The Decibel - Why Canada lost consensus on immigration — and how to get it back

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

The Canadian consensus on immigration cratered last year. In the fall of 2024, an Environics poll found that for the first time in a quarter century most Canadians felt there was too much immigration. Under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, the country experienced one of the biggest periods of immigration growth in its history, but after the shift in public opinion, the Liberal government reversed course. Despite big reductions to immigration levels, most Canadians still think rates are too high.Today, The Decibel is looking at how Canada’s relationship with immigration significantly changed, what it’s meant for the country and the people who have immigrated to it, and where we go from here.Tony Keller, Globe columnist and author of Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong, will walk us through what motivated Trudeau’s dramatic changes to the immigration system and how they impacted the country. And then, Rupa Banerjee, professor and Canada Research Chair in Economic inclusion, Employment and Entrepreneurship of Canada’s Immigrants, will explain the effect that whiplash-like changes to the system have had on recent immigrants and our economy.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For a long time, public sentiment towards immigration in Canada has been positive. But recently, there's been a shift. Last year, for the first time in decades, a majority of Canadians felt there were too many people coming into the country. And most still feel that way. 67% of poll respondents think Canada's 2026 immigration targets are too high. That's according to an abacus survey this month. Under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, immigration reached historic levels. Politicians across the country put the blame on the former PM,

with some saying he broke Canada's immigration system. We have, right now, refugees and homeless shelters. We have international students grappling with a lack of supports in the community. Radical, uncontrolled immigration and policies related to it are partly to blame for judges. joblessness, housing, and health care crises. People come to Canada with a hope that they can build a good life. But that is not what's going on right now.

In late 2024, Astrodot's political fortunes were sinking. He announced a U-turn on his government's immigration policies. As a federal team, we could have acted quicker and turned off the taps faster. Canada would drastically reduce the number of immigrants it accepted. So we're doing something major. We're reducing the numbers of immigrants that will come to Canada. for the next three years. A year later, we've seen what this reduction has meant for Canada.

Today, we're looking at how we got to this moment where Canada's relationship with immigration has significantly changed and where we go from here. First, we'll hear from Globe columnist Tony Keller. He's also the author of the new book, Borderline Chaos, how Canada got immigration right and then wrong. And then, Professor Rupa Banerjee will join us. She's the Canada Research Chair in Economic Inclusion, Employment, and Entrepreneurship of Canada's immigrants.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Tony, thanks so much for coming on the show. You're very welcome. So before we get into what drove former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government to make the change that it did on immigration, let's look about how Canadians broadly felt about it before. the shift in public sentiment? So from the 90s all the way through till about 2015, Canada averaged about 250,000 immigrants a year. Pretty stable number through conservative governments and liberal governments and pretty strong public support. I mean, a polling we had suggested that

immigration was more popular in Canada than really any other developed country, even though we actually had relatively higher immigration than other developed countries mostly and particularly higher immigration than the United States. So it's an interesting paradox that in Canada, immigration was relatively high and quite popular. And I understand that actually Ottawa started polling Canadians in 1996. So we do have some numbers to back that up to show that, you know, Canadians were very much for immigration. Absolutely. There was really no pushback over immigration. Parties agreed on immigration. They roughly agreed on how to run the system. They roughly agreed on immigration levels. And it's important to note, they also agreed that it was really key to

keep control of the border. So it's kind of, again, part of this paradox was Canada had very strong border control, but also very high immigration. So we were very strict about who we let in, but we actually let in a lot of people relative to other developed countries. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about how that kind of worked in the earlier days, like the point system, right? That that's kind of what we had starting 1967. So right. So one of the elements is the point system. So Canada's got a, you know, fairly unusual immigration history. Through much of the 20th century, Canada had racial restrictions on who could come to Canada. Basically, Canada had an immigration policy that said, you got to be white to come to Canada, pretty much. That changes in the 60s, and we

start to change to a system that says, okay, the bulk of our immigration will be economic immigration, and people will be chosen based on skills, education, other attributes. Some of them will come as refugees. That means they're coming for their needs. Some of them will come as family reunification, meaning they've got close relatives in Canada who want to bring them here. But most immigrants to Canada since the 1960s and especially since the 90s have been economic immigrants chosen by Canada because they had certain skills, certain attributes that it was thought would be valuable to Canada. And the way they were chosen was the point system.

So kind of like a competitive university, we ranked and we chose the applicants we thought best met the Canadian criteria. Okay. And you mentioned about how, you know, cross-partisan. parties that there was kind of a consensus around immigration, that it was seen as a good thing for Canada. I do think it's important to know that also there was, of course, tensions, right? It wasn't always a perfect system. And you mentioned a little bit here about how, at one point, we talked about race as being a way that people were allowed into the country. But it never

became kind of like the dominant political issue. Why is that? So just to go back a bit on the history, the consensus that I'm talking about is post-1960s, where basically liberals and conservatives agree, yeah, we're going to pick future immigrants based on objective, non-racial, non-discriminatory criteria. And in fact, that is started by a conservative government, by John Deef and Baker's conservative government. And it's expanded under Pearson's liberal government. And it continues to expand under future governments.

The decision to make immigration kind of high and stable rather than fluctuating year to year to year is made under the Mulrooney government. So again, another conservative government. So there's this consensus building from the 60s and really entrenched by the 1990s that neither liberals nor conservatives want to touch immigration. Nobody's talking about dramatically increasing it. Nobody's talking about dramatically lowering it. And the system is kind of just running along. Canadians aren't upset about it.

And Canadians don't think about it. And politicians don't argue about it. It's a very, very neat situation. It's like plumbing. Nobody worries about plumbing when it's working. People start to worry about plumbing when it's not. working. So is it the case that like economically it's also working for Canada? Yeah, on the whole. I mean, there was because Canada tended to choose economic immigrants

based on attributes of education and skill, Canada's immigration stream in the 1990s, in the 2000s, in the early 2010s, and even actually extending into the late 2010s, is very tilted towards highly skilled people. The belief was that would make Canadians think, hey, when I think immigrant. I think of someone who's earning a good income is going to have a good job, is going to benefit the economy, is going to pay taxes, is going to make Canada better. I don't think of immigrants as stealing something from Canada or undermining Canada. Immigration is great. It's actually going to help the economy. It's going to make me better off. It's going to make my community better. And so a lot of Canadians really believe that. And there was some underlying data to

suggest, yeah, that's pretty much what the immigration system was doing. Okay. So we do know that things dramatically change under Trudeau. So let's talk about what the broader conversation on immigration is looking like, because it's also in 2015 that Trump enters the presidential race for the first time. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. It did feel as though Trudeau was kind of positioning himself as the anti-Trump. I remember this tweet, right? The tweet that Trudeau put out that he said, to those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you regardless of your

faith. Diversity is our strength. Hashtag, welcome to Canada. So the Trudeau government definitely wanted to send a message, or I should say the liberals when they were running to become the government, definitely wanted to send a message that they were going to be more, quote, unquote, progressive than the conservatives. The government under Trudeau does perceive immigration and present immigration as a value, as opposed to as a practical matter. And that tweet was part of that. The problem was he didn't actually have a plan. He didn't have a plan to welcome hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the United States.

And he didn't want hundreds of thousands of people to flee the United States and come to Canada. I really think he just wanted to put that tweet out there, to put out that value statement. Okay. So Trudeau has positioned himself as the anti-Trump and immigration policy and sentiment plays a big part in that. Canada is already taking in a higher than average amount of immigrants compared to its counterparts. So where does this idea to scale up come from? So it comes from a lot of different places. First of all, the government does perceive immigration as a value, meaning we should want more because that's good in and of itself.

And I think that's an important underlying thing with the Trudeau government. Second of all, you've got a large part of the business community. And this started even before 2015, but it really ramps up after 2015, saying Canada is suffering labor shortages, generalized labor shortages. There just aren't enough workers. You need to allow us to bring in more people through temporary pathways. And by the way, most of those people are not highly skilled people doing a highly paid job. We in the business community are saying that the shortages we're suffering are at the bottom of the labor market. You also have higher education institutions saying we want to bring in more students.

We want to bring in more foreign students. We want to make more money off of these foreign students. Our budgets are squeezed. Here's an opportunity to wrap up. We have provinces saying agreeing with the higher education institutions and agreeing with the business community. So you have a whole bunch of actors all saying more. Not doing a lot of thinking about the details, not doing a lot of thinking about quality versus quantity, not doing a lot of thinking about, okay, what does this mean for various

public services, for housing, for other things? Just a simple more. And the government really listens to that. And as I said, it especially listens post-2020. Starting in 2015, things ramp up and the temporary immigration system grows. But as of 2021, the temporary immigration system explodes. Okay. Yeah. Let's talk about the numbers here. So we know that immigration rates accelerate after the pandemic and the border reopens. Can you explain just how much it does? Yeah, these are where the numbers get just absolutely shocking. So what's happening after 2015 is more and more the people coming to Canada are coming through the temporary programs. Meaning notionally, they're just coming here for a couple of years to either work or study and then

they're going to go home. But in fact, most of them do want to stay in Canada. They want to do two-step immigration and become permanent. Here's how the numbers change. Starting in 2020, That sort of 250,000 a year number that had been the case all the way from the 90s through to the early 2010s, in 2021, it starts to wrap up really sharply. 2022, the number is a million. 2023, the number is 1.3 million. 2024, even as the government's trying to pull back, it's just shy of 900,000. In the space of three years, Canada gets net 3.1 million immigrants.

That is, permanent immigrants plus temporary immigrants, minus temporary immigrants. minus temporary immigrants who leave, 3.1 million is a huge number because, again, to go back to the way things used to be, it used to be 250,000 a year. Now it's 3.1 million in three years. It's averaging over a million a year. Wow. Okay. I was going to ask you to put that in perspective. So that's quite a big jump. That is a huge difference. And that is the thing that the economy noticed, that various economists started to notice. You see impact in the labor market and you see impact It's in the housing market. And it's also really key to stress.

This was never in the government's official immigration plans. All their immigration plans talk about permanent residents only, not temporary residents. Do you know why that is? They were almost run as if they were two completely separate systems that had nothing to do with one another, even though the temporary system, they're not tourists. They're living here. Second, most of them, from what we know, appear to want to become permanent. residents. So they are attempting to immigrate. They're not just visiting. They're not just passing through. And yet the official way the government presented the system was if the permanent

immigration number was immigration and temporary immigration just didn't exist. And yet what happened was the temporary immigration system became much bigger than the regular official front door number that was always talked about. And that's how you end up with these much, much higher immigration numbers than we had ever had in the past. It's sort of like we had this strange immigration conversation where when the government would say immigration, it should have come with an asterisk that it was leaving out kind of three quarters of the picture. Did the government have a handle on this? Because I feel like if there's a whole part of this conversation that they're kind of leaving out, I would assume that maybe understanding how many people are in the country might be kind of hard. And a lot of this went on in the system.

The Canadian immigration system is fairly complicated and it became. much, much more complicated. And the data became extremely opaque, absolutely opaque to the public and to researchers, but I think even to the government, because there were so many different doors into the system, so many different rules, so many different selection processes, so many different possible temporary visas, and that I think the government kind of lost track of it. And on top of that, to make it even more complex, the provinces run part of the immigration system and make some decisions.

So you kind of had a situation where everyone could sort of focus on their one little area and no one was really thinking about the national interest. And I think even the Trudeau government lost sight of what was going on. Everything was, you know, everything was legal, but you never got the impression that the government had really taken stock of what it was doing and what the consequences might be and what it would have to do in response to those consequences. And then suddenly, public opinion changes in 2023 and in 2024. The government backpedals and changes course in 2024.

But up to then, it had continuously said, everything's great. This is fantastic. We know what we're doing. And it's going to be wonderful for the economy. And then the U-turned. Because in the tumultuous times as we emerged from the pandemic between addressing labor needs and maintaining population growth, we didn't get the balance quite right. And so the government's pivot is to say, we need to bring these numbers down somewhat, but that's hard to do.

It's not easy. It's easy to open a door. It's not easy to close a whole bunch of pathways that you've opened. With the plan we're announcing today, along with previously announced measures, we're making our immigration system work better. I mean, public opinion right now, I don't think, is anti-immigrant. I think public opinion, has become upset at the numbers and the sense of loss of control and the sense that nothing has been planned and the sense that nothing was really thought through over the last few years. But if you say to Canadians, look, we have a plan. It's a reasonable plan. I think you will see public opinion return to where it was. I'm hopeful. What I don't want is for us to end up in a situation that a lot of other countries are in where you have extreme polarization over

immigration, extreme right-left polarization where one side of the political spectrum says all immigration is good no matter the numbers. And the other side says, we don't want any immigration at all. That would be terrible because neither one of those is a good option for Canada. They're both economically negative and they're both going to cause even more political polarization. So my hope is we can go back to being kind of a unique country where we have relatively high immigration but with limits, and we don't have political polarization. We have conservatives and liberals not arguing about immigration, but basically not even talking about it.

Tony, great to have you on. Thank you very much. Cheryl. It's been wonderful. That was Tony Keller, a columnist with a globe, an author of Borderline Chaos. After the break, Professor Rupa Banerjee tells us about what she thinks we can improve in our immigration system. Professor Rupert Benerjee, thank you so much for making the time. Thanks for having me.

So, Ruba, you've been studying the immigration system for years. And I want to ask you about your thoughts on Trudeau's changes to this system. A lot of people said he broke it. Did he? You know, I think it's really important for us to remember that there were a lot of problems in our immigration system long before Trudeau came into the picture. So when our points-based system was introduced in 1967, we switched from like an overtly country-based racist selection system to one that really focused on human capital. And that was supposed to bring in the best and the brightest, sounds familiar, to really improve the productivity of the country. And it did. It started bringing in much more educated folks over the decades that point system was tweaked to really even enhance education requirements even more.

So over the 80s into the 90s and into the 2000s, you saw the education levels of newcomers going up. But what you didn't see was marked improvements in labor market outcomes. So there's a bit of a paradox where the education levels of newcomers was going up, but actually wages, ability to find work in your field, all of those kind of metrics were actually going down. And so this also coincides with a marked shift in the source countries of immigrants, right? So before the point system was instituted, most immigrants did arrive from Europe, from Western Europe, from the UK. And once we brought in the point system and country-based restrictions were lifted, you saw a shift to Asia. And with that shift in source countries, despite the increase in education levels, outcomes were going down. And they were going down well into the 2000s and, you know,

early 2010's. So I think there's a bit of a simplification when we say everything was going so wonderfully and Trudeau broke the system. So there were problems with the immigration system before Trudeau, as you pointed out. What have you heard from people about what immigrating to Canada has been like in the last few years? I mean, I think it's been incredibly stressful. I have been talking to immigrants, international students, and postgraduate work permit holders for several years. And even during the boom times, it was filled with peril. So there was many, many points where students often, you know, experienced exploitation, experienced outright abuse in some cases, terrible housing conditions, huge long commutes. And once work restrictions were lifted

from international students, they were allowed to work off campus as many hours as they wanted and they did. So all of these things have sort of positive effects and negative effects. Yes, many of them were able to make money to help pay for the massive tuitions that they had to pay. But on the other hand, often it became the focus that it was about making money and trying to find a way to transition to permanent residence rather than a focus on education. And the student experience completely changes then, right? Because you're just focusing on making money instead of like really focusing on your schooling as well. Absolutely. And certainly in the past year when we've seen this huge pullback and lowering of the permanent resident numbers

and lowering of the student permit numbers and also huge rejection rates, particularly from applicants from India, the anxiety has just, you know, multiplied. And so I think a lot of people are really worried and you see that in the number of students who are applying. So there's been a huge drop in even applications. On top of that, there's been a huge drop in acceptances. So the actual planned number of student permits that were supposed to be accepted in 2025, for example, we're not even meeting that number now. We are significantly below the target that was set from last year. Oh, is that because people are just not even applying anymore? So there's a combination of two things. People are not applying like they used to and the

number of rejections have gone up. For example, from Indian applicants, more than 70% of the applications are being rejected at this time. Wow. Which is much, much, much higher. The reason why things kind of went off the rails has a lot to do with poor quality programming, lack of oversight within post-secondary institutions, particularly in private institutions, but also public-private partnerships and extremely heavy recruitment in source countries to really bring people here. it was really a lack of oversight in the quality of the educational programming that was kind of being approved and the study permits that were being approved under those poor quality programs and the really unregulated recruitment system intermediaries who were really trying to draw people here.

So I think that that's a very important point to be made that increasing our student numbers was a deliberate choice. And I think that is the biggest thing that derailed our immigration system, which was already not experiencing the best outcomes because of a variety of issues. Yeah, and there was a reason for that as well, because, of course, the schools that were recruiting students, they were able to get a lot more money for the students that they were recruiting, right, compared to a Canadian citizen who was paying a lot less tuition. Yeah, and I mean, I think this stems back down to the underfunding of our post-secondary system, right? It's a vicious cycle. And instead of adequately funding it, focusing on internationalization and bringing in international students, was essentially seen as a free source of money. And now you see with the cutbacks and the dramatic decreases in numbers, the detrimental

impact is having on the post-secondary sector. So I think it's this lack of foresight and thinking a little bit more long term that kind of got us into this mess. to begin with. Yeah. So about a year ago, Trudeau made significant reductions to his government's immigration targets. And just to get some numbers in here, in 2024, they said they would reduce the number of permanent residents. They planned to admit from 500,000 to 395,000. And they said they would reduce the number of temporary residents by around 445,000. What do these reductions do to Canada on a broader scale economically? Like, what have we seen? How has this played out so

far. I mean, our population growth has stopped. We have flat population growth. So at least on a temporary basis, this is going to have negative economic impacts on our productivity and on our GDP. There's no doubt about it. And I mean, I think what the government has said is that this gives us time to catch up with our infrastructure and all of that. And in a sense, like, that makes sense. But I think that we also have to remember the long-term implications, are there going to be long-term ripple effects of this level of the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. What time of long-term implications do you foresee happening? I mean, I think that Canada has long been seen as a destination of choice, a destination of

choice for skilled workers for students. And so as Canada starts clamping down, as Canada's immigration policy becomes seen as less favorable, we're just not going to be seen as the favored destination for the best and the brightest, which is kind of ironic given the latest levels planned, which kind of targets bringing the best and the brightest. I think a lot of new research has shown that actually a lot of newcomers who are sort of the best and the brightest tend to leave because, again, we don't have the innovation ecosystem. We don't have the kinds of jobs that would sustain them. And so a lot of them end up working in jobs that are below their skill level. And so at the end of the day, I think there needs to be a much more of a whole

of society, whole of economy kind of approach to thinking about, okay, not just what numbers do we need, what are our absorbative capacity abilities, but also kind of what do we want for our future in 50 years? Yeah. And I mean, so Prime Minister Mark Carney is also kind of pulling this lever of reducing the numbers. He announced further reductions to the immigration numbers. And so you've talked about how the caps are not addressing the issue. What do you think would make our immigration system better? I mean, it's such a complicated question, right? But I think that fundamentally, if we have an immigration system that focuses on both selection and integration that would go a long way, we focused a lot on numbers, targets, caps, without really looking at the underlying

deep-rooted systemic issues within the system, within society more generally, right? Unemployment is a problem right now in Canada. Productivity is a problem. And that's not 100% about immigration, right? It's more general. New grads are feeling this just as much as immigrants, right? So I think we have to think about sort of the broader Canadian labor market and economy and how to make it more dynamic and more attractive for newcomers, while having a selection system that has a balance between looking at not just new grads who don't have any foreign experience and are essentially coming here in their early 20s. But if we also want to bring in the best and the brightest, so I think there needs to be a balance between the immigrants that we select and then

Canada's role in making sure that they can leverage their skills. It is expected that newcomers will come here and essentially completely change to become acceptable to Canadian employers. At the end of the day, employers need to play a role and see that they are kind of a very important stakeholder in this whole system. And otherwise, we'll see what we see now, which is that those who do have opportunities elsewhere don't want to stay because it is an incredibly frustrating experience to come here with a dream and then to find that you're not able to actually leverage your skills. You're not able to work in your field. I mean, these are demoralizing. So we talk about the economic impacts, but there's also serious psychological

impacts, family impacts, and community impacts. That's a really good point. Yeah. So reducing incoming immigrants doesn't change the fact that there are already a lot more people here, right? What does it mean for them? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really, really important point. right? We had this quite significant change in targets and just policy outlook while people were already in the system. And what I fear is that the reduction in permanent resident numbers essentially will leave a lot of those people who are already in the pipeline in limbo. And so the question is what will happen to them. You know, there could be three routes for them to take. One is to leave. And I do think most will leave and are leaving.

Because I think a lot of folks don't want to stay without papers. But the second option is for people to become undocumented, to basically move underground, in a sense. And, I mean, there's so much evidence that having a large undocumented population is so harmful for those folks, but also for Canada as a society. So what is the government going to do about that? Are we going to have mass deportations? Is that something that Canadians have an appetite for? And the third option for them is to claim asylum. And we've seen an incredible rise in asylum claimants to the point where now the lineup for having your asylum claim heard is almost 10 years.

Oh, my goodness. So, you know, this is an incredibly problematic aspect of this abrupt policy shift. Not to say that there didn't need to be a policy shift, but we have to recognize the ripple effects and the unintended consequences that happen when you, do have a pendulum swing from one extreme to another. I want to take a minute to talk about racism because this is also part of the conversation, right? Like, how does racism fit into our current conversation around immigration? I mean, I think that, I mean, racism is not new. We've definitely have a long history of anti-immigrant sentiment, but specifically against racialized immigrants. And as much as

legislative changes have tried to address some of these things. At the end of the day, it's about public discourse and culture. And, you know, I came in the early 80s when I was a kid with my family. And it was a very openly racist society at that time. And over the years, you know, I felt and I hoped and I thought that Canada was becoming less racist, how naive of me, right? But now we see this discourse really re-emerging, maybe not in the the physical space as much, but in the online space. And so a lot of folks have said that part of the reason why the Trudeau government pulled back so much last year is because of the public pushback and the public sentiment that there's

too many immigrants. They're not integrating with a real focus on international students being a problem. And so which is interesting, right? International students were never framed as a problematic group until very recently. Right? And I think that has to do with the racialization of international students and this perception that they're all from India. And so when we start attaching sort of racist tropes to particular groups, you can see how the vitriol and the poisoned rhetoric spreads. And I think it affects a lot of folks because at the end of the day, people don't really care if you're a newcomer, if you're a second generation, if you're, you know, where you're from exactly. an entire group of people.

It's a very broad brush that folks are painted with. And we know that if we didn't have immigration, we would not be able to survive as a society. And so I think the public discourse has to be brought along. Because if you look at the data, it's very clear we need immigration. Immigration is good for us. Yes, we need to make sure selection systems are tweaked. And we need to make sure that there's a level of standards, for example, in international student admissions. We need to make sure of all those things. But at the end of the

day, we also need to make sure that the public perception of what's going on is brought along. So this perception that everything's off the rails, it's mass immigration, it's borders are being flooded. No, that's absolutely untrue. And so I think just education, making sure that the reporting is balanced and not putting out sort of panic signals that stir up. this kind of negative public sentiment is also very important. At the end of the day, I had a study last year that was published that showed that, you know, the fact that from about 2015 onwards things were getting better is almost entirely driven by international students who got postgraduate work permits and transition to permanent residents. Not to say that there's no

problems, but this student to immigrant pathway has been successful for us. So let's not villainize all international students as being some kind of burden on the system. In fact, they have helped us avoid a full-blown recession after the pandemic. So, you know, I think changing that public conversation would help. Rupa, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been really great. Thank you so much. That was Professor Rupa Bannergy.

She's the Canada Research Chair in Economic Inclusion, Employment, and Entrepreneur. of Canada's immigrants. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer,

and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.