Canada’s ‘Pause’ on Immigration-Driven Population Growth May Be a Statistical Illusion

An Air Canada Plane is seen at Pearson Airport in Toronto, on July 24, 2024. The Canadian Press/Christopher Katsarov

Commentary

Last fall, Ottawa responded to a surge in public support for immigration restriction with a cut to immigration levels that it promised would “pause population growth in the short term” to ease “pressures on housing, infrastructure and social services.” But a curious question about this policy U-turn is beginning to emerge: Is Canada’s population growth really on pause?

A new report by Benjamin Tal, CIBC’s deputy chief economist, argues that the federal government is significantly overstating the effect its immigration cut will have on population growth—a statistical undercounting that could hamper Canada’s ability to plan for our social services, infrastructure, and housing needs.

The CIBC report takes issue with Statistics Canada’s projection that population growth will dramatically decline from 3.2 percent in 2023 (an astonishing rate that ranked us roughly on par with sub-Saharan African countries like Angola) down to 0.3 percent in 2025 and negative 0.2 percent in 2026.

The report argues that this projection is overly optimistic in that it overestimates the number of non-permanent residents (mostly international students and foreign workers) who will leave the country in the next two years, and undercounts asylum seekers.

In order for the federal government’s population growth pause projection to pan out, there would have to be a huge “outflow” of non-permanent residents in the next two years: 1.26 million in 2025, and 1.1 million in 2026. Tal dryly describes this prediction as “a tall order.”

The major problem here is that what Statistics Canada measures as an “outflow” of non-permanent residents is really just the total number of expired visa holders, “many of whom actually remain in Canada and retain employment, long after their visas expire,” Tal writes.

This is because Statistics Canada does not directly measure departures. As a 2018 Statistics Canada report titled “Measuring Emigration in Canada” explains: “Because emigrants have, by definition, left Canada and are not required to report their departure, it is very difficult to track them in most Canadian data sources.”

Statistics Canada removes visa holders from their official population count within 120 days of their visa expiring, but this may not reflect reality on the ground.

How many non-permanent residents actually get on a plane and fly home once their visa expires? The short answer is that nobody really knows. A previous CIBC report in 2023, also by Benjamin Tal, estimated that Canada undercounts the number of non-permanent residents by almost 1 million—mainly because of a high number of visa overstayers.

Asylum seekers are another statistical grey area in population projections. Tal’s most recent CIBC report points out that, unless legislation is introduced to reform our asylum system, Ottawa will continue to have “limited control over the numbers of asylum seekers from within Canada.” Numbers may fluctuate in line with “geopolitical shifts that impact asylum claims.”

The report projects that non-permanent resident outflows will be 65 percent of the level projected by the federal government, while the number of asylum seekers from within Canada will be close to 200,000. This would put Canada’s population growth at 1.1 percent in 2025, and 1 percent in 2026—a far cry from the government’s projection of 0.3 percent in 2025 and negative 0.2 percent in 2026.

While the debate over population projections can appear rather nerdy, this is anything but a wonkish numbers argument. It has become widely acknowledged in Canada that excessive population growth places stress on housing, food banks, hospitals, walk-in clinics, classrooms, roads, water treatment plants, and much more.

As we have seen since the post-pandemic immigration surge, a failure to calibrate population growth in line with Canada’s capacity can mean the difference between young couples being able to start families or being forced to delay having children due to unaffordable housing. It can mean the difference between timely access to health care or crowded emergency rooms and interminable surgery list waits.

In Canada, unlike in countries with high fertility rates, population growth is synonymous with immigration. In 2023, 97.6 percent of Canada’s growth came from immigration, according to StatCan. In 2024, that proportion was virtually the same at 97.3 percent.

This means we have the ability to directly control population growth through our immigration department, but we can only do that intelligently if we have solid population projections.

With such a striking difference between the population projections put forward by Ottawa and Benjamin Tal’s report for CIBC, the government should head back to the drawing board, incorporate all available information and data it may have missed, and start new projections from scratch.

If Canada’s population is set to grow much faster than projected by Statistics Canada, this could have major implications for municipalities and provincial governments trying to align housing and services with demand.

More fundamentally, this is a matter of government accountability. Canadians deserve to know whether the population growth pause they were promised is in fact a statistical illusion.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.