The Carney government has laid out ambitious plans on housing affordability, defence spending and international trade. But on one of Canada’s most consequential policy files — immigration — experts say Ottawa has yet to offer a vision of its own.
“I don’t think that the Carney administration has really done much thinking yet about immigration,” Daniel Hiebert, professor emeritus in the University of British Columbia’s department of geography, told Canadian Affairs in an interview in May.
“I think they’ve got a whole bunch of high-priority issues, and I think immigration is not near the top of that list.”
Some experts say the absence of a clear vision on immigration risks overlooking Canada’s long-term economic and social needs.
Immigration is “the policy lever that more than any other determines what the future of Canada’s going to look like,” Hiebert said.
In 2016, an influential federal advisory council recommended Canada increase its annual immigration intake from 300,000 to 450,000 to offset its aging demographic and sustain economic growth.
The Trudeau government embraced that advice, gradually boosting permanent residency admissions over several years to a high of nearly 485,000 in 2024.
But amidst a public backlash over housing affordability and service capacity constraints, the government reversed course in late 2024.
The Carney government has largely continued these targets. It has stabilized permanent residency admissions at below one per cent of the total population, effectively halting further population growth. And it has pledged to reduce Canada’s reliance on temporary residents, introducing a five per cent cap on the size of Canada’s non-permanent population.
“They’re just simply following the policy legacy of the Trudeau government,” Hiebert said.
The demographic trends that informed the advisory council’s recommendations in 2016 remain true today. In fact, Canada’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.3 in 2022, far below the 2.1 replacement level.
Lisa Lalande, CEO of the Century Initiative, a non-profit that advocates for population growth, says Canada’s current immigration levels fail to address the demographic and economic challenges Canada faces.
“We have an aging population and a crashing fertility rate — and a dependency ratio that ultimately means we are going to have difficulty in the future with regards to meeting our labour needs,” she said.
A 2024 Parliamentary Budget Officer report highlights the challenges. It projects the proportion of individuals aged 65 and older relative to the working-age population will increase from nearly 30 per cent in 2023 to nearly 50 per cent by 2098. And this projection was based on the government’s higher, 2023 immigration targets.
The Century Initiative has proposed Canada raise permanent residency admissions to between 1.15 and 1.25 per cent of the national population each year — a higher target than the Carney government’s current cap, which sits just below one per cent. At current population levels, this would mean admitting between 478,000 and 519,000 permanent residents a year.
“Canada needs a stronger plan that looks at the issues more holistically and understands immigration as central to a strategic plan for growth,” said Lalande.
Splitting the pie
Other voices are more circumspect about the need for sustained, high immigration levels.
In December 2024, former Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz said in a webinar that Canada is in a recession. He said the weakness of Canada’s economy has been masked by high population growth.
“A technical [recession] is a superficial definition that you have two quarters of negative growth in a row, and we haven’t had that,” Poloz said. “But the reason is because we’ve been swamped with new immigrants who buy the basics in life, and that boosts our consumption enough.”
A January report by the PBO projected that Ottawa’s reduced 2024 immigration targets would lower real GDP by 1.7 per cent in 2027. But it also projected that real GDP per capita would be 1.4 per cent higher in the same year.
In effect, high population growth can decrease the amount of economic activity per person.
“In a sense, it’s the size of the pie,” explained Lars Osberg, an economics professor at Dalhousie University. “If you have to divide the pie among more people, each slice of the pie is on average going to be smaller.”
Real GDP per capita — which has declined in five of the past six quarters in Canada — is well below its long-term trend, which equates to a decline in living standards of about $4,200 a person, a recent Statistics Canada report says.
Osberg particularly worries about the effect of low-skilled immigration on workers’ average incomes.
“If you bring in a whole bunch of people to work at Canadian Tire or Tim Hortons or all these relatively low paid service sector jobs, you increase GDP, but you increase it by less than the average of all incomes. And so that pulls the average down,” he said.
Social friction
Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, says high immigration levels also have far-reaching consequences for national identity and social trust.
“The more diverse the population, the less people trust each other,” he said.
Kaufmann draws on decades of international research showing that rapid demographic change can strain civic engagement and weaken collective identity, especially if policymakers fail to address these shifts openly.
The Carney government has defended its current immigration strategy.
An Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spokesperson told Canadian Affairs in an emailed statement that the government is managing immigration levels in a “balanced, sustainable” way.
“Successful immigration requires an alignment between immigration levels and the ability to properly welcome newcomers with housing, accessible healthcare and education,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also emphasized the government’s efforts to transition skilled temporary residents already in Canada to permanent status.
“Expected to represent over 40 per cent of overall permanent resident admissions in 2025, these people are skilled, educated and integrated into Canadian society,” the spokesperson said.
“They will continue to support the workforce and economy without placing additional demands on services, as they are already settled in Canada with jobs and housing.”
Kaufmann says many Canadian policymakers and academics avoid a critical discussion of immigration policy, because they can be professionally ostracized for doing so.
But Kaufmann suggests there is a public appetite for more frank discussion about immigration policy. Without it, the gap between public sentiment and elite consensus on immigration policy could grow and lead to social instability, he says.
“ What you’re getting is a buildup of discontent,” said Kaufmann. “But until it’s released, we won’t know how profound it is.”
In Osberg’s view, there is not merely an appetite but a need for such discussions.
“One of the things I kind of regret about the way in which we organize ourselves in Canada is that we don’t seem to be able to have an informed public debate on those issues,” said Osberg. He noted there was no debate about the high immigration levels introduced under the Trudeau government.
“[Immigration levels] get decided and announced as targets,” he said.
“You can think of a whole bunch of important questions for democracy, but one of the big questions has got to be, how big should we be?”
