Mark Carney has started fixing immigration. He needs to keep at it

The Carney government has spent the past year and a half leaning hard on the wheel, trying to steer away from some of the Trudeau government’s worst navigational errors.

One of the big issues where the previous government got it very wrong, and where the current government says it wants to chart a different course, is immigration.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s watchword on the file is “control.” It’s the first term he reaches for whenever he talks about immigration. Answering a question about immigration from The New York Times, he used the word seven times.

This doesn’t mean closing the border or stopping all arrivals. It’s about moderating the immigration level after Justin Trudeau’s record surge, and giving the public a sense that the government is back in control of who comes to Canada, and who stays.

After a sharp drop in student arrivals since 2024, and a refugee claims backlog that is falling for the first time in years, Team Carney can claim progress on the immigration file.

However, as I wrote earlier this week, quite a bit of course-correcting remains.

What does the Carney government still need to do?

Let’s review where we are, and how we got here.

Under the previous government, employers and educational institutions – whether good, bad or awful – were offered an unlimited number of temporary work visas and student permits. That led to recruiters scouring the developing world, selling the hope of Canadian citizenship in return for a couple of semesters and low tuition at no-name, puppy-mill colleges.

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Between 2022 and 2024, the number of new Canadian residents averaged one million a year – four times the level of the 1990s, 2000s or early 2010s. Canada’s legal temporary-resident population grew to three million by 2024.

It was an unprecedented and unplanned immigration surge, driven by a government that branded itself to be progressive, yet acted as if Canada’s main economic problem was a shortage of people willing to work for minimum wage, or less.

The Trudeau government started backpedaling in its final year, and the Carney government continued. The number of student visas has been capped at a level far below the heights of a couple of years ago. The count of foreign students in Canada, which topped one million in the summer of 2024, is now down to 590,000.

However, the hangover from so many people arriving on temporary visas is still with us.

According to the federal Immigration Department, the number of visa students has fallen by 404,000 since January, 2023. But the tally of people on work visas – mostly former visa students – has risen by 327,000. The population of asylum claimants in Canada has also more than tripled over the past four years, to 530,000.

As a result, the legal temporary-resident population – which the Carney government wants to lower to 5 per cent of the population, or around 2.1 million – has barely budged over the past two years. After peaking at three million in late 2024, Statistics Canada estimates that it’s now 2.8 million.

That is even though Canada is devoting a large share of its permanent immigration places to temporary residents.

Also, as part of the hangover, Statscan says that its previous population figures, which assumed that people whose visas expired immediately left, were off the mark.

It now has better information on who leaves, and who gets another visa and remains. (It’s still working on measuring how many remain in Canada without legal permission.)

With fewer temporary residents leaving, a widely reported decline in the Canadian population in 2025 turns out never to have happened.

In the coming weeks, Ottawa will release its annual immigration plan, including numerical targets – temporary and permanent – for the coming years.

The main goal of Canadian immigration policy should be to benefit Canada. Immigration can benefit Canada, and we should say that loud and clear. But we also need to acknowledge that the previous government’s immigration choices generated more downsides than upsides, not least by inflaming our politics.

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One part of Canada’s immigration program will always be about welcoming refugees from overseas. Another part will always be family reunifications. But Canada’s main focus has been independent economic immigrants. Until the Trudeau government, there had been an increasing accent on immigrants whose education, skills and experience earned them top scores on Canada’s points system.

The two-thirds or so of immigrants who come through the economic stream should be chosen like applicants to a selective university. Canada has historically been quite good at that.

We need to return to that approach, and double down on it.

Liberals and Conservatives also need to shut out the loudest voices on the far left and the far right. Ignore the minorities on the fringes who see immigration entirely through an identitarian lens.

Instead, be practical and reasonable. Make policy for the quiet majority of Canadians on the centre-left and centre-right, who just want to know that our borders mean something, that immigrants are carefully chosen, and that immigration can be a two-way street that benefits immigrants and Canadians.

Immigration was so uncontroversial in Canada, for so long, because previous governments inherently understood the bargain, and pursued a common, non-partisan immigration policy. We need to get back to that.

How?

Continue reducing temporary immigration: The temporary-immigration streams used to be small, but they exploded under the Trudeau government. They came to be seen as backdoors to permanent immigration, for those who would not otherwise have scored high enough to secure permission to permanently immigrate.

These pathways need to be wound back, and some need to be wound down. The Carney government has promised to bring temporary-resident numbers down to 5 per cent of the national population by next year, but it’s well behind schedule. In any case, the target is too high.

The C.D. Howe Institute’s expert group on immigration suggests aiming for 3 per cent. I agree. What’s more, the vast majority of future temporary residents should be high-quality visa students or former students on postgraduate work permits.

End the low-wage temporary foreign worker program: It makes sense to give Canadian businesses the flexibility to temporarily hire an aeronautical engineer from overseas. It makes no sense to hand out temporary visas for low-wage work. Canada has a shortage of educated and skilled people in some high-paying fields, but there is no generalized shortage of workers, nor is there a lack of unskilled workers.

Temporary work visas should no longer be available for jobs paying less than $100,000 a year, with the singular exception of the long-standing seasonal agricultural worker program. A reduction in the pool of people available for entry-level jobs should cause wages at the bottom of the income scale to feel some upward pressure. That would be a good thing.

Focus student visas on the best: The limited number of student visas should go to the highest-quality institutions and programs, admitting the most-qualified students, and charging the highest international tuition.

What happened during the Trudeau era was the opposite, as provinces – led by Ontario – took advantage of the unlimited number of student visas to encourage the weakest and lowest-tuition institutions, mostly public and private colleges, to go on a cash grab. What was being sold was entry into Canada, not education.

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Our leading public universities, which charge international undergraduate tuition of $50,000 and up, and even more for some master’s programs, should get nearly all of the visas. Private colleges should get none. Public colleges should get few.

Stable permanent immigration: From the early 1990s until the Trudeau government, Canada’s immigration rate was relatively stable, through Liberal and Conservative administrations. It helped to make immigration as boring and unnoticed as functioning plumbing.

Let’s set our immigration rate at 0.7 per cent of the population – that’s about 300,000 new immigrants. Keep the rate there year after year, indefinitely.

An immigration rate of 0.7 per cent would be on par with where things were for the quarter century before the Trudeau government. It would be well below the level Canada hit from 2022 to 2024, and somewhat lower than the figure the Carney government has targeted. But by international standards, it would still be above average.

As I detail in my book on immigration, the U.S. legal-immigration level in the decades before the first election of President Donald Trump was around 0.3 per cent.

As on other key files, the Carney government has started to turn the ship on immigration. As with those other issues, more turning is still needed.