Canada's premiers after a three-day meeting in Huntsville, Ont., on Wednesday.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
After years of messing up the immigration system, the last thing Canada needs to do is to give premiers more room to make it even worse.
That’s what the premiers want. After a three-day meeting in Muskoka, one of the big asks in the 13 premiers’ closing communiqué was for Ottawa to increase the number of provincial nominees – economic immigrants chosen by the provinces.
That’s a terrible idea.
Certainly, the federal government has done a lot to mess up the immigration system in recent years. But expanding those provincial programs will make it worse.
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Under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, the feds did quite a job of mucking it up, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic. It failed to control a boom in foreign students and temporary workers and balkanized the rules for economic migrants so that the system became incoherent and dysfunctional.
But Mr. Trudeau’s last immigration minister, Marc Miller, took some strong steps in 2023 and 2024 to repair some of the damage. He capped the number of foreign students and slashed the number of provincial nominees.
That hasn’t fixed all that ails the immigration system, but it was a step forward.
But on Wednesday, the premiers asked Ottawa to undo it. They want the numbers of provincial nominees to be doubled, to bring them back up to their previous level.
Premiers like to be able to tell local businesses they can deliver workers. Or to tell aging communities newcomers will arrive.
But Waterloo University economics professor Mikal Skuterud notes that it is a bit of a mirage. “There’s no way to restrict the mobility of immigrants, nor should we want to,” he said. That leads to potential immigrants seeking the provincial program with the lowest standards but moving elsewhere.
The premiers’ own justification for asking for bigger numbers of provincial nominees – that they know their own labour markets better – is itself a good reason to reject their request.
Using immigration to try to plug holes in labour markets, by recruiting foreigners to fill current job openings, is a failed approach. By the time they arrive, those occupations might not be in high demand. They might be outdated in a few years. Micromanaging the labour market doesn’t work. Supply and demand, and the adjustment of wages, takes care of that.
That’s why Canada’s economic immigration system turned to a different approach almost 25 years ago to focus on human capital. A system was developed that granted points for criteria such as education, experience and language skills.
That’s one of the things that Mr. Trudeau’s government mucked up. It introduced new categories, often for short periods, that gave more points to certain types of workers who didn’t meet the points standards, including hairdressers and estheticians.
That was on top of the expanding provincial nominee programs. Quebec has had powers to select immigrants since the 1970s, intended as a power to preserve its language and culture. But after 2001, other provinces made agreements with Ottawa for nominee programs. Most have lower criteria that squeezed out applicants with more points for their human capital.
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All those things have turned an economic-immigration system that was supposed to be based on predictable scores into a hodge-podge of programs built on the desires of lobby groups.
To potential immigrants, that made Canada’s immigration system look random.
“The consultants and immigration lawyers love this because it complicates the system and makes it more like a lottery, or something that has to be gamed,” Prof. Skuterud said.
A foreign student or temporary worker might not meet the criteria for permanent residence, but they might one day become eligible under a new category or provincial program. That encourages people who might be ineligible for permanent residence to take a gamble on coming to Canada as a temporary resident – and it doesn’t always work out.
We don’t need more of that complicated mess. We need less of it.
The exceptions to the point system should be limited to a few, well-defined areas where labour markets aren’t really markets – such as health care workers – and a small number of provincial nominees.
That requires a lot of repairs to the current system. The last thing Canada needs is to give the premiers more room to mess it up.