2023 Conversations Shaping Canadian Immigration in 2024
Estimated Reading Time: 5.5 minutes
2023 was a year that the Canadian public really started paying to immigration. It started in January when IRCC trumpeted its accomplishment of meeting its 2023 target of 431,645 new permanent residents. I don’t recall such fanfare in previous years, but fanfare is often how the Trudeau government rolls. It’s a substantial number, and I’m thankful for the important conversations it sparked.
Given the immense challenge this federal department has faced in upgrading its dated technology to respond to this ambitious goal, IRCC deserves a round of applause for getting this done. Only 5 years ago, the target was 43% lower at 300,000. Anyone who has touched a Canadian immigration application in one way or another understands that each is a time-consuming and clunky process for applicant, legal representative, and IRCC officer. So please, let’s applaud where merit is deserved. It’s not often anyone says positive things about IRCC, myself included, so we should take the opportunity when our public service exceeds expectations.
Immigration Targets & Early 2023 Conversations
The early 2023 commentary was predictable: big picture thoughts about the impact of immigration on Canada’s economy, housing, wages, employment, as well as publicly funded services like healthcare and education that are already struggling to serve our current population. Opinion columns came from the usual pundits who follow such matters, but there seemed to be a greater attention in traditional news outlets and social media platforms. These are important conversations to have, and I’m glad we were having them.
Disclaimer: In case it wasn’t obvious, I am firmly in the camp that thinks Canada’s population needs to grow substantially in the medium to long term. For anyone interested in this topic, I recommend Doug Saunders’s Maximum Canada: Toward a Country of 100 Million (2019).
2023’s total new PRs (437,000) exceeded the specific target, but IRCC actually had a generous range in its target—from 360,000-445,00.
Historically, Canada has thought in targets as a percentage of the population. It’s been held below 1% for the past few decades, but the Trudeau Liberals decided to bring it higher to address our greying population that doesn’t reproduce much on its own. Canada’s immigration intake broke 5% of the population earlier in the 20th century (but a lot of those new immigrants abandoned Canada for the United States. The challenges of newcomers leaving Canada has been a problem since the country’s origins.)
The 2024 target is 1.2% of the population. Because of 2023 conversations from July onwards, many now worry that targets are too high. Meanwhile, a recent RBC report argued that we need 2.1% growth in the long term to counterbalance the challenges of our country’s “age structure.” We’re talking about permanent residents here, which is only part of the immigration conversation of 2023.
For thoughts on the 2024-2026 targets that were released in November 2023, see this blog post from November 13.
Summer & Fall Conversations about Temporary Residents
By July, the conversation zeroed in on housing. Fingers started to be pointed at international students, as though they were at fault for Canada’s (and, most notably, the provinces’) policy decisions. (International students often struggle the most to find housing and are eager for co-habitation options, but that wasn’t part of the conversation, unfortunately.)
By fall, the conversation shifted to the number of temporary residents (student and worker) that Canada is bringing in. As stories started coming out about international students sleeping under bridges and using food banks, Canadian society was brought into the conversation about issues in Canada’s International Student Program that are very well known by anyone working in the sector.
So, by November, with a new minister of immigration, the conversation is shifting to a reduction of temporary resident numbers, even though IRCC has no official quotas for temporary residents as a whole. They are driven by market forces, a variety of special policies and streams (which do have some of their own caps), and IRCC processing capacity, but our new immigration minister understands that he has some carrots and sticks to use.
Non-permanent residents of Canada, by type and quarter. Source: CTV News.
The Conversations We Need to Have
There are many important conversations to be had about Canada’s use of temporary foreign workers and their impact on wages. Many argue that it is the temporary status of foreign workers that leads to precarity and drives down wages, particularly in sectors such as agriculture. I argue that we need to be bringing in more people as permanent residents rather than as temporary residents who lack the many of the rights and privileges that Canadians hold dear.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then please read a story or two about the experiences of temporary foreign agricultural workers during the pandemic. COVID exacerbated existing issues that have been documented but largely ignored for years regarding Canada’s employer-specific work permits.
Source: The Toronto Star (2022)
There are many conversations happening about the number of immigrants coming to Canada but not enough about the treatment of foreign nationals inside the country, or the lack of oversight over employers who use the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. There are some folks such as Sara Mojtehedzadeh doing great investigative journalism in this area, fortunately. The stories just don’t somehow make it into the national conversation.
We are starting to have conversations about educational institutions, the methods used in the recruitment of international students, and the quality of care provided once those students are on campus. (I hope that serious conversation about the quality of career supports for post-graduation success will widen in the near future as well.) The Canadian public is starting to understand that international students help pay the bills when provincial governments have decided that they don’t want to. If we want provincial governments to cover more, then taxpayers should also talk about how much more they’re willing to spend on maintaining an education system that maybe isn’t quite as public as we feel it is.
Complex Conversations
These are complex conversations that require more than 144 characters. And we should have them with openness to the challenges we are facing as a country with an aging population, shortage of workers in fields like healthcare, tech, and agriculture, as well as public institutions that don’t seem as shiny as they once did.
And we should also have them with the understanding that many of the 437,000 people in the headlines have been our neighbours and community members for quite some time. I’ve long been proud of how welcoming Canada is to the world. I have been proud of how we are a rare example in an increasingly isolationist and nasty world. But some of the commentary worries me that I should be more cautious with my pride.
And finally, as we look to 2024, I hope the conversation focuses on the temporary resident to permanent resident funnel that Canada has promoted, but now seems inclined to dispense with. Namely, after seeing Canada’s promotions of pathways to PR through first studying or working in Canada, many people have quite literally sold the farm as part of a long-term immigration strategy. Canada created a system that incentivized people to do that, so many so that the temporary resident to permanent resident funnel has become hyper-competitive.
In 2024, we need to have conversations about that funnel, about the foreign nationals inside Canada who are our neighbours, and about how we feel about growing as a country via a temporary class of people holding fewer rights than Canadian permanent residents and citizens.
