Is Canada’s immigration system actually broken? Here’s how it changed under Justin Trudeau

Good overview and series of informative charts:

Canada’s rapid population growth recently has been driven by immigration, which accounted for 97.3 per cent of the 724,586 net growth in the country in 2024.

Since the early 1990s, successive federal governments had maintained a steady immigration level yearly that averaged 0.75 per cent of Canada’s overall population, regardless of the boom-and-bust economic cycle. Skilled immigrants were viewed as an economic stimulant during a recession and as a source of labour supply in time of prosperity.

The number of temporary residents was relatively small. Most international students came primarily to study while foreign workers ebbed and flowed supposedly based on labour needs; those whose time was up had to go home. In the mix were asylum seekers who would become permanent residents if granted protected status. 

Riding the popularity of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “sunny ways,” the Liberal government welcomed tens of thousands of displaced Syrians and slowly raised the annual immigrant intake to 0.9 per cent of Canada’s overall population in 2019.

After a nosedive in immigration in 2020 — to 0.49 per cent of the population — due to pandemic border closures, Trudeau not only extended the stay of most temporary residents, but opened the door to more in response to skyrocketing job shortages, which reached about a million vacancies….

It didn’t help that Canada’s immigration system over recent years has prioritized the transition of temporary residents in the country, many toiling in lower-skilled jobs, to permanent residents. Instead of picking skilled economic immigrants with high scores in the point selection system, so-called targeted draws were introduced in 2023 to favour candidates with lower scores but who work in an in-demand occupation or are proficient in French.

“We are not selecting the best of the best,” said Planincic. “The intent is to meet labour market needs, but it really muddies the waters, especially when the categories can change at political whims.” 

A better indicator of an immigration candidate’s value to the community and the country, she suggested, is their current earnings, which should be part of the point system….

Immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo attributes much of the system’s chaos to the myriad “ministerial instructions,” temporary directives issued by the minister to address intake, processing, selection, or to create pilot programs.

The extraordinary authority endowed with the minister — introduced in 2008 by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives — has contributed to a patchwork of ad-hoc immigration policies with little transparency.

The ballooning temporary resident population is further fuelled by Canada’s evolving “two-step” permanent residence selection system that favours those already in the country, with Canadian education credentials and work experience. In 2022, 36 per cent of all new permanent residents had previously been in Canada on work permits, up from 19 per cent in 2010 and 33 per cent in 2019.

The population of temporary residents got out of control “because they wanted this mass pool to draw from,” said Bellissimo, adding that immigration officials have been stretched thin handling these student, work and visitor applications, compromising services….

Most people used to look past the struggles of immigrants and focus on the success of their children, but now they expect newcomers themselves to hit the ground running. Paquet said it’s time for Canadians to have a debate about the objectives of immigration.

Immigration had generally been a non-issue in modern Canadian politics because of a consensus that it’s good for the country. Might this federal election be different?

Although Donald Trump and tariffs have dominated the early part of the campaign, immigration has become a major political issue in the last few years of Trudeau’s government.

“How much will the parties talk about it and how much of a central theme will it be?” asked Paquet, research chair in politics of immigration at Concordia. “When a party decides to do that, then that tells us a lot about how the political system is changing.”

Source: Is Canada’s immigration system actually broken? Here’s how it changed under Justin Trudeau