reported that for the first time in a quarter-century, a clear majority of Canadians believed there is too much immigration, a view growing for the second consecutive year. Almost six in 10, or 58 per cent, thought the country accepts too many immigrants, a 14-percentage-point increase since 2023, which built on a 17-point increase over the previous year.
Mr. Carney, launching the Liberal campaign last month, said he planned to maintain caps on both temporary and permanent residents after a “surge in immigration.”
He said the caps, put in place by former immigration minister Marc Miller, would not be adjusted until housing supply has expanded.
At a press conference in Victoria on Monday, Mr. Carney said, “We have not lived up to our promise to those we brought to this country” – including to international students.
“We don’t have the capacity in terms of housing, social services,” he said. “We need to build that capacity. We need to manage immigration at lower levels for a period of time, until we have those results in the capacity. Of course, that means working very, very closely between the federal and provincial governments.”
Speaking to the Christian Cardus institute in November last year, Mr. Carney said that after the pandemic hit, employers pressed the government to allow in more temporary foreign workers, which led to it “losing track of that.”
“We had much higher levels of foreign workers, students and new Canadians coming in than we could absorb, that we have housing for, that we have health care for, that we have social services for, that we have opportunities for. And so we’re letting down the people that we let in, quite frankly,” he said.
Mr. Miller took steps to get a grip on rising numbers after becoming immigration minister in 2023, including capping the number of international students, and reducing targets for the number of permanent and temporary residents. In last month’s cabinet shuffle, Mr. Carney replaced Mr. Miller with Rachel Bendayan.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail shortly after taking on the role, Ms. Bendayan said she wanted to make further reductions to the number of migrants living in Canada.
But advocates for migrants are warning that the two main parties’ immigration policies of capping numbers could lead to mass deportations of temporary migrants.
Syed Hussan of the Migrant Rights Network said it was wrong to link housing affordability with immigration, as many people being granted permanent residency are already living here on visas.
“Both the Liberals and the Conservatives are continuing to fan the flames of division and xenophobia and continue to link immigration and the housing and affordability crisis incorrectly,” he said.
He said the votes of immigrants to Canada would likely not be swayed by the parties’ immigration policies, but by wages and other “pocketbook issues” as their concerns align with those of other Canadians.
Editor’s note: (April 8, 2025): A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Cardus as a Catholic institute. It is not exclusively Catholic, but Christian. This version has been updated.