LILLEY: Ottawa must say no to calls for higher immigration
· Toronto Sun
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Ahead of Thursday’s budget, when the Carney government will release new immigration targets, business groups are lobbying to open the system back up again.
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The government should send a clear and unequivocal message: no.
Canada is a country built on immigration, but starting in 2021, we let the system get out of control. Despite Mark Carney claiming that his government has curbed the excesses, the numbers in all but one category remain well above historic norms.
The fact that some business groups say they need higher immigration to fill labour shortfalls in the midst of high unemployment should have everyone asking questions.
“I worry that we have turned the dials way too low and that there are some pretty significant labor market and population implications of the recent changes to immigration that may not be in Canada’s long-term interests,” Dan Kelly, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, told Bloomberg this week .
Kelly is a nice guy, I like him a lot, but he’s completely wrong on this.
Our unemployment rate nationally is 6.5% , which is not healthy at all. The labour force participation rate is 64.8%, the lowest level since 1997. Youth unemployment sits at 13%, well above the national average.
More workers for what?
Why on earth would we decide to turn on the immigration taps again in an economy like this? It’s understandable that business groups want higher immigration. It allows them to keep wages low rather than hiking the pay package on offer to attract existing talent.
And yet, we might end up increasing immigration numbers based on what Prime Minister Carney told the New York Times last month when, for the first time ever, he raised the idea of increasing Canadian immigration levels while speaking to a foreign media outlet.
“What we’ve basically been doing is first getting the system under control,” Carney told the Times.
“Now the question starts to become: When do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada. So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control.”
The numbers don’t lie
Except, he never got the full system under control. His government appears to have wrestled with the temporary foreign workers program, but the rest of the system, in terms of the number of people coming in, remains well above historical norms.
The numbers don’t back up Carney’s claim of the system being back on track.
In 2015, the last year of the Harper Conservative government, Canada brought in 271,000 new permanent residents. When you add in the 219,166 foreign students, the 249,000 people granted temporary work permits and 16,040 asylum seekers, Canada added a total of 755,000 new people.
Fast forward to 2023 and we had 471,000 permanent residents, 682,889 foreign students, 949,270 people given work permits and 144,000 asylum seekers, for a total of 2,247,159. Even after Ottawa’s pullback, the total remained above two million in 2024 and 1.1 million in 2025.
The number of permanent residents who came to Canada in 2025 was still 45% higher than a decade ago. Foreign student numbers were up 75%, and asylum claims, mostly from economic migrants skipping the line, were up sevenfold compared with a decade ago.
Still too many, still too fast
This is not a system that is functioning and under control. This is a system that is better than it was, but still needs to be pulled back.
Increasing Canada’s immigration levels at this point in time would be the wrong thing to do economically. It would be the wrong thing to do morally. Sadly, it looks like this is the direction the government will take.
Before opening the immigration taps again, Ottawa should answer a simple question: if unemployment is high and jobs are scarce, who exactly is this serving?