It’s been about a year since Immigration Minister Marc Miller took up his post at Canada’s gates with promises to bring the flow of newcomers down to manageable levels, and the situation has only gotten worse.
In 2023 alone, 1.3 million people came to the country, growing the population by 3.2 per cent — that’s more than three times as seen in the United States. It’s a rate that would have been hard to fathom years ago: temporary foreign workers are up sevenfold since 2000, as is the international student population. Once on a gentle rise, the numbers took off in 2015, and became especially steep after the COVID pandemic.
It’s the country’s youth who are particularly squished by the squeeze.
The banks, at least, have turned some attention to the poor tidings that population inflows have brought Canada’s youth. In April, Scotiabank economist Derek Holt noted that the previous month saw youth jobs drop by about 28,000. It may not have been as noticeable (sub-25s aren’t as tied to housing and consumer markets, our economist explains), but he raised a few possible explanations anyway.
It could have been that spring break’s particular odd timing with data collection could have exaggerated numbers, Holt suggested — or, perhaps, recent surges in temporary residents “left fewer openings for youths to fill in terms of seasonal March break related employment.”
“If so, then what happens to the youths category going forward partly depends upon whether the feds are successful in pushing the temps category down toward their targets,” he concluded.
The 15-to-24 cohort later went under the lens of BMO senior economist Robert Kavcic in early July. He determined that youth employment rose by 25,000 positions over the past year — but the labour force has grown by 100,000 people in that time. Youth unemployment, accordingly, rose to 13 per cent.
“Robust labour force inflows have certainly made it a tougher job market in some industries where youth tend to find summer employment,” he wrote.
The situation wasn’t as bad as it was in 2009, which saw the youth unemployment rate reach 15 per cent, nor was the figure as bad as the COVID shutdown’s 30 per cent, Kavcic pointed out. It’s true: the raw numbers have been worse in the past. But youth back then weren’t up against a vastly over-supplied labour market, and in the wake of the 2008 recession, youth employment was improving.
Now, in the couple of years post-pandemic, it’s getting worse. Weak private investment and productivity no doubt contribute to the lack of jobs for youth, too, but, the post-pandemic immigration policy is akin to filling a pothole with a dump truck. Things weren’t great to begin with; now, they’re not great and crowded.
The minister, at least, is aware that the country has its limits. “We need to take a step back and look at the historic volumes of people coming here,” he said in July. That same month, he told Bloomberg that student visas shouldn’t be thought of as an immigration pathway, “People should be coming here to educate themselves and perhaps go home and bring those skills back to their country.” At other times, he’s likened the country’s use of temporary foreign workers to an addiction.
His boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, appears to concur.
“Over the past few years we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration,” he said in April. “Whether it’s temporary foreign workers, or whether it’s international students in particular that have grown at a rate that’s far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”
Miller has tried to rectify the problem by weakly pulling a few of the levers available to him. He announced last year that he’d cap growth at 500,000 (which is still about 70 per cent more than 2015’s total newcomer count of 300,000). In January, he instituted a “cap” on international student permits to “stabilize new growth” coming from education. It wouldn’t do much to fix things, though: the total permits granted in 2024 (360,000) is slated to be higher than the total number of study permit holders in 2015 (352,330), and data from the past five months shows that this year’s permits are being handed out at a faster pace than before.
As for the temporary foreign worker program, it’s received a very, very light brake-tap.
As for limiting the impact of international students on domestic labour, Miller at least tried to correct the program’s past transformation into what was functionally another cheap labour stream. Once beholden to a 20-hour limit on off-campus work during the school session, international students were waived that restriction in 2022 — and some 80 per cent of them took the opportunity to work over the old limit.
Instead of fully reverting to the 20-hour cap for the next academic year, which Miller re-instated last fall, he bumped the limit up to 24 — “to help offset the cost of living in Canada.” Never mind the fact that the program was originally intended for people who can pay for their education without working full-time. Miller also doubled the amount of money a student requires to study in Canada from 10,000 to 20,000, but that threshold can be met via private loan schemes, rendering it only so effective.
In the meantime, Canadian youth will be the ones to suffer the consequences of high inflows. Anecdotes of anxious, fruitless job searches will continue to litter the internet — and now the media (Guelph Today found one local student who sent 250 applications before securing summer work). The federal Canada Summer Jobs Program will continue to provide some relief, constrained by its identity-based priorities.
The poor job prospects will continue to compound an already bad housing situation of short-term rentals and a construction pace that lags far behind population growth. Long-term, lesser prospects for employment and homeownership will risk stunting the financial position of today’s youth, potentially causing them to miss out on key milestones in life.
Miller’s year of mild adjustments has been akin to going from 180 km/h on a highway to 150 km/h. For the unfortunate souls who take the impact — in this case, young Canadians — the experience isn’t all that different.
National Post