Quoted on need for annual levels plan to include temporary residents and political will to curb growth:
In 2022-23, Canada took in some 1.13 million immigrants, the highest such figure on record, and almost half a million more than the previous year. Over the same period, the number of non-permanent residents increased by 697,701.
As of June 2023, the number of non-permanent residents stood at nearly 2.2 million, about 5.5 per cent of Canada’s population.
“Temporary immigration has surpassed permanent immigration for the first time last year in a context where permanent immigration was already close to a record high,” said Charbonneau.
Andrew Griffith, a former director general at the federal Immigration Department, said Ottawa has a well-managed immigration system of permanent residents, but the exponential growth of the temporary resident admission has made the population growth unsustainable.
Ottawa has an annual plan that sets admission targets for different classes of permanent resident, but the entry of temporary residents is uncapped.
“We have to have an integrated immigration plan that actually looks at both the permanent residents and the temporary residents, given that the temporary residence is largely uncontrolled and has been increasing at a very high rate,” Griffith said.
“If you look at its explosive growth over the past few years, the past 20 years, that obviously contributes to all the pressures on housing, health care, infrastructure and the like.”
He said the government’s immigration plan is developed in silos and doesn’t address infrastructure capacity issues when it comes to health care, housing, education and transportation.
Although public sentiment still largely favours the continued immigration boost and its economic and workforce benefits, many regions are already struggling to manage housing and health-care shortages.
Across Canada, rising prices and limited supply create difficulties for those seeking home rental and ownership. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. said in a Sept. 13 report that Canada needs 3.5 million more units, on top of those already being built, to restore affordability. Sixty per cent of the demand for housing is in Ontario and B.C., largely due to supply lagging behind demand for 20 years.
On the health side, about six million people across Canada lack access to a family doctor, according to Canadian Medical Association data. Of those who have a family doctor, about a third experience overly long wait times to access them.
It’s a system already under strain, with doctors and nurses increasingly reporting stress and burnout, and some quitting.
An increasing population doesn’t necessarily dictate a health-care calamity, said Ruth Lavergne, a Canada Research Chair in Primary Care at Dalhousie University.
But she said the segment of the population supporting and working in health care needs to grow proportionately to the population. And we need to “rethink the organization of health care, to make it more efficient and better use the capacity that we have.”
Some of that capacity exists within the ranks of the newcomers, in the guise of foreign-trained health professionals. The problem is Canada doesn’t have a great record in helping them work here.
But streamlining the credentialing process can’t be the only fix, said Canadian Medical Association president Kathleen Ross.
She said the country will have to reconsider health-care delivery.
And that, to her mind, means reconsidering who’s doing what, where and when in the health system, and how to plug gaps without opening up new ones.
It also means changing how primary care works, reducing the administrative burdens on health professionals and better retaining them.
“We’re in a really unique time. Our emergency rooms, which are sort of the backstop, if you will, for a primary care system that’s not functioning well, are already over capacity and struggling with closures relating to our human health resource challenges.”
“These are all things we need to take into consideration, whether or not our population increases by a half a million or one-and-a-half million this year. It still behooves us to get back to the big discussion about how we are going to deliver access to care for all residents in Canada, whether they’re temporary or permanent.”
On the housing shortage side, the responsibility falls on provincial and federal governments to ensure Canada can withstand rising demand, said John Pasalis, president of Toronto brokerage Realosophy Realty. Over the past decade, he feels that has broken down as governments failed to scale investments in vital services in line with population growth.
Although immigrants often feel the brunt of the blame for these pressures, Pasalis said culpability lies with leaders who set ambitious immigration targets and allow universities to accept significant numbers of international students without investing in upgrading capacity.
“The people who are moving here are the ones that are kind of paying the biggest price in many, many cases.”
If governments don’t step up, all Canadians will eventually feel the squeeze, said Mike Moffatt, assistant professor in business and economics at Western University.
“We certainly either need to increase the amount of infrastructure built and housing built or slow down population growth,” Moffatt said. “If we continue to have this disconnect, we’re just going to have more housing shortages, less affordability and more homelessness.”
Instead of looking at newcomers as the source of housing strain, Moffatt says leaders should impose stronger restrictions on investors taking advantage of scarcity to drive up prices.
But it’s not just the supply of houses; it’s the type of supply. Those stronger regulations will need to be aimed at developers, too, said Marc Lee, a senior economist for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The housing in highest demand — for low- and middle-income families — is not as profitable to build.
David Hulchanski, a University of Toronto professor of housing and community development, noted that Airbnb has also taken up available housing across the country, something he said could be curbed through stronger regulation.
“There’s this effort to blame our housing problem on an increase in population,” said Hulchanski. “It isn’t just supply, it’s the type of supply.”
Against this backdrop, Immigration Minister Marc Miller has talked about the need to rein in admissions of international students — around 900,000 this year — by developing a “trusted system” to enhance the integrity of the international student program.
Griffith said that’s not enough — Canada needs to impose a hard cap, though that will take a strong political nerve.
“The business sector will squawk about the fewer temporary workers. Education institutions will go bankrupt if they don’t have their international students. The provincial governments will get in the way because they have to actually pay for university (education) rather than allowing the universities to be subsidized by foreign students.”
Shutting down the international student program and the temporary foreign worker program, or making major reductions to those programs, seems unlikely, he said, but freezing at current levels and gradually reducing those numbers might be viable.
“It would be very contentious,” he said. “It boils down to a lot of political will.”
Multicultural Meanderings 