A Canadian flag flies in front of the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill in March, 2017.Chris Wattie/Reuters
Canada is shrinking. For far back as records have been kept, and probably much farther, this country’s population grew year after year, seemingly inexorably. Until 2025.
On Wednesday, Statistics Canada released figures for the fourth quarter, which estimated that Canada’s population declined by 102,436 people over the course of last year.
That is the result of a much-needed corrective applied to the dramatic mistake in immigration policy made by Justin Trudeau’s government. But now, there is a danger that the recent past will teach us the wrong lesson.
Public support for immigration, as measured in opinion polls, has plummeted in recent years, when a surge in international students and temporary foreign workers led to rapid population growth after the height of the pandemic. Rents spiked and housing markets were tight.
Canada reports first annual population decline on record
The brakes were slammed on that surge in 2024, and rents and house prices have since cooled. Unemployment is lower than it would have been. And now there are plenty of people using that as an argument that immigration should be kept at low levels for the long term.
But the lesson of the recent past is not that immigration is bad. It is that wild swings in immigration policy are bad. And that immigration policy matters.
A paper published last year by the C.D. Howe Institute, written by University of British Columbia emeritus professor Daniel Hiebert, did some calculations that put the differences between potential choices is stark terms.
If Canada stopped taking in immigrants, and its declining fertility rate reaches the level already seen in B.C., the population would shrink to 12.3 million, less than a third of its current size, by the end of the century. On the other hand, if it chose to use immigration to increase the population at the same rate of growth seen in 2023, Canada’s population at the end of the century would reach 452 million.
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Both of those extreme outcomes would be disastrous, of course. Canada needs immigration to build the country’s standard of living but not in the pursuit of visions of massive growth. It requires long-term, stable planning. Immigration means recruiting a big part of the population of the future. Now would be a good time to start.
At the moment, there are immigration plans, issued by the federal government each fall to set targets for the next three years. But they don’t involve much planning.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government is piecing together a policy that is mostly scramble to react to the enormous mistakes made during the tenure of his predecessor and carry out the about-face that was announced in Mr. Trudeau’s final year in power.
Mr. Trudeau’s last immigration minister, Marc Miller, set a goal to reduce the number of non-permanent residents from a peak of 7.6 per cent of the population, more than 3.1 million people, to 5 per cent of the population.
Those necessary efforts to reduce the numbers of international students and temporary foreign workers are what is driving the shrinking of the Canadian population. But now that that effort is nearly halfway to the goal, according to the Statistics Canada figures, it’s worth asking if it is the right goal. No one has ever really tried to explain it.
The political hangover from the not-so-long-ago days of the excessive temporary-resident surge has turned politicians who never raised a complaint when it was happening into critics of immigration now that the population is shrinking.
Quebec’s immigration-shy CAQ government cancelled one of its immigration programs last fall, but recently begged Ottawa to extend the stay of many temporary foreign workers until Quebec could sort out the problems – employers were complaining.
Most importantly, the system to select economic immigrants, which should aim to recruit highly productive newcomers that raise Canada’s standard of living, has been balkanized with a series of programs to fill alleged labour shortages, often with lower-wage workers.
Immigration means recruiting a big part of the population of the future. It can make the lives of Canadians born today dramatically richer or poorer.
Now, the recruitment is essentially on hold – probably for two more years. The short-term goal is to pause population growth. In the meantime, there is a compelling need to focus on what immigration should be over the long term, and plan for it.
The country is going to need it.