Temporary Workers (IMP, Temporary Foreign Workers) and International Students: Permits and extension breakdown

2026/10/26 Leave a comment

Given the corrections from previously excessive levels of temporary residents, I though it would be interesting to obtain data breaking down permits and permit extensions for temporary workers (IMP and TFWP) and international students, 2016-25.

The following tables highlight the impact of the pandemic in increasing the percentage of extensions compared to new permits, which is also the case following the reductions in 2024 and 2025.

Not too much surprising but does highlight the considerable “overhang” from previous excess numbers.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Canada’s anti-immigrant sentiment softening, according to new poll

2026/10/26 Leave a comment

Expect trend will also show in forthcoming Focus Canada survey:

Canadians in the Atlantic region and on the Prairies are most likely to think there are too many immigrants coming to this country while British Columbians and Quebecers are least likely to see it that way, according to a new poll.

When you look at all 10 provinces, 45 per cent of Canadians polled said we have too many immigrants, 31 per cent indicated we have about the right number, and 13 per cent said we don’t have enough, according to the poll conducted earlier this month by EKOS for the Association for Canadian Studies.

“We’re still seeing the large plurality of Canadians saying there are too many immigrants,” said Jack Jedwab, the association’s president.

“But clearly relative to the previous three years, we are seeing some change in feeling around that and some loosening of concern on the part of Canadians.”

Manitoba and Saskatchewan respondents were most likely to say Canada has too many immigrants (52 per cent), followed by Atlantic Canada (50 per cent), then Alberta and Ontario (both at 46 per cent).

British Columbians were least likely to say Canada has too many immigrants (39 per cent), followed closely by Quebecers (40 per cent).

“The poll comes ahead of Mark Carney’s Liberal government announcing immigration levels for the next three years in the coming weeks before presenting a budget on Nov. 5.

British Columbians topped the list of those who said Canada has about the right number of immigrants (34 per cent), followed by Alberta and Quebec (both at 32 per cent). Those polled in Manitoba and Saskatchewan were least likely to say Canada has the right number of immigrants (26 per cent).

British Columbians were also the most likely to say Canada doesn’t have enough immigrants (18 per cent), followed by Quebec (16 per cent), Atlantic Canada (13 per cent), and Ontario (12 per cent).

Immigration concerns have declined across the board, but they’re still high in Atlantic Canada and lowest in B.C. and Quebec, according to the poll.

Quebecers were most likely to strongly agree with the need for a common set of values (42 per cent strongly agreed with that, and another 42 per cent somewhat agree).

Only 31 per cent of respondents in Manitoba and Saskatchewan strongly agreed with the need for a common set of values, while 42 per cent somewhat agreed.

“But a near equal share believes cohesion requires people accepting others with different values, according to the poll.

In all 10 provinces, 40 per cent of respondents strongly agreed with that statement, while another 39 per cent somewhat agreed.

Those who indicated Canada has too many immigrants was down 13 percentage points from a separate Leger poll conducted in March 2025. Those who say we don’t have enough was up 10 percentage points over that same period…..

Source: Canada’s anti-immigrant sentiment softening, according to new poll

Filed under Immigration, Polling

Rempel Garner: Immigration levels must go way down, not up.

2026/10/23 1 Comment

Pre-levels plan political positioning, principles with few details, no numbers and lots on the failures of the Trudeau government.

Closing line of interest sounds more NDP than CPC: “It’s time for Mark Carney to deliver an immigration levels plan that works for people, not just for corporations:”

…First, bring the numbers down.

Bring them down so unemployed and underemployed Canadians get first crack at Canadian jobs. The Liberals love to talk about buying Canadian. It’s time they started talking about hiring Canadian and training Canadians.

Bring down levels so housing starts can catch up and rents can come down.

Bring down levels so our hospitals and family doctors aren’t asked to do the impossible.

And bring down levels so immigration policy goes back to what it should be: helping newcomers succeed and integrate, not handing corporations a tool to drive down wages.

Second, restore integrity to the system.

That means swiftly removing the large number of people who are in Canada with no legal right to be here. It means making sure social benefits go to people who genuinely need protection, not to those filing bogus asylum claims. It means stronger security, criminal and identity checks on every applicant. And it means ending lenient sentences handed to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes so they can avoid deportation.

It also means cracking down on fraud, from fake documents to study permit scams to the buying and selling of job offers. My colleague Brad Redekopp will describe one recent program change that is an example of a step in the wrong direction….

It’s time for Mark Carney to deliver an immigration levels plan that works for people, not just for corporations.

Source: Immigration levels must go way down, not up.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Globe editorial: Ottawa’s entry point to reform immigration

2026/10/23 Leave a comment

Yep, back to the more generic approach:

….Express Entry works by allocating each candidate a certain number of points for factors such as age, proficiency in official languages and work experience. But in recent years, Ottawa stopped doing general rounds of invitations to pick candidates with the highest scores. Instead the immigration minister does a “category-based selection” to meet an identified economic goal, selecting the top candidates within these smaller pools.

While there are some narrow cases when niche rounds makes sense – a recentone selected physicians with Canadian work experience, for example – most are questionable. Express Entry is supposed to focus on the country’s economic goals, but one of the highest priority groups now is French-speakers outside of Quebec. This group has cut-off scores significantly lower than most other groups, meaning they are more likely to struggle economically and make less money.

Of course, the overall Express Entry system should continue to value proficiency in French (and English) as part of an applicant’s overall score. Highly skilled Francophone candidates are needed by Quebec and other parts of Canada.

Other category-specific rounds, such as those for certain trades occupations, require the government to micromanage the job market, something it rarely does well. Category draws for people with Canadian experience help absorb some of the still enormous population of temporary workers, but displaces applicants outside Canada who are stronger candidates.

Ottawa hasn’t done a general round since April, 2024. It should bring general rounds back as the main way of selecting economic immigrants, with narrow exceptions….

Source: Ottawa’s entry point to reform immigration

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Why results of Alberta’s immigration referendum might not mean what voters think

2026/10/22 Leave a comment

Reasonable assessments. And Sharma correct on tendencious nature of question wording:

…Is this a victory or a defeat for immigrants?

These margins were lower than what had been projected in earlier public polls, especially given Premier Danielle Smith’s campaign to rally for the mandate for change, said Avnish Nanda, a co-founder of Our Alberta Advantage. The group opposes the Alberta government’s immigration-related referendum questions and policies.

Albertans have voted to remain part of Canada in the province’s first-ever referendum on separation. Wondering what the result says about the other nine questions? Curious how the separatist movement will continue? Want to know what it means for the provincial government’s relationship with the rest of the country?

“She sent every Albertan home like a large pamphlet that contained (what) I think were false statements but made the case about why they should vote yes,” said Nanda, who is also an immigration lawyer in Edmonton.

“She won by (a handful of points) on these questions. She should be winning by 25, 30 points. She barely won this. A large portion of Albertans rejected it.”

Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, also sees the result as a “victory” because he said the way the immigration questions were structured and written would lead many respondents to say yes.

“These were slam-dunk-level questions,” he said. “They didn’t get that. It gives me great joy, great optimism that Alberta has been very decisive. At the end of the day, it looks like Albertans are quite reasonable, committed to the Canadian fabric, committed to working with their neighbours, whether newcomers or old, to a future together.”

Can Alberta actually curtail its immigration?

The referendum asked for more control over immigration but Sharma said the question was “disingenuous,” because immigration is exclusively within the jurisdiction of the federal government. Not too long ago, the premier was asking to double the targets of Alberta’s provincial immigration nomination program and was warm to the idea of increased pathways for Ukrainians, he added.

While Smith may hope to wrest as much control over how many people, and who, are let into Alberta as Quebec does in setting its intakes, Sharma said the conditions and circumstances are so different between the two provinces.

“I’ll call it a febrile fever dream that Alberta can get the same position within the constitutional framework as Quebec,” he said. “If you want sovereignty, you need to define and have a culture … oil and gas is not enough for a culture. The starting point for sovereignty would be to define the culture. Alberta is not the same as Quebec. We don’t have this separate language.”

Source: Why results of Alberta’s immigration referendum might not mean what voters think

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Carney government says Canada’s immigration is under control. But those in the know highlight what’s going wrong

2026/10/22 Leave a comment

Some good reads just prior to the levels plan release:

…While Diab has reined in immigration numbers, whether the immigration system is under control is another question altogether.

“A smaller immigration target is not the same thing as a smaller immigration problem,” said Mario Bellissimo, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer and policy analyst.

Depending on who you ask, Canada’s immigration system is either more controlled, stable and sustainable than it has been in years — or still very much a work in progress, plagued by persistent backlogs, constantly changing rules and a critical lack of data on the hundreds of thousands of temporary residents already here.

The question now is whether Ottawa can fix the deeper structural problems before Carney opens the tap again.

Nagging backlogs and long processing

“Reducing numbers is comparatively straightforward,” said Bellissimo. “Building a predictable system that matches intake to capacity, deals fairly with people already here, targets genuine economic needs, reunites families, meets humanitarian obligations, uses technology responsibly, enforces the law and provides timely decisions is much harder.”

6 charts showing Canada’s dramatic immigration changes and economic trends, from Trudeau to Carney

Ottawa has struggled to reduce immigration backlogs and address growing processing times despite huge investments in AI and advanced analytics to modernize the system. The Immigration Department’s website shows that there were more than one million pending permanent residence applications in the queue as of the end of July 2026….

Source: Carney government says Canada’s immigration is under control. But those in the know highlight what’s going wrong

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Karas: Canada’s mass-immigration era is ending—but high immigration is not

2026/10/22 Leave a comment

Of note and making some necessary linkages:

…The durable policy lesson is not that Canada should close its doors. It is that admissions must be tied transparently to housing construction, labour market conditions, infrastructure, public services and measurable settlement outcomes. Immigration should complement productivity and domestic workforce development, not conceal their weaknesses.

If that principle survives the next labour shortage and the next political cycle, Canada’s immigration reset will mark a genuine structural change. If governments return to using population growth as the easiest substitute for economic reform, the present retrenchment will prove to have been only a pause, and its benefits may evaporate.

Source: Op-Ed: Canada’s mass-immigration era is ending—but high immigration is not

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Her federal role was cut. Now Amira Elghawaby is launching a new tool to force government action on Islamophobia

2026/10/22 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the results and usage over time:

…The Muslim Communities Research Observatory (MCRO) portal, called macro for short, goes live Friday. It will be a global hub, a one-stop shop for advocacy groups who may “not even be aware of what research is out there” and for academics who “struggle with knowledge mobilization.”

“This is about raising the ability to ask for policy changes that are fully rooted in the evidence,” she said.

The site will be an important platform to disseminate a new five-year survey of Muslims in Canada by the University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies on social issues, faith and belonging that will also be announced Tuesday.

The last research on Muslim identities was the landmark Environics Survey in 2016, in which a question was, “Do Muslims want to embrace Canadian values or Muslim values?” said lead author Anver Emon. In this survey, researchers did away with that binary and found a majority of Muslims and non-Muslims saying Muslims in Canada want to adopt both Canadian and Muslim values.

It also found that while first-generation Muslim immigrants would overwhelmingly choose to immigrate to Canada again, nearly half (47.5 per cent) of second- and later-generation Canadian Muslims would choose to live in another country over concerns of affordability and inequality. The study reflects the perceptions of 903 Muslim households and 1,072 non-Muslim households across Canada, making it the largest sample of Canadian Muslims surveyed to date, Emon said.

MCRO is an ideal partner for the dissemination of research, said Emon, because, “as academics, we’re not the best at putting our ideas in 30-second sound bites, let’s be honest, right?”

Elghawaby’s experience with government, knowledge of policy and background as a journalist makes her “ideally suited” to translate that knowledge, he said….

Source: Her federal role was cut. Now Amira Elghawaby is launching a new tool to force government action on Islamophobia

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Musselman: A covenant, not a grant: Canada’s citizenship process asks too little in return

2026/10/21 2 Comments

Odd commentary that suggests the author doesn’t fully understand the current process and requirements. Certainly, the header “asks too little in return” is one that I share but his specific recommendations in many respects are already in place (e.g., there is already a written attestation of the oath, which is of course a binding, albeit unenforced except through abiding by Canadian laws).

And always telling, when a lawyer states changes “cost little,” that they don’t appreciate the operational details and complexities (just as is the case for policy makers occasionally with C-3 being the latest example):

Canada is changing quickly, and the strain shows. Police-reported hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity have risen for six consecutive years, hate crimes targeting religion remain well above their 2020 level, and Canadians’ trust in one another has fallen from 54 per cent in 2013 to under 44 per cent today. These problems have many causes, and naturalization policy is clearly not the primary one. The issue is not immigration itself, but whether the process by which immigrants become citizens asks enough of them, and of us, in return.

Canada’s citizenship process asks immigrants to pass a test, pay a fee, and meet residency requirements. What it does not ask is the one thing that matters most: that they recognize Canada’s constitutional order as binding, conduct themselves within it, and take part in civic life through legitimate channels. That should worry us.

Since 1995, Canada has replaced the citizenship judge — who once interviewed every applicant — with a twenty-question multiple-choice test that can be easily memorized. The oath ceremony now often happens alone on a screen. An immigrant can clear every stage of naturalization without ever being asked to demonstrate that they understand, much less accept, the constitutional order and civic responsibilities of the country they are joining.

That is a mistake, and an avoidable one. Citizenship should be treated as a covenant, not a grant — a mutual bargain, not a gift with no strings attached. Canada offers immigrants membership in one of the world’s most prosperous, stable, rights-respecting societies. In return, it is entitled to ask that they recognize the country’s constitutional order as binding, resolve disagreements through Canada’s own institutions rather than import quarrels from abroad, and take part in civic life through legitimate channels. None of that means policing what anyone believes — only how they act.

Naturalization is the only moment Canada has real leverage to secure that covenant: the one point when an immigrant is actively asking the state for something. Once the oath is sworn, the leverage is gone. Yet Canada’s process checks residency, fees, and test scores — never recognition, conduct, or participation. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has even stopped tracking how many permanent residents goon to become citizens, in favour of measures that only show whether paperwork is moving.

A COVENANT, NOT A GRANT

Canada’s citizenship process asks too little in return. Other countries offer lessons, but none are perfect. The Netherlands built a genuinely substantive citizenship test, but let it fall unfairly on its most vulnerable applicants. Germany keeps its knowledge test modest and does the real work through a signed Declaration of Loyalty to the country’s constitutional order. Britain made its test harder without making it meaningful — a UK parliamentary committee has called it a “bad pub quiz.”

Canada has taken none of these lessons to heart. Ottawa should (my comments in italics):

• Tell applicants, from their very first contact with the citizenship process, what recognition, lawful conduct, and civic participation require — not wait until the oath to explain it. The website focuses on basic eligibility requirements and citizenship process, which then lead to the more substantive issues of rights and responsibilities. Arguably, could have a short intro on the importance and general substance.

• Rewrite the outdated Discover Canada guide around Canada’s constitutional order, not trivia and heritage narratives. Kind of funny reading this as Discover Canada, the 2009 study guide which, with some controversy, dramatically increased such references compared to the earlier guide, A Look at Canada. Is important for the guide not just to be a dry legal text but to capture some of the history and geography that help newcomers understand Canada better. Not all trivia.

• Require a real recognition interview for every applicant, not just the small minority who currently trigger one. Unrealistic, given the annual numbers. The test was introduced in 1995 given the impracticalities and costs of interviewing all applicants at a time when numbers were half compared to the present.

• Restore in-person citizenship ceremonies and rewrite the oath, with a signed declaration, to name what Canada actually requires. Agree on making in-person ceremonies the default (currently about half of all ceremonies). Current wording of oath covers the basics but certainly room for improvement but requires legislation. Applicants sign a written attestation already.

• Make IRCC report to Parliament on whether permanent residents are actually choosing to become citizens — not merely on how fast their applications move. This used to exist but was meaningless as the performance standard was not xx percent within 5-9 years since landing but from any period. Data published during regular census periods which has been informative. Agree should be in annual plan, but focus needs to be on recent immigrants.

Canada naturalized more than 359,000 people in 2024–25 alone. Every one of them passed through a process that never required them to demonstrate an understanding of the responsibilities that come with the Canadian passport they now hold. That moment, once gone, cannot be recovered. The reforms proposed above cost little and could be implemented quickly. What Canada cannot afford is to keep treating citizenship as paperwork to process rather than a covenant worth keeping.

Mark Musselman is a Toronto-based entertainment lawyer and PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.

Source: A covenant, not a grant: Canada’s citizenship process asks too little in return

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ICYMI – Chris Selley: Avi Lewis embraces collective guilt for Jews, but never for Muslims

2026/10/20 Leave a comment

Valid contrast:

…“Indeed, I’m old enough to remember the aftermath of 9/11, when New Democrats — and many others, particularly on the left — admonished us not to do to Muslims precisely what Lewis did to his fellow Jews. (The admonishment was often a bit much, but I fully agreed with the message and still do, no matter what group we’re talking about.)

One very common commentary trope back then was, “Well why can’t Muslims at least apologize for what was done in their name?” It was ugly and un-Canadian, and it rightly got called out. And now, a quarter-century later, Lewis is doing the same thing.

Anyway: By way of follow-up, Lewis bizarrely insisted that he had not held Jews collectively responsible for the wreck of Gaza … which he unambiguously had, including himself among the guilty.  He accused those criticizing him of being “partisan.” Lewis’s fellow travellers insisted, among other things, that Lewis’s critics were acting “in bad faith”— which is, ironically, a very bad-faith argument.

I also have to say I’m intrigued to know what Lewis imagines he or any other Jewish Canadian should have done to stop what he claims is an “ongoing genocide.” Does he have special powers we don’t know about? The anti-Israel rabble isn’t easily placated by empty statements of support and solidary from their politicians. They want Canada to Do Something, or at least be more virulently anti-Israel in its policies and messaging.

“People like Lewis rely on the notion that “criticizing Israel is not the same as criticizing Jews,” which I certainly agree with. But you don’t hear that argument so often nowadays. Protestors seem less and less interested in picking targets that we’re supposed to believe are extra-supportive of Israel. Once you start marching through Jewish-populated neighbourhoods, the argument is laughable. You don’t know who lives there. This is just pure harassment.

Does Lewis realize he’s inviting misery upon himself, for that matter? It’s not hard to imagine the rabble turning on him. They don’t care who he is, or who his father was, or where he sits on the political spectrum. They just want more Canadian politicians to say they hate Israel. And Lewis just made that quit a bit easier.

Source: Chris Selley: Avi Lewis embraces collective guilt for Jews, but never for Muslims

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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