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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Ottawa announces immigration rule changes that will give highly paid foreign workers an edge

2026/10/20 Leave a comment

Sensible change:

Highly paid foreign nationals working in Canada – including doctors, engineers and programmers – will now have an advantage when applying for permanent residence.

Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab announced changes to immigration rules Friday that will see applicants to the Express Entry system receive additional points if they have worked for at least a year in a high-wage job in Canada or have a high-paid job offer.

The extra points will increase the chances of skilled foreign nationals, such as academics and people working in high tech, getting an invitation from the Immigration Department to apply for permanent residence.

The move follows calls in recent years from economists to focus immigration on the highly skilled workers that Canada needs to fuel growth and plug labour gaps, rather than large numbers of unskilled workers.

Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets, said Friday he agrees that the focus for immigration “should be on high-skilled individuals.”

“But it also needs to focus on skilled labour such as trades where Canada has a chronic shortage,” he said in an e-mail. “If one of the goals of housing policy is to reduce the cost of building, such a move will be in the right direction toward improving housing affordability.”

A high-wage occupation is defined by the Immigration Department as a job where the median wage is at least 1.3 times the national median wage for all workers, which is currently about $57,000….

Source: Ottawa announces immigration rule changes that will give highly paid foreign workers an edge

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Canada is about to announce its new immigration targets. Here’s what we know and don’t know

2026/10/20 Leave a comment

We will know soon enough to see the trade-offs:

…Since becoming prime minister, Carney has pledged to reduce the share of temporary workers and international students to five per cent of the population by the end of 2027 while maintaining permanent resident admission to under one per cent of Canada’s population annually beyond 2027.

Currently, the share of temporary resident population still stands at 6.7 per cent of the country’s nearly 42 million population. Meanwhile, Ottawa’s hands are tied in shifting more temporary residents to permanent status if it sticks to Carney’s one per cent commitment, meaning the upper target for permanent residents can’t go over 418,000.

Little leeway to raise immigration

There is little wiggle room unless Ottawa finds an innovative way to account for the numbers. It has before. Last year, it rolled out two one-time initiatives to grant permanent residence to 115,000 people with protection status and 33,000 foreign workers in small communities over two years, but the groups were counted on top of the 2026 permanent resident target.

“They’re going to be holding at least relatively close to their 380,000 projection,” said Calgary-based immigration lawyer Mark Holthe. “That five per cent temporary resident target is what’s driving a large portion of this plan. They made a campaign promise and they are going to hit it no matter what.”

Last month, the C.D. Howe Institute, a Toronto-based think tank, recommended an annual admission of 380,000 permanent residents in 2027, and further reductions to 350,000 in 2028, and 340,000 in 2029. It said the five per cent target for temporary residents should be treated as a ceiling and come down to three per cent in the medium and long term.

Managing temporary resident population is not straightforward. Officials can cap new study and work permits to control intakes and transition temporary residents to permanent status, but it takes resources to track and remove people with expired permits.

“The government hasn’t been able to reduce this (population) significantly,” said Parisa Mahboubi, an economist who chairs C.D. Howe’s immigration targets council. “We are going to see a large share of transitions from TR to PR … The government has greater control over that.”

Larissa Bezo, president and CEO of the Canadian Bureau for International Education, doubts that Ottawa will need to raise international student intakes since it didn’t even manage to fill the quotas it set.

“The challenge really has shifted from perhaps managing growth to a period of where we are now having to rebuild confidence,” she noted.

“The larger issue from my perspective is what happens several years from now. Fewer students arriving today means fewer graduates, fewer researchers, fewer health-care workers, fewer engineers, fewer entrepreneurs and fewer permanent residents in the future.”

Priorities and fine-tuning programs

Diab has been clear about her plan to bring in even more French-speaking permanent residents outside Quebec, raising this demographic’s share of the total annual admissions from nine per cent in 2026 to 9.5 per cent in 2027, 10.5 per cent in 2028 and 12 per cent in 2029.

She has also hinted at maintaining the share of permanent residents in economic class at around 64 per cent in 2027 and 2028, while working with provinces and prioritizing talent in key sectors and industries like health care, emerging technologies and skilled trades.

Earlier this year, the Immigration Department held consultations on proposed reforms to the skilled immigration programs as well as the way points are awarded to candidates for their education, work experience and language skills among other factors. It has also asked for public input in setting economic priorities and selection categories for its targeted talent draws.

Stein Monteiro of Signal49 Research said he does not expect drastic changes to immigration policy direction, rather, more fine-tuning of current programs to better align the system with economic needs.

“There’s a lot of other things they’re trying to do aside from the levels,” said Monteiro, lead immigration researcher at the independent research organization, formerly known as The Conference Board of Canada.

“They’re trying to maintain stability by streamlining programs, cutting unnecessary niche programs and then improving on the application process … (which) makes it more predictable for what’s coming out on the other end of the immigration system.”

Targeting high-skilled, high-wage immigrants

C.D. Howe’s Mahboubi said immigration is more than just a numbers game; the type of migrants Canada brings in matters. The system should focus on welcoming high-skilled, high-wage immigrants over low-skilled, non-agricultural temporary foreign workers, she noted.

“We want high-quality students and higher-skilled workers to support our economy,” she said. “There are still more reforms and more oversight needed. We are not there yet.”

Over the past year, Ottawa has stopped accepting applications for immigration programs for start-up entrepreneurs, home care workers, privately sponsored refugees for resettlement (Group of Five), and skilled refugees and displaced people. Few expect they will reopen next year.

“Their focus is on high-wage individuals, so any new program that they’re looking at creating or rolling out are going to target those individuals,” said Holthe, the Calgary lawyer. “Our professionals and executives and people making over $100,000 have no pathways to permanent residence. That’s part of the reason why they’re making changes.”…

Source: Canada is about to announce its new immigration targets. Here’s what we know and don’t know

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HESA: The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up

2026/10/14 Leave a comment

Yet another example of mismanagement:

….The first part I know for sure – it’s how the federal government got drawn into this mess and also why it eventually cut all private institutions out of the grants systems in last year’s federal budget (something I wrote about back here before I had any of this context). The feds don’t have the power to cut out any single institution from the program (only provinces have that), and so the feds spent most of 2025 asking Ontario “what the hell is going on in those institutions”? And when they were fobbed off with various weak-ass answers (”it’s a post-COVID thing…online education is big now, we shouldn’t try to stifle innovation…”), the feds pulled the plug. So, important data point here: the feds knew there was something bad in a specific few institutions over a year ago and asked the province to do something. The province chose not to act.

The second part, re: the nature of the scam, I don’t know for sure. Details will presumably come out in county at some point: Allison Jones of the Canadian Press published some juicy preliminary tidbits about ten days ago. But just for now, assume that something was happening, something bad enough that Career Colleges Ontario (CCO), the association which represents private post-secondary institutions in Ontario, was moved to tell the government – “we have bad actors in our sector and you need to act”. We know this is the case because the government said so in its press release last week. But again, check the date. CCO did this in January 2025. So why did it take so long for the province to move?
(I assume there are journalists out there looking at political contributions made by the owners of these institutions. This work will be helpful in understanding provincial government motivations).

One might try to excuse the government’s lengthy time-to-get-off-its-ass by saying “oh that’s just the speed of government, it never does anything quickly.” But this is not true. The government may have waited until this summer to move against bad actor private colleges, but it used the crisis to attack students and OSAP itself much earlier….

Source: The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up

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While I was away: Immigration articles of interest

2026/10/13 Leave a comment

NYT: Our Interview With Mark Carney [Immigration]

Commentary by the Conservatives and right leaning media has overdramatized the possible shift. Proof will of course be in the forthcoming levels plan:

…What we’ve basically been doing is first getting the system under control. So if we want to let in 500,000 people through formal immigration and some temporary workers and students, we cap things and we let in 500,000 people. There were years where the expectation would have been for example, 700,000 and it ended up 2 million. The overshoots were, and you know it’s a country of 40 million people.

These are big, big overshoots, and it’s not that easy to get to Canada, right? It is from the U.S. but otherwise you’re flying in or taking boats. So we’ve taken measures to get that under control and we have it under control. So students down by 60 percent, temporary foreign workers down by 50 percent. It happens to be the case. Part of this is tightening, but asylum seekers are down by one-third on a flow basis, and 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….

Rob Breakenridge: The Carney honeymoon would end if he opens up immigration again

Depends on what the forthcoming levels plan contains for both permanent and particularly temporary resident numbers:

…Carney’s musings on immigration have also been noticed on the campaign trail in Quebec, where the Parti Québécois (PQ) pushed for limits on immigration in what became a successful campaign.

And even though the PQ has promised to shelve an independence referendum until after Donald Trump leaves office, new premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has threatened to hold a referendum on immigration, not dissimilar to what’s on the ballot in Alberta.

It’s hard to imagine that voters in either province won’t or wouldn’t side heavily with their respective premiers on this issue. As such, it’s easy to envision a backlash against Carney’s planned increases.

It may well be that the government is tempted by the GDP boost that high immigration helps to generate, even if it papers over other weaknesses in the economy. Again, Carney himself has noted this phenomenon, calling it a “basic fact,” and that “you can do the math” in terms of how declining population can affect economic growth.

Carney’s political honeymoon is not a political blank cheque and nor should he be so overconfident as to feel as though he’s immune from a similar backlash to his predecessor. This issue has become divisive enough already and it’s playing with fire to thrust this issue back on a fatigued and frustrated Canadian public.

We’ll eventually need a return to responsible immigration growth, but the government has more work to do before that’s feasible and saleable.

Keller: The Canadian population decline that never happened, and what it means for immigration policy

Keller’s latest two part series on immigration following the Carney NYT intv:

… On the same day as Statscan dropped that news, Prime Minister Mark Carney was in New York, sitting for an interview with The New York Times. Among other things, he was asked about Canada’s “population decline,” and when he would begin “reversing” it through higher immigration.

The PM didn’t challenge the mistaken premise that Canada’s population is declining; he was presumably unaware of the new figures. But he gave a long and detailed answer about the immigration system’s recent history, which shows that he has a grasp on how things went off the rails under his predecessor.

I wrote a book last year on what Canada used to get right about immigration, and how after 2015 it got things so badly wrong. Most of what Mr. Carney had to say was on point.

He concluded with this: “Now the question starts to become: When do we resume some controlled increase in the population?”…

Keller: Mark Carney has started fixing immigration. He needs to keep at it 

His concrete recommendations:

…Continue reducing temporary immigration: The temporary-immigration streams used to be small, but they exploded under the Trudeau government. They came to be seen as backdoors to permanent immigration, for those who would not otherwise have scored high enough to secure permission to permanently immigrate.

These pathways need to be wound back, and some need to be wound down. The Carney government has promised to bring temporary-resident numbers down to 5 per cent of the national population by next year, but it’s well behind schedule. In any case, the target is too high.

The C.D. Howe Institute’s expert group on immigration suggests aiming for 3 per cent. I agree. What’s more, the vast majority of future temporary residents should be high-quality visa students or former students on postgraduate work permits.

End the low-wage temporary foreign worker program: It makes sense to give Canadian businesses the flexibility to temporarily hire an aeronautical engineer from overseas. It makes no sense to hand out temporary visas for low-wage work. Canada has a shortage of educated and skilled people in some high-paying fields, but there is no generalized shortage of workers, nor is there a lack of unskilled workers.

Temporary work visas should no longer be available for jobs paying less than $100,000 a year, with the singular exception of the long-standing seasonal agricultural worker program. A reduction in the pool of people available for entry-level jobs should cause wages at the bottom of the income scale to feel some upward pressure. That would be a good thing.

Focus student visas on the best: The limited number of student visas should go to the highest-quality institutions and programs, admitting the most-qualified students, and charging the highest international tuition.

What happened during the Trudeau era was the opposite, as provinces – led by Ontario – took advantage of the unlimited number of student visas to encourage the weakest and lowest-tuition institutions, mostly public and private colleges, to go on a cash grab. What was being sold was entry into Canada, not education.

Our leading public universities, which charge international undergraduate tuition of $50,000 and up, and even more for some master’s programs, should get nearly all of the visas. Private colleges should get none. Public colleges should get few.

Stable permanent immigration: From the early 1990s until the Trudeau government, Canada’s immigration rate was relatively stable, through Liberal and Conservative administrations. It helped to make immigration as boring and unnoticed as functioning plumbing.

Let’s set our immigration rate at 0.7 per cent of the population – that’s about 300,000 new immigrants. Keep the rate there year after year, indefinitely.

An immigration rate of 0.7 per cent would be on par with where things were for the quarter century before the Trudeau government. It would be well below the level Canada hit from 2022 to 2024, and somewhat lower than the figure the Carney government has targeted. But by international standards, it would still be above average.

As I detail in my book on immigration, the U.S. legal-immigration level in the decades before the first election of President Donald Trump was around 0.3 per cent.

As on other key files, the Carney government has started to turn the ship on immigration. As with those other issues, more turning is still needed.

Olive: How Justin Trudeau’s immigration ambitions unravelled

Meanwhile in the Star, Olive seems oblivious to the failings of the philosophy and approach, not just miscalculation:

…Trudeau brought a record number of newcomers to Canada, and that proved to be a test of his governing philosophy. The labour shortages of the post-pandemic gave him the chance to better align economic need with more newcomers. It was a test he failed through miscalculation, but the philosophy was sound.

The weakest links in Carney’s cabinet are still there

The latest in the case for a change in immigration minister with speculation why still in place:

Most Canadians don’t know much about the Singh decision. But if you’re the country’s Immigration Minister, you must.

So it was alarming that Lena Metlege Diab seemed confused when she was asked about the seminal 1985 Supreme Court decision in an interview for a Radio-Canada podcast.

It was the ruling that set the foundations of Canada’s asylum system, and is central to immigration policy. It established that asylum-seekers have Charter rights and a right to an oral hearing, led to the creation of the Immigration and Refugee Board, and is still an issue in reform efforts today.

But it didn’t ring bells for the minister.

Kevin Paquette: The Parti Québécois forced a necessary immigration debate

The more positive approach to integration. Will see what the incoming government changes its electoral approach to a more inclusive governing approach: 

But integration is a concept that goes beyond language. It is also about sharing some basic values, understanding the institutions of the society you are joining and, over time, developing a sense that you belong to something larger than yourself. A society needs that sense of common civic and civilizational belonging if it is to remain cohesive over time.

All of these elements show why the debate over integration capacity deserves better than the familiar accusations and assumptions we have now become accustomed.

Raising questions about our capacity to welcome newcomers does not mean shifting the burden of our collective choices onto immigrants who choose Quebec. On the contrary, it means taking seriously the responsibility we have toward them.

When someone chooses Quebec, we should want them to be able to find their place here, learn French, build a life, and develop a genuine sense of belonging. When our capacity to integrate newcomers is overwhelmed, they pay a price as well.

That is ultimately what the immigration debate should be about: not searching for someone to blame, but making sure that those who choose Quebec have a real chance to succeed here and, over time, to feel fully at home.

Kevin Paquette is a consultant at Crestview Strategy. He was a political advisor to Quebec’s Minister of Public Security and president of the Coalition Avenir Québec’s youth wing. 

Express Entry and Labour Market Outcomes of Economic Immigrants

Unclear whether this will still apply and the CRS gets undermined by increased specialty streams as preliminary evidence suggests it is not:

Four recent studies examine the labour market outcomes of immigrants selected through Express Entry (EE) and assess how well the system’s Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) identifies applicants with strong economic potential. Using data from the Longitudinal Immigration Database and the linked IMDB–2021 Census, the research examines employment, earnings, wages and occupational mobility among EE immigrants, comparing their outcomes with those of other economic immigrants.

Overall, EE immigrants demonstrate stronger labour market outcomes than non-EE economic immigrants. They are more likely to be employed, earn higher employment income and weekly wages, and remain in their intended occupations. These differences are observed across a range of admission cohorts and demographic and labour market characteristics.

The research also finds that several core CRS selection factors are consistently associated with stronger outcomes. In particular, higher official language proficiency, educational attainment, Canadian work experience and higher pre-admission employment earnings are associated with better post-admission employment and earnings outcomes. Pre-admission employment earnings are among the strongest predictors, suggesting that the quality of applicants’ previous labour market experience may be more informative than simply having Canadian work experience.

Occupation characteristics also matter. Applicants in higher-skilled occupations generally have stronger employment, earnings and occupational retention outcomes, while remaining in an intended occupation is associated with substantially higher earnings. Job offers are associated with somewhat higher post-admission earnings, although their predictive value varies across outcomes and occupational categories.

By contrast, several CRS bonus factors – including Canadian education, French-language bonuses, siblings in Canada and spouse-related characteristics – show limited associations with short- and medium-term labour market outcomes after accounting for other applicant characteristics.

Together, the findings provide evidence on the factors associated with labour market success among EE immigrants and can inform ongoing consideration of the design and selection criteria of economic immigration programs. Because Express Entry was introduced in 2015, additional follow-up will be needed to assess whether these relationships persist over time.

Read the research: Express Entry and Labour Market Outcomes of Economic Immigrants

Canada’s refugee shelters are getting ready for the next surge. Here’s how cities are building a system that works

The key factor is, of course, the reduced number of refugees…:

… The tide, however, has begun to turn. Federal policy shifts aimed at curbing irregular migrants and restricting access to asylum have led to a significant decline in new asylum claimants in the past year — and governments have used the opportunity to build a more sustainable refugee shelter system that would be ready for the next surge. 

Municipalities reporting fewer refugees in shelters 

New refugee claimants dropped from 105,940 in the first seven months of 2024 to 69,410 in the same period in 2025 — and to just 33,415 this year.

Officials attributed the decline to the new visa requirement for Mexican travellers, tightened border enforcement and heightened scrutiny of visa applications. Ontario currently receives about 45 per cent of all claims, followed by Quebec at 38 per cent.

The federal Immigration Department said it closed all the refugee hotels that it directly funded and ran as of October 2025.

In Toronto, the number of claimants in regular shelters fell from 6,490 people in August 2024 to 1,691 this September. As demand declines, the city is closing two of its refugee shelter hotels this fall and the remaining one in 2027.

Calls specific to refugee claimants have dropped from more than 100 a day at times in 2023 to 10 to 20 a week now. During the first six months of 2026, fewer than 500 claimants were admitted into Toronto’s shelter system, while on average 165 have left each month since January. 

“We are generally able to meet demand from refugee claimants,” said Vera Dodic, the city’s director of refugee response. “We are no longer regularly seeing refugee claimants call Central Intake to report no available space.”…

Immigration Department looking into termination of refugee sponsor policy: Diab

Hopefully, with public reporting:

The Immigration Department will monitor for any negative effects from a recent decision not to extend a policy that gave permanent residency sponsorship exemptions to some refugees, Immigration Minister Lena Diab said Wednesday.

The policy was introduced in 2019 to allow some refugees to sponsor some undeclared family members for permanent residency but it expired earlier this month and was not renewed.

Kazemzadeh: Canada’s settlement services are going digital. AI should support workers, not replace them

Overall, balanced but one should expect some staff efficiencies and reductions but hopefully with better outcome reporting (even outputs are updated on opendata and have to be requested):

… Canada should not reject AI in settlement services. The technology has real potential. But governments and settlement agencies should avoid building a digital-only system.

The better model is hybrid: AI for routine information, translation support, navigation and basic triage; humans for complex cases, legal referrals, trauma-informed care, accessibility needs and emotional support.

The future of settlement services will likely be more digital. But success should not be measured by how many workers are replaced. It should be measured by whether newcomers receive faster, safer and more inclusive support.

AI can open the door. Human expertise must remain inside.

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Canada faces questions over treatment of Iranian conscripts as U.K, Australia take different approach

2026/09/21 Leave a comment

Would be nice if CBC reporting would focus more on the substantive issue of how Australia and UK have a more nuanced approach than just the individual case stories and hardships:

…U.K., Australia recommend examining cases closely

The United Kingdom and Australian appear to have taken different approaches, where conscripts are not automatically considered “members” of an organization. In March, Australia’s Parliament published guidance on the matter, saying authorities should distinguish involuntary conscripts from supporting members. 

The U.K. government published similar guidance in August, stating military service is compulsory for men and that conscripts are unlikely to be required to commit acts “contrary to the basic rules of human conduct.”…

Source: Canada faces questions over treatment of Iranian conscripts as U.K, Australia take different approach

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ChatGPT and IRCC Open Data Tables

2026/09/21 Leave a comment

Assume many of you may have also tried using ChatGPT to download IRCC data for analysis. Did a quick trial with study permits and remarkably efficient and will likely use it substantially on my next quarterly update as it easily verifiable.

ChatGPT test ircc_quarterly_study_permit_summaryDownload

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