Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that Canada would scale back immigration levels to 365,000 people a year by 2027 in response to a growing sentiment that the Trudeau government has let in far more people than Canada can handle.
“These changes will make immigration work for our country so that everyone has access to the quality jobs, homes and supports they need to thrive. We have listened to Canadians, and we will continue to protect the integrity of our system and grow our population responsibly,” said Miller in a statement on Thursday.
“Today’s announcement is the next step in our plan to address the evolving immigration needs of our country. While it’s clear our economy needs newcomers, we see the pressures facing our country, and we must adapt our policies accordingly.”
The 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan projects Canada’s population to decline by 0.2% over the next two years before returning to a population growth of 0.8% in 2027.
The number of permanent residents will be reduced from 500,000 to 395,000 next year and then to 380,000 in 2026, before reaching a target of 365,000 in 2027.
Sergio Karas, a specialist in immigration law agrees, he told True North that while this reduction is necessary given the housing crisis and the current state of the economy, he still believes that number should be further reduced.
“As usual, the Trudeau government is doing it wrong,” said Karas.
“The total number should be reduced to the 2015 levels of approximately 300,000 because the federal government inflated the number exponentially in the last nine years, but more important are the categories where the reduction should be applied. Not all applicants have the same ability to adapt, job security, language skills, and expertise required to ensure economic growth.”
Immigration accounted for nearly 98% of Canada’s population growth last year, 60% of which were temporary residents.
Karas believes that the government should focus on “reining in the categories that have grown out of control and are the most problematic from the point of view of fraud and economic cost: there are still too many international students in colleges taking useless courses, and too many refugee claimants making questionable claims just to remain in Canada.”
According to Karas, who is also co-chair of the American Bar Association’s immigration and naturalization committee, those categories are consuming a great deal of processing resources and having the most significant impact on affordable housing.
The IRCC said that “reducing the amount of immigrants will help to alleviate some pressure in the housing market, with the housing supply gap expected to decrease by approximately 670,000 units by the end of 2027.”
“The government should screen international students more rigorously and grant visas only to those with highly marketable degrees in universities, insist on higher official language scores, and prohibit the payment of commissions to recruiting agents who operate overseas,” he said.
In addition to clamping down on international student program abuses, Karas suggested tightening measures to reduce refugee claims back to the country’s historical levels, which he believes would make it “much harder to game the system.”
“They should also eliminate all ad-hoc temporary programs for specific countries such as Gaza, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ukraine, and Sudan, as they are costly to operate, raise security concerns, and drain resources from other programs,” said Karas.
He took issue with the government’s drastic reduction in economic categories, instead arguing that it would be better to slash the parents and grandparents categories.
“It is an albatross around our neck, it offers no economic benefit, and places significant strain on the healthcare system,” he said. “Applicants have either no or marginal income, little or no language ability, and are not of working age.”