Rempel Garner: Immigration intakes don’t account for the impact of AI. They should.

Agree that there needs to be greater consideration of immigration levels and skills in the context of AI and automation in general. Arguably, the current approach, even with recent reductions, understates the potential impact and the associated issue that current policies provide disincentives for companies to invest in AI and automation.

While I still write my posts, and do my number crunching myself, am increasingly using AI for proofreading, excel/numbers formulas and basic research for references. I am also currently exploring AI to generate my personal newsfeed rather than combing individual websites:

…But there’s something else that should be driving the Liberal government to pump the brakes on high levels of new temporary foreign labour and get a handle on expired-visa removals: the potential impact of artificial intelligence on Canada’s jobs market.

If you spent any time on X this week, you would have encountered AI entrepreneur Matt Schumer’s extra-mega viral article entitled “Something Big Is Happening”. Hype or not, Schumer’s article, which warned that many entry level white collar jobs are about to be replaced by AI, struck a chord. That’s probably because most people now have lived experience with AI changing or replacing major parts of their work.

There’s empirical proof of this trend now, too. Stories of law firms choosing to hire fewer new associates in favour of leaning on AI are starting to pop up. Accountancy giant PwC plans to hire a third fewer new grads by 2028. Entry-level hiring at the 15 biggest tech firms dropped 25% from 2023-2024. In Canada, this AI work disruption is coming at a time when the country’s economy is already brittle. Over the past decade, Canada’s per capita GDP has been on a rather steep decline, and the youth unemployment rate is double the national average.

Said differently, there are less jobs for Canadian workers due to an already-weak economy, an overabundance of low-skilled foreign labour, and AI is now disrupting the jobs market even further.

Capturing the spirit of this concern was known-to-senior-Canadian-Liberals Ian Bremmer, President of the global consultancy Eurasia Group, who tweeted: “The fact that this [the replacement of white-collar jobs with AI] is even remotely plausible should be the top issue on most everyone’s agenda.” I’ve shared the same view since the moment I first used ChatGPT in late 2022. My immediate thought was, “My God, they’re going to automate human thought, just as they automated human labour.” A few days later, I became the first legislator in Canada to raise the issue in the House of Commons. And Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada stated in a recent speech that, “Not surprisingly, we are seeing increased demand for workers with AI skills. The flip side is we may be seeing some early evidence that AI is reducing the number of entry-level jobs in some occupations.”

Unfortunately, in spite of these warning signs, there is no evidence that the federal Liberals have factored in the possibility of artificial intelligence disrupting entry-level jobs into their immigration levels plan during the middle of an existing economic downturn. If they had, they probably wouldn’t have quietly lifted a freeze on the permitting process to bring new low-skilled temporary foreign workers to several major cities across Canada last month….

Source: Immigration intakes don’t account for the impact of AI. They should.