Here’s what Canada’s immigration data reveals about the drop in international students and temporary foreign workers

2026/02/19 Leave a comment

Good infographic that shows the impact:

Canada saw a 53 per cent drop in admissions of new international students and temporary foreign workers last year, with more than 2.1 million migrants with valid study and work permit holders in the country, according to new data.

That number did not include the estimated 505,000 refugee claimants, protected persons and other out-of-status migrants, who resided in Canada as of December, although there were 34 per cent fewer new asylum seekers reported than a year ago. 

In total, there were about 2,660,000 temporary residents in the country, accounting for 6.4 per cent of the overall population, which was still far above the five per cent target that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has vowed to reach by the end of 2027….

Source: Here’s what Canada’s immigration data reveals about the drop in international students and temporary foreign workers

IRCC Infographic: Understanding student and temporary worker numbers in Canada

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Asylum seekers to face brunt of IRCC cuts through co-payments of dental and prescription coverage: analysis

2026/02/19 Leave a comment

Of course, the large increase in asylum claimants is reflected in these numbers. Prescription co-payments are relatively small ($4) and it was increasingly untenable to provide asylum claimants better health care coverage that Canadians without an employer health coverage plan. And coverage of medical care at hospitals and by physicians is still covered:

“Almost half of the spending reduction in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will come from a single cut to the health coverage of asylum seekers, according to a new analysis from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.”

“In the 2025 budget, the federal government announced that about a quarter of a billion dollars, or $231.9 million, will be cut from the health-care coverage of refugees in the 2027-28 fiscal year with what the government calls a “modest co-payment model” of 30 per cent.

All other cuts from IRCC in 2027-28 are estimated at around $315 million, according to the analysis.

Currently, most refugees are covered under the government’s Interim Federal Health Program, which provides the cost of most medical care until individuals are eligible for provincial or territorial insurance.

However, the federal government will continue to provide full coverage for emergency room visits and visits to a physician.

Dental and prescription co-payments for asylum seekers will begin on May 1 this year.

David Macdonald, author of the analysis and economist at the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, pointed out that costs could rise for the federal government, especially as low-income asylum seekers eschew costly preventative care leading to more emergency room visits.

““Asylum seekers come to Canada with little to nothing, since they’re escaping dangerous conditions. Most won’t be able to pay the extra costs and will simply avoid dental care and filling prescriptions — until an emergency rises,” Macdonald wrote.

Those individuals could “end up in Canada’s emergency rooms, which will also be paid by IRCC, but at 100 per cent of the cost, even though prevention is preferable and less expensive than the emergency room.”” …

Source: “Asylum seekers to face brunt of IRCC cuts through co-payments of dental and prescription coverage: analysis”

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May: The Executive Cuts

2026/01/26 1 Comment

The latest overview of the approach in considerable detail:

Too many layers. Everyone knew it.

The executive ranks have been climbing for decades despite warnings about bloat and slow decision-making. Now a 12-per-cent cut is coming: about 1,120 executive jobs disappearing across 90 or so departments.

The cuts will ensure Canada’s executive hierarchy is “a pyramid, not a cylinder,” says one senior bureaucrat. The big driver is saving money. But it’s also about speed. Fewer layers, faster decisions. That’s the plan, anyway.

There are 9,155 bureaucrats who occupy five levels of executives (EX-1 to EX-5) between directors and assistant deputy ministers. But it’s not just them.

Many expect PCO clerk Michael Sabia to also trim the deputy minister ranks, too, as he reshapes the senior bench of public service leaders. He started with a pre-Christmas shuffle — bigger than any seen in years — and promised another. No one at the top is safe, it seems.

“The cuts are a shock to the system, like a taser,” says one senior official. But can cutting layers fix the public service and speed up decision-making like the Carney government expects?…

Source: May: EXs, cuts and layers

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Here’s how much the cuts to Canada’s international students have hurt Ontario colleges and universities

2025/11/28 Leave a comment

Starting to get a better sense of the numbers and how governments created this problem through a mixture of underfunding of post-secondary education and over-reliance on international students:

Ontario colleges and universities have been hit with more than $4.6 billion in lost revenues amid the drastic cuts to international students, new post-secondary figures obtained by the Star show.

And with Ottawa just announcing even fewer foreign students for 2026, for universities alone the impact is expected to increase from the $2.1 billion blow they are already dealing with.

The new numbers have the province’s universities now warning they “cannot cut their way out of these growing fiscal challenges.”

…Universities have already cut $550 million in the last few years, mainly through program loss, fewer services and staff cuts, and many schools are staring down deficits this school year. 

Colleges have cut $1.8 billion in the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, by cutting up to 10,000 jobs, and 600 programs as well as shuttering a number of campuses. …

Source: Here’s how much the cuts to Canada’s international students have hurt Ontario colleges and universities

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Savoie: If Canada wants to recapture the national ambition of the 1960s, it must seriously cut the bloat

2025/11/19 Leave a comment

Agree on need to focus on programs and whether or not they are making a significant difference in terms of concrete outcomes. Requires a government willing to expend political capital:

A more promising approach is to take a look at programs that have passed their best-before dates and scrutinize the growing number of departments and agencies. For one, Ottawa should be asking if we still need seven regional agencies. The federal government should try harder to stay in its lane and deal with its core responsibilities, such as national defence. It should also ask provinces to look after their constitutional responsibilities, thus avoiding costly duplications. 

Another place for cuts would be the Canada School of Public Service, which spends $94-million annually and, beyond its responsibility for second-language training, would be hard-pressed to show it has contributed to better management. France did away with its École Nationale d’Administration in 2021 and Britain shut down its National School of Government in 2012. The United States, meanwhile, has long rejected efforts to establish a Public Service Academy. 

There are many other government agencies that should be reviewed, particularly given Ottawa’s difficult fiscal situation. Parliament should also ask if it needs nine officers, when other Commonwealth parliaments make do with less; Australia, for example, has only four. Dealing with these questions would let the whale swim like it did in the 1960s. 

As is often the case, Ottawa has a well-honed capacity to define a new approach and new policies. Where it fails is in the implementation. The test will be not in announcing new projects, but in how Ottawa will declutter the machinery of government and empower those on the front line trying to make the approach work.

Source: If Canada wants to recapture the national ambition of the 1960s, it must seriously cut the bloat

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In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit

2025/09/02 Leave a comment

Not that surprising:

When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation.

She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target.

But her 35-career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she had earned the respect of officials from both parties. Surely, she thought, the office tasked with tracking the achievement of the nation’s students could not fall under the president’s definition of “divisive and harmful” or “woke.”

But for the first time in her career, Dr. Carr’s data points didn’t add up.

On a February afternoon, a security guard showed up to her office just as she was preparing to hold a staff meeting. Fifteen minutes later, the staff watched in tears and disbelief as she was escorted out of the building.

“It was like being prosecuted in front of my family — my work family,” Dr. Carr said in an interview. “It was like I was being taken out like the trash, the only difference is I was being taken out the front door rather than the back door.”

While tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs in Mr. Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to shrinking the federal work force, experts say the cuts disproportionately affect Black employees — and Black women in particular. Black women make up 12 percent of the federal work force, nearly double their share of the labor force overall.

For generations, the federal government has served as a ladder to the middle class for Black Americans who were shut out of jobsbecause of discrimination. The federal government has historically offered the population more job stability, pay equity and career advancement than the private sector. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government aggressively enforced affirmative action in hiring and anti-discrimination rules that Mr. Trump has sought to roll back.

The White House has defended Mr. Trump’s overhaul of the federal government as an effort to right-size the work force and to restore a merit-based approach to advancement In July, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could continue with mass firings across the federal government.

In a statement, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said that Mr. Trump was “ushering in an economy that will empower all Americans, just as it did during his first term.” He added that “the obsession with divisive D.E.I. initiatives reverses years of strides toward genuine equality.”…

Source: In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit

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Savoie: Shaving department budgets won’t be enough to rein in federal spending 

2025/07/24 2 Comments

Agree. Full-scale program review, as per Chrétien/Martin, best approach:

…The Ottawa-based bureaucracy is loaded with policy and program evaluation units. One would think that they are always at the ready to identify which programs are failing and those that are long past their best-by date. Program evaluation units, found in all government departments and most agencies, have been missing in action, unwilling or unable to report that programs fail to deliver what they promise, for fear of casting the government in a negative light. 

The units report to the government, not Parliament, as they deal with access to information legislation and other transparency requirements. No minister wants to stand before the House of Commons or the media to explain why departmental programs are missing the mark or should be eliminated. Whatever the reason, the units are still kept busy turning a crank not attached to anything.

Instead of announcing reduction targets from above that generate countless meetings with the objective of identifying possible cuts that stand to cause minimal damage to departments, the Cabinet could go with a different approach, one that would have a longer lasting impact. The government could, for example, eliminate two management layers. There are, at the moment, anywhere between six and nine management layers in the federal government, which are costly, slow down decision making and, all too often, generate non-productive work. The Treasury Board could also eliminate 90 per cent of “associate” positions attached to senior management jobs, which have mushroomed in recent years, in part to get around wage freezes or to award promotions that would not otherwise exist.

The federal government is home to hundreds of organizations and programs. Rather than try to shave a 7.5-, 10- or 15-per-cent cut to existing spending with uncertain success, Cabinet should review all organizations and all programs to see which ones no longer meet expectations or could be eliminated with limited impact on Canadians. 

Government organizations and programs are the product of political decisions and it is incumbent on Cabinet to decide whether they should continue. The exercise would enable Cabinet ministers to ask pointed questions about government programs and operations. Decisions to establish and eliminate organizations and programs belong to politicians, and not to anyone else. If the goal is to restructure the expenditure budget, this is where they need to look.

The Carney government has unveiled new spending commitments to strengthen the national economy, soften the blow of U.S. tariffs and boost defence spending. Mr. Carney’s planned cuts will not generate the required savings to support the various new spending commitments. The government can increase taxes, such as the HST, or it can take a close look at its organizations and programs and decide which ones still square with its policy agenda. This calls for a genuine political review of programs, not a process of trying to shave spending on selected activities which, history shows, only offers temporary savings. 

Source: Shaving department budgets won’t be enough to rein in federal spending

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Carney’s plan to cut tens of billions in spending is tough but doable, experts say

2025/07/16 Leave a comment

Always interesting to listen to the assessments of previous clerks on some of the lessons learned:

….Mel Cappe, who served as clerk of the Privy Council from 1999 to 2002, a position that includes heading up the public service, said meeting those targets will be tough but doable.

“There’s somebody in the public who’s going to be outraged by the cuts,” he said. “This is going to require all ministers holding hands, saying prayers together.”

…But previous clerks of the Privy Council say it will be difficult for the government to avoid cutting staff because wages, benefits and pensions are such a large part of the operating budget.Leaning on attrition

In 2023-24, excluding one-time payments like back pay made after a new collective agreement was signed, the federal government spent $65.3 billion on salaries, pensions and benefits. That was a 10 per cent increase over the previous year.

“In 1995, the wage bill was so high that it was necessary to invest some money to facilitate people to leave by giving them cashouts,” Cappe said.

“If you are going to do that on a massive scale, you have to be prepared to see those costs up front. Because it will save you a lot of money in the long run.”

Michael Wernick — the clerk of the Privy Council from 2016 to 2019 — told CBC News that relying on attrition “doesn’t make any sense as a management strategy.”

“What happens if your absolute key cybersecurity expert retires next week? You’re not going to replace her?” he said. “If your aspiration is a serious compression of the numbers, then you have to be more mindful about it and you have to do layoffs and buyouts.”

Where you cut — rather than how much

One of the ways the prime minister has said his government will cut operating expenses is by looking for ways to employ artificial intelligence and automation.

Wernick says that approach will require investment in training and technology and that, like buyouts for public servants, comes with an upfront cost.

But both former clerks say the Liberal government can hit its targets and they have a suggestion for how it can be done.

“Stop doing some things, rather than an across-the-board cut,” Cappe said.

By going this route, staff no longer carrying out a given function can be moved to work on other government priorities. Wernick says cutting entire lines of business also prevents spending from creeping back up.

“If you don’t kill the program entirely, the pressure to restore it will come in almost immediately from the clients, from the mayors, from the caucus,” Wernick said.

Donald Savoie, an expert in public administration and governance at the Université de Moncton, said the government can be downsized without hurting service delivery.

“Let’s look at programs that we don’t need anymore, let’s look at organizations that we don’t need anymore,” Savoie said.

He said there is also room to cut the use of consultants and outside contractors, but Wernick warned doing so would cut off access to expertise. That can be mitigated, he said, by training public servants — but that comes with an upfront cost.

Trying to emulate Chrétien and Martin’s fiscal success

Savoie said Carney has two things in common with Chrétien that bode well for his cost-cutting ambitions.

The first is that unlike Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper and Trudeau, both Carney and Chrétien had experience working in government well before securing the country’s highest office.

Savoie said that means Carney, like Chrétien before him, knows which levers to pull.

The other thing both men share is a mandate to respond to a national crisis. In the 1990s, Canada’s federal debt was so large compared to the economy that a third of every dollar collected in tax went just to service its interest payments.

“I think what helped Chrétien immensely in 1994-95 is Canadians were seized with a real crisis,” Savoie said.

“So Canadians said: ‘we got a problem’ and so [Chrétien] could draw on public support. And in the same vein, Carney can draw on public support because Canadians see that dealing with Trump, dealing with tariffs, is very tough and some tough decisions have to be taken.”

For that reason, Savoie said, Canadians will be much more open to suffering through cuts than they were five to 10 years ago, which may be just enough political licence for the expenditure review to bear fruit.

Source: Carney’s plan to cut tens of billions in spending is tough but doable, experts say

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Cabinet ministers asked to find ‘ambitious’ spending cuts as Carney government prepares first budget

2025/07/09 Leave a comment

To watch, significant targets:

Federal cabinet ministers are being asked to find “ambitious” internal savings this summer ahead of the 2025 budget as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government decides how it will pay for the billions of dollars in new spending that it recently announced.

Specifically, ministers must find ways to reduce program spending by 7.5 per cent in the fiscal year that begins April 1, 2026, followed by 10 per cent in savings the next year and 15 per cent in the 2028-29 fiscal year.

Program spending refers to the costs related to services provided directly by Ottawa. It excludes large categories such as federal transfers to the provinces and territories for health and social services, debt payments, and direct transfers to individuals such as seniors benefits. 

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne sent two letters to all cabinet ministers Monday informing them of plans for a “Comprehensive Expenditure Review” as well as a new pre-budget process related to minister requests for new funding.

“You will be expected to bring forward ambitious savings proposals to spend less on the day-to-day running of government, and invest more in building a strong, united Canadian economy,” Mr. Champagne wrote in one of the letters.

Source: Cabinet ministers asked to find ‘ambitious’ spending cuts as Carney government prepares first budget

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Over half of Canada’s 2025 study permits going to international students already here

2025/06/27 Leave a comment

Part of the adjustment process. Will be interesting to see how the provinces priorize new study permits between universities and colleges and by discipline:

The number of new study permits approved in 2025 is expected to drop by 50 per cent from last year as a growing number of the permits are going to international students changing schools or programs, or extending their studies in Canada, according to new projections.

Fewer new international students — the result of a decline in new study permit applications and approval rates — could spell trouble for the postsecondary education sector, which will continue to see enrolment drop for at least the next three years, warns an analysis by ApplyBoard based on the latest government data.

“Onshore students and students extending their studies may help Canada reach its cap targets in 2025, but this trend is unlikely to hold in future years,” said the forecast released Wednesday.

“Search engine data has shown that interest in studying in Canada has fallen at a greater rate than for Australia, the U.K. or the U.S. And with issued study permit extensions now outpacing new study permits, the flow of new international students toward Canadian institutions is weakening.”

Canada should be alarmed by the low new student count, said Meti Basiri, CEO and co-founder of the online marketplace for learning institutions and international students.

“We have effectively closed the tap,” he told the Star. “When your graduation exceeds significantly your entry into the process … two years from now you will have no students because you graduated everyone.” 

Last year, Ottawa capped the number of new study permits issued in order to reduce international student admission by 35 per cent, as Canada’s temporary resident population was soaring. The cap did not apply to students for master’s and doctoral programs or in elementary and secondary schools.

This year, the study permit caps were reduced by another 10 per cent and include those pursuing post-graduate studies in the country.

Leveraging early 2025 study permit data, ApplyBoard projects the total number of study permits issued may reach 420,000, just short of the overall cap (437,000). However, Basiri said that’s deceiving because only 163,000 of these permits are going to new international students, half of the volume admitted in 2024 and nearly 70 per cent fewer than 2023….

Source: Over half of Canada’s 2025 study permits going to international students already here

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