Stephen Harper suggested in his 2018 book, Right Here, Right Now, that historic support for immigration in Canada was because policy united the aspirations of new arrivals with those of citizens.
“Make immigration legal, secure and, in the main, economically driven and it will have a high level of public confidence,” he wrote.
Canadians have rejected the premise that the country accepts too many immigrants for more than two decades, but public confidence in the system has been rocked by disastrous public policy emerging from Ottawa over the past couple of years.
Pollster Environics has been tracking public opinion on the issue since 1977 and noted that the number of people disagreeing with the statement that Canada accepts too many immigrants fell to 51 per cent last year from 69 per cent in 2022 — the largest one-year change ever recorded. The reason for most people was the impact of increased immigration on the cost of housing.
It is no coincidence that during this period, the number of non-permanent residents doubled from 1.35 million in the first quarter of 2022, or 3.5 per cent of the total population, to 2.79 million, or 6.7 per cent of population, in the second quarter of this year. This doesn’t even include the estimated 300,000 to 600,000 workers and students whose permits have expired and are still in Canada without official status.
Ottawa relaxed rules on the number of low-wage temporary workers companies could hire, and businesses loaded up with cheap food counter attendants, cooks, cleaners and fish plant workers.
Asylum, work and study permits were issued as fast as they could roll off the presses.
The government claimed it was to stop the economy seizing up during the post-pandemic time of acute labour shortages. Economists suspect it was also an attempt to suppress wages and stave off inflation.
However, the rule of unintended consequences kicked in and the deregulation exacerbated the affordability crisis and negatively impacted Canada’s competitiveness. (Economic output rose 1.1 per cent between the fourth quarters of 2022 and 2023, yet population increased by 3.2 per cent, meaning GDP per capita fell by two per cent.)
Marc Miller, the immigration minister who was handed this bag of policy dreck last summer, has said he will reduce the number of temporary residents to five per cent from the current 6.7 per cent over the next three years.
We are now finding out how he plans to do so, and the measures proposed are unlikely to boost public confidence in the integrity of the system, or align with the interests of citizens.
There is already a steady stream of non-residents on work or study permits who transition to permanent residency — one Scotiabank report estimated around 36 per cent of new residents made this move in 2023.
But the growth in college-level foreign student enrolments and the expansion of the low wage stream of temporary workers mean there are many migrants who would not meet the requirements of the skills-based points system.
Ottawa has now revealed its solution — that from this fall, it will create a new economic class of permanent residency candidates for people with high school education or less, who would not otherwise have qualified to stay.
Mikal Skuterud, a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, said this is a first for Canada. He said he believes the measure is, at least in part, a “release valve” to address the bulging population of visa overstayers.
“Many of these non-permanent residents will never obtain skilled jobs and the current economic class selection system makes it difficult to prioritize applicants working in less-skilled jobs over high-skilled applicants. That’s the trade-off being made to avoid a growing undocumented population,” he said.
It is not clear yet how many of the 300,000 slots allocated for economic immigrants in 2025 will be filled from the new stream, but every one that is will be at the expense of a higher qualified person applying from abroad and going through the Comprehensive Ranking skills-based points system that has been the backbone of Canada’s successful immigration policy.
OECD data from 2021 showed that Canada was by far the most successful of its peers in picking immigrants with high levels of education — more than 70 per cent — compared to just 20 per cent with medium (high school level) education. That could soon change.
As Skuterud notes, there are going to be many frustrated foreign computer science graduates from Canada’s top universities who find their chances of coming to Canada permanently are now much reduced. “That’s not good if we’re genuinely concerned about labour productivity in this country,” he said.
Ottawa obviously has no stomach to dramatically increase outflows of undocumented immigrants
The Immigration Department said no information is available on numbers or a timeline because “this initiative is at the proposal stage, with no certainty of being implemented.” But it is hard to see what else the government can do.
Ottawa obviously has no stomach to dramatically increase outflows of undocumented immigrants — deportations reached 16,205 in 2023 and every single one has the potential to be a front-page Toronto Star sob story.
The Liberals have already cut student visas by 35 per cent and limited the percentage of any given workforce that can be made up of low-wage foreign workers to 20 per cent from 30.
But these measures will take time to work — most students are here on multi-year visas and are eligible for a three-year work permit after graduation.
Against that background, turning temporary workers and students into permanent residents looks like a work of political genius.
But at a stroke, it undermines the integrity of a skills-based immigration system; reduces Canada’s ability to attract the best and brightest; and, rewards those who have overstayed their visa by providing them with an option to permanent residency.
“The deskilling of Canadian economic immigration continues,” said Skuterud.
No wonder the public is losing confidence.
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