Carney’s immigration strategy comes during a shift in the economy — and public opinion on newcomers

Canadians will learn how the federal government is revising its immigration strategy in Tuesday’s budget, as public support for immigration is changing and after Ottawa already lowered its targets last fall.

“We are getting immigration under control,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told a room of students at the University of Ottawa in October.

“To match immigration levels with our needs and our capacity, the budget will include Canada’s new immigration plan to do better — for newcomers, for everyone.”

The Trudeau government had cut immigration levels after it rapidly increased during the post-pandemic labour shortage.

In 2024, the government announced the target for permanent residents this year would be cut from 500,000 to 395,000, with further reductions in subsequent years. The government also said at the time it was lowering the cap on international student permits by 10 per cent.

This came as a majority of Canadians said were too many immigrants coming to Canada for the first time since Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada started polling in 1996.

Have Canadians’ attitudes toward immigration soured?

Usha George, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s faculty of community services who focuses on newcomer settlement and integration, said the immigration increase in the years following the pandemic had an impact on public services.

“Our housing, our transport, our health care could not meet the demands of this very large number of people who have come in,” she said.

Canada’s unemployment rate has been rising this year, sitting at 7.1 per cent as of September. But the picture is worse for new arrivals.

The unemployment rate for recent immigrants was 11.1 per cent last year, about double the rate for those born in Canada.

And according to Statistics Canada, immigrants are more likely to be working in a field “unrelated to their education or training than their counterparts who were born in Canada.”

The government lowered standards for the qualifications and skills economic immigrants were required to meet, said Phil Triadafilopoulos, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

“I think where we really went off the rails, especially after COVID, is using the economic immigration system to admit people who previously, and now again, would have no hope of gaining entry,” said Triadafilopoulos.

At the same time, there is demand in the business community for more high-skilled labour in emerging industries.

Rob Goehring, the founder and CEO of AI startup Wisr and the executive director of the AI Network of B.C., says a “strong pipeline” of international talent is important for any company in his industry that is “looking to grow and scale.”

There needs to be a shift away from volume–based immigration toward more precision–based immigration, according to Anne Patterson, the chief research and communications officer with the Information and Communications Technology Council.

Immigration pathways should focus on national technology priorities like semiconductors, AI, cybersecurity and digital public infrastructure, said Patterson.

There have been calls in Canada for the country to capitalize on recent changes to U.S. visa policy to attract specialized talent.

Earlier this fall, the Trump administration imposed a fee of $100,000 on employers applying for an H-1B visa. The visa has allowed employers in the U.S. to hire foreign skilled workers for specialty occupations since 1990.

Goehring thinks this moment is an opportunity to attract new talent to Canada, and to bring Canadians, who had left for American jobs, back home. 

On top of the delays and complexity of the Canadian immigration system, lower salaries and expensive housing are structural challenges that face the Canadian tech sector’s ability to attract talent, he said.

The complexity of Canada’s economic immigration system can lead to long wait times where both highly qualified people, and the businesses trying to recruit them, get caught in a limbo period, said Goehring.

But George cautioned that the government should be careful and not just take immigrants because of the H-1B changes.

“Our economic program is already a talent–attraction program. The economic categories are selected on a basis of labour market demand,” she said.

“To say that ‘we are going to take more people in the tech sector because they can’t go to the U.S.,’ that’s not a good reason to make major policy changes.”