There is no flood of newcomers anymore, Mr. Poilievre
Canada’s population has stopped growing.
That’s an important point to remember when you hear Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre complain that immigration is “out of control” and people are pouring into the country.
For a while, that was true. The numbers of international students and temporary foreign workers boomed in the years immediately after the COVID-19 lockdowns, when the Liberal government of then-prime minister Justin Trudeau made one of the biggest public policy failures in decades.
But the feds – notably Mr. Trudeau’s last immigration minister, Marc Miller – slammed the brakes on that in 2024.
Now net immigration is pretty much zero.
So when Mr. Poilievre declared last week that the numbers of new temporary residents coming to Canada are “out of control,” he was way off base. And a couple of years too late.
There are plenty of things still wrong with Canada’s immigration system but the problem is no longer about the number of people coming into the country. It is about how people are being recruited to come to Canada – not how many.
Oddly, Mr. Poilievre wasn’t screaming so much about the numbers in 2023, when the surge in temporary residents was out of control, causing the population to grow by 3.2 per cent in a single year, the highest rate since 1957. Maybe he’s doing it now because public support for immigration has fallen so low.
But there is no massive influx now. Canada’s population is not growing.
The statement issued by Mr. Poilievre last week blasted the government for supposedly blowing through the 2025 targets for new arrivals of temporary workers only halfway through the year. It was repeated by the National Citizens Coalition lobby group and picked up by some pundits who chimed in. But they misinterpreted the statistics.
Mr. Poilievre’s statement said that 105,000 new temporary foreign workers had come in the first half of 2025, when the government had set a target of 82,000 new arrivals. But the 105,000 figure included work-permit renewals. Immigration and Refugees and Citizenship Canada reported there were 33,722 new arrivals.
Similarly, the Conservatives charged that the 302,000 work permits issued from January to June under the separate International Mobility Program exceed the target of 285,000. But again, many of the permits were renewals, and in this case, postgraduate work permits. According to IRCC, there were 85,512 new arrivals to Canada under IMP.
Postgraduate work permits and extensions are important if you want to understand what’s going on in Canada’s immigration system right now.
The big surge of temporary residents earlier in the decade came when Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals failed to realize colleges were recruiting vast numbers of international students. Many came with a guarantee that when they graduated they would get a three-year work permit. So international students who arrived in 2023 might be eligible for work permits through 2028 or 2030.
Now Ottawa has embarked on a process of reducing the numbers of temporary residents. One part is reducing new arrivals. The IRCC reports there were 214,000 fewer new arrivals of temporary workers and international students in the first half of 2025 than in the same period the year before.
But another part is an effort to turn temporary residents into permanent residents. Many of the 395,000 people to get permanent resident status in 2025 were already here.
In total, the immigration plan calls for slightly more people to leave in 2025 than arrive. Already, population growth in the first quarter of 2025, according to Statistics Canada, was 0.0 per cent.
The Liberals certainly deserve mountains of blame for the failures of 2021 to 2024, but Mr. Poilievre has no business pretending the number of immigrants is still going up.
That’s especially true when there are so many other big problems in the immigration system to fix – the things that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has so far failed to correct.
The labour market impact assessment system used to determine whether a company can hire temporary foreign workers is an utter failure. The low-wage stream of the temporary foreign workers program, which brings in occupations such as fry cooks, should be completely scrapped. The selection of economic immigrants, turned into a hodgepodge by the Liberals, should be returned to a predictable, points-based system. Those are real immigration issues.
But there is no flood of newcomers. Rapid population growth has stopped. There are other things to fix.
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