Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says Canada’s population growth via the immigration system needs to decrease in order to be sustainable, saying the current numbers are putting strain on the country.
“We have to have a smaller population growth. There’s no question about it,” Poilievre told reporters in Ottawa on Aug. 29.
Poilievre accused the federal government of rapidly increasing the population through immigration “at three times the rate of the housing stock.”
“We need to have a growth rate that is below the growth in housing, health care, and employment,” he said.
Temporary and permanent immigration has increased at a record pace in recent years, with immigration targets set to reach 500,000 by 2025 and the number of permanent residents doubling from 2021 to 2024,
reaching over 2.7 million. The number of work permit
holders was slightly over half a million in 2021 and climbed to over 1.3 million in the second quarter of 2024.
The Conservative leader argued that fraud and abuse in the temporary foreign worker program had “destroyed what was the best immigration system in the world” and said the number of international students had grown “almost three times as fast as the housing stock.”
Poilievre said if he became prime minister, the temporary foreign worker program would be used “exclusively to fill jobs that Canadians cannot or do not fill,” and international students will only be allowed into Canada if they have “a way to pay their bills, a house to live in, and a real admission letter to a real educational institution.”
New Measures
During a Liberal cabinet retreat on Aug. 26, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced Ottawa was taking steps to reduce the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada.“As the landscape has shifted, we’re no longer dealing with the same labour shortage that we were dealing with even just a couple of years ago. So too, the policy landscape has to shift,” he said, adding that further measures to reduce would be announced.
The new rules include preventing temporary foreign worker applications in the low-wage stream in metropolitan areas with an unemployment rate of 6 percent or higher, barring exceptions for “food security sectors” like agriculture and fish processing, as well as preventing employers from hiring more than 10 percent of their total workforce through the program. The stricter rules are estimated to reduce the number of those workers by 65,000.
A day earlier on Aug. 26, Trudeau also said the government is considering reducing the number of permanent residents accepted into Canada each year. “Those are the discussions that we’re having as a cabinet here and over the coming months,” the prime minister told reporters.
A recent Leger poll found that 65 percent of Canadians said the government’s plan to welcome 500,000 new immigrants in both 2025 and 2026 is “too many,” while 20 percent said it’s the right number and 3 percent said it’s not enough. The survey found 78 percent thought immigration was contributing to the country’s housing crisis, 76 percent said it is stressing medical services, and 72 percent said the government’s immigration policy is “too generous.”
