The Decibel - Why the ‘lottery’ of Canadian immigration undermines the system

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Canadian immigration minister Marc Miller announced the intentions of the government in its new set of targets: while the number of permanent residents being welcomed has grown annually, starting in 2026, there will be a freeze at 500,000. This update comes at same time as the latest polls indicate that Canadians are souring on immigration. But the change may not actually address the heart of the problem of why pressure is being exerted on the immigration system. Campbell Clark, The Globe’s chief political writer, joins the show to explain how the immigration system works – and why the federal government’s policies are failing current and hopeful Canadians.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

When Immigration Minister Mark Miller announced his government's new immigration plan last week, he had to sell it. I'm just going to finish my thought. What Canadians are telling us to get our acts together, and I think that's what we need to do. I mean, what I'm hearing from industry, what I'm hearing from... But this plan may miss the point. At least, according to The Globe's chief political writer, Campbell Clark. He's on the show today to explain how Canada's immigration system works, how it's changed over the years, and why last week's new targets are actually just a small piece of the puzzle. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and

Mail. Campbell, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me here. Let's just start with the news from last week. So the immigration minister, Mark Miller, made two announcements. Let's start with the first one. What was that about? Well, the first one is supposed to be a strategic plan for immigration.

So not the numbers of people that are coming, but how they intend to reorganize the categories of who comes and some of the ways that's going to work. In particular, they talked about finding more pathways to get people to move to smaller towns and rural areas, which has been a concern for Canadian governments for a long time. And the second one was about the numbers. What did he say about that? So what he said was that he's going to keep the relatively high targets that Canada has set for immigrants over the current three-year period, that is 2023, 2024, and 2025. And 2026, he's going to freeze it. Now, the significance of that is that in 2025, Canada was going to accept half a million permanent residents for the first time

in its history. And that was a very big number and kind of a milestone figure, but there has been some drop in support for immigration this year. And the immigration minister, Mark Miller, announced that he's going to freeze it for 2026. So it's still going to be half a million. He didn't lower it, but it's not going to go up again. Just to be clear, when we say that we're welcoming half a million people in 2025, another half a million in 2026, does that mean there's going to be 1 million new people in Canada by the end of that year? No. The thing that's happening in Canadian immigration is that the permanent resident numbers no longer really reflect immigration to Canada,

the number of people coming to the country. And that's quite, for a variety of reasons, it's kind of a very serious issue. It never was exactly, you know, if you take except 500,000 permanent residents that we're going to except 500,000 permanent residents that we're going to have 500,000 more people in the country, partly because there are other people that come with the primary permanent residents. Like family members, you're saying, right? So spouses, parents. Like family members, a spouse. But also because there are people in Canada already who become permanent residents, but they were already here. So they are temporary residents and they become permanent residents.

And that's a thing that's happening more and more of now. So the number of people that we put in the targets no longer reflect the number of people we're welcoming to Canada. I see. And when we're saying temporary residents, so this is people that come for school or temporary work, that kind of thing, right? Not SPR. It's exactly that. Well, there's one other category and that's asylum seekers who have not yet been accepted to Canada, but mostly it's temporary foreign workers and foreign students. And we've always had, or have long had temporary foreign workers and foreign students, but the numbers have grown exponentially so that there are now 2.2 million of them. And in the eyes of some people who look at these numbers, actually a lot more. Let me ask you a little bit more about these numbers then,

you said the 500,000 was a significant number. Can you give us, I guess, a sense of that? How does that compare to previous levels? 20 years ago, for example, the numbers would have been about 250,000. And they fluctuate, but basically they increased to around 300,000 by 2018. 2019, they were just over 300,000. Then the pandemic hit. And of course, the numbers went down because people were not coming to Canada in 2020. And after the pandemic, the government essentially decided they were going to make up for lost time, but the numbers went up quite a bit. So from 300,000 in 2019 to over 400,000 in 2021. And now we're setting targets of 500,000.

What about, I guess, the overall impact this is having? Because we know immigration grows our population. What does that do for Canada's population? Last year was the first time that the Canadian population grew by more than a million people in a single year. And it's now over 40 million. And we've had periods of rapid population growth before. One of the things that's interesting, though, is that we happen to be having rapid population growth at a time when we have slow, relatively speaking, housing growth. And we have

discovered, as we've realized that we're too slow at building homes, that there are more people in Canada than we realized. In fact, more people in the government realized because of this growth in temporary migration and temporary residence, especially in Ontario, where the numbers of foreign students have doubled in just five or six years. And that's really put a lot of pressure on the housing market. It's those two things together, supply and demand, are the reason we have a housing crisis. And do we know how much of our population growth is actually from immigration? It's almost all of it, really. It's about 96% of it comes from immigration rather than births and deaths, population growth. And so I would imagine then when we're talking about the growth of our labor force, that's also a good chunk from immigration too? Yes, also almost all,

about 90% of the labor force growth comes from immigration. I'm wondering about the rationale, Campbell. So what does the liberal government say about why they've increased immigration levels so substantially over the last few years? Essentially, they've said it's for economic growth. Right after the pandemic, there was a little bit of, you know, it will be a welcoming country again. You know, there was a certain amount of that kind of spirit. If you recall, after 2020, when nobody was coming into Canada, there was this whole sort of will open the doors again feeling. And there was also in 2021 and 2022 labor shortages, and the government said, we are going to increase numbers. And their argument was that immigration creates economic growth.

Okay. So it's kind of the two things. So there's kind of this like the virtue of welcoming people, that kind of idea. But then also this question is about how do we get people to work here then? Basically, the idea being that the more people you bring in, the faster the economy grows, which by the way, is a very contested and controversial point, or at least contested point if you look at economist studies of these things, because you bring in more people and the economy will certainly grow. It doesn't necessarily mean that the per capita economy grows. In other words, it doesn't mean that the average person is getting better off. It means that the whole economy is getting bigger. Despite all that, over the last few years, the Liberals' policy has been to bring in

more and more people. But then last week, as we talked about, the government announced that it was going to keep that level steady for 2026, basically freeze the number of immigrants we're going to bring in. So why are they doing that now? Yeah. The rationale, frankly, is political in that there has been a drop in public support for immigration because of the housing crisis. There has been a measurable drop in public support in opinion polls for immigration overall this year, like a sudden drop. One poll found that there was a 20 percentage point increase in the number of people who were saying that immigration is too high, that there are too many immigrants coming to Canada. It went from 34% to 53%. Is there evidence that supports that connection that more immigration is making

things more unaffordable? There is definitely evidence for the idea that rapid population growth and slow housing growth together create a housing crisis. That is something that is particularly acute in Ontario because the number of temporary residents are lion's share in Ontario. And one of the issues that's related to that is that we've essentially developed a two-stage immigration system where people are coming to Canada as temporary residents because they believe that that is a path to become a permanent resident. And the numbers have exploded because it's not always clear who can stay after being a temporary resident. It's no longer very clear. So people are coming to Canada basically on the hope that they will get to stay.

And that is one of the things that's really fueling the numbers of foreign students and temporary foreign students. So, I mean, when we're talking about this stuff, it really, it sounds like this is kind of a systemic problem here, right? Like, it sounds like it's poor planning and kind of government coordination is kind of at fault here then. Well, it's obviously not the fault of immigrants coming to Canada or foreign students coming to Canada. In fact, it's not just poor planning, but it is a failure to curb abuses because many of the foreign students and temporary foreign workers are being preyed on. Essentially, they're being charged large sums of money to take a shot at becoming a permanent resident in Canada. And that's a real problem.

There is a clear problem in the planning in the sense that we have created a permanent resident immigration system that encourages people to come as temporary immigrants. And we don't cap the temporary immigrants, and we don't control the quality of the temporary immigration. And I don't mean the quality of the people. I mean, the applications are essentially allowing, for example, people to pay for a private college course as essentially a ticket to a lottery for permanent residency.

And that encourages all kinds of abuses in the system. You know, those foreign students who are coming to Canada and finding a housing crisis are the victims. They're paying large sums to come for sometimes a poor education and facing a housing crisis. It's not foreign students themselves that are to blame. It's the system that forces them into a difficult situation. We'll be right back. So I think it might be helpful to just take a step back and look at immigration a little bit more broadly here in Canada. Campbell, can you just, I guess, give me a sense of how Canada's immigration system works? Very high level here.

How does it actually work? Okay, so if we're talking about permanent resident immigration, there's essentially three large categories, right? So there are family reunification category. And, you know, that is if you are a Canadian and you want to bring in your spouse, child, sibling, there are a number of those allowed every year. So out of that 500,000 target that we'll see in 2025, about 120,000 would be family reunification. And then there's another category which is sort of humanitarian, which would be asylum seekers who have come to Canada and they're deemed to be refugees from pure persecution so they can stay, or people who are refugees who are resettled from other countries, you know, Afghanistan, Ukraine in the recent past. And then the largest category is economic immigration, which is people who come as skilled workers, or there's a provincial nominee program where

provinces pick certain types of worker, but, it's people who come to Canada to join the labor force, and we accept their applications to come to Canada because they are workers who will contribute to the Canadian economy in the labor force. And that's the largest category. And this is kind of the system. There's kind of a point system a little bit, right, of how that category works then.

Yeah, so the skilled worker part of that has a point system and there's what's called a CRS, a comprehensive score. And that was initially set up so that if you wanted to immigrate to Canada, you could sort of see what kind of things you needed to have, what kind of qualities, what kind of credentials you needed. And those scores were supposed to be evaluating how much benefit you would bring to the Canadian economy. In other words, would you help improve the economic standard of living of Canada on average or not? And so if you had a high score, every couple of weeks, the government would come along and say, okay, we're going to take people over the score of 475. And they'd send invitations to the people

that had a high score over that cutoff point. And that is how you select, in theory, people who are going to benefit the Canadian economy. What happened was there was a number of holes punched into that system in the last few years that have meant that you can't really know far in advance what kind of score you're going to need. So if you don't really know what kind of score you're going to need, and you know that one of the advantages is being in Canada and working in Canada or going to school in Canada, there's a lot of incentive to come to Canada and then try to get in and see if you can get into one of these programs that goes around the high score. So there's that kind of hope that is essentially sold to people. And because of the way that the system is now working, hope that if you come here temporarily, you might actually have that

path to PR then. Yeah. And that hope is fine if it's true, but it isn't always going to be the case that you can stay. And people don't always know whether they're going to be able to stay. So we have targets, which are essentially caps or limits for permanent residents to come in each year. This is the 500,000 number that we've been talking about. But we don't have caps for temporary residents in Canada. Why don't we have we don't have caps for temporary residents in Canada. Why don't we have a limit on the number of temporary residents that can come in then? Because that sounds like that would kind of eliminate that, you know, coming here with false hope or false promise, right? Yeah. So I guess one of the reasons is we never did before.

And when the numbers of temporary residents were small, it didn't seem like a major issue for foreign students, for example. It was if these people were accepted at accredited institutions that the province deemed to be real educational institutions, then the federal government would process their visa application, right? Then they didn't cap the number. Temporary foreign workers, well, these programs for temporary foreign workers, essentially, if you can sort of establish that you're in a job shortage category, if an employer is willing to offer you a job in a job shortage category, you will often fit these temporary foreign worker programs. But they've expanded enormously. So now instead of a couple of hundred thousand, we've got 1.4 million temporary

foreign workers. Foreign students were once, like 10 years ago, it was a couple of hundred thousand. At the end of 2022, it was 800,000. And the projections are that in four years time, it'll be 1.4 million. So these numbers are growing hundreds of thousands every year. And this is kind of a complicated problem. We've done an episode before here about how universities get a lot more tuition money, right, from international students. So there's kind of that draw there as well on the university side. There's a really good reason for universities to want foreign students to come to Canada. And that doesn't just apply to universities.

It applies to colleges, public colleges, but it also applies to private colleges because this is a perceived path to residency. Private colleges have opened or expanded massively the number of foreign students. There are many colleges in Ontario that have far more foreign students than Canadian students, those foreign students come hoping that they'll be permanent residents and it's become a booming business. Honestly, Campbell, it sounds like the system, it's not working great for a lot of groups, right?

Students are being exploited here. Potential immigrants aren't always sure, right, of what Canada is looking for, how they can actually get their PR. And then Canadians who are already here and other people who are already here are dealing with the affordability issues, right? And everyone who comes deals with it too, right? What are the Liberals trying to do to fix all of this? There's a lot of different elements of this here. What's happening? The headline number last week was part of the political response to that, not increasing the targets for permanent residents again. But there are slow and, I would say, relatively quiet efforts to deal with the number of temporary residents.

The immigration minister has talked about trying to look at some of the temporary foreign worker programs to see if these are appropriate. And in terms of foreign students, the numbers aren't being capped, Look at some of the temporary foreign worker programs to see if these are appropriate. educational institutions so that the ones that have essentially lower quality outcomes for their students may face difficulties. It's really an effort to get the provinces, and in particular the province of Ontario, to do something about this as well, right? To start looking at whether these educational institutions should all be accredited as proper educational institutions or whether some of them are essentially selling immigration opportunities to people. Is there more that the government or governments

could be doing here to help this situation? Yes, but it's complicated. This is one of the things, if we are dealing with a housing crisis where you can't really expand the number of units being built rapidly, and you don't really want to move your permanent resident targets up and down like a yo-yo over the years, one of the quickest things to do would be to cap the number of temporary residents. Say that educational institutions collectively cannot bring in more foreign students next year than they brought in last year. You could cap some of the temporary foreign worker programs. But for example, if you tried to cap the number of foreign students, well, the educational institutions would be very upset about it. And the government of Ontario, which is supposed to be

accrediting those educational institutions, will probably feel that their jurisdiction is being interfered with. Definitely the government of Quebec would if they capped the number of foreign students allowed there. The problem that the federal immigration department faces is that capping them involves creating a lot of difficult problems within provincial jurisdictions. Lastly here, Campbell, we've talked a lot about numbers here, but I think something I want to come back to is the public sentiment in Canada towards immigration, because we talked about those poll numbers that drop in thinking about immigration favorably. I guess, is there anything that the government could do to help reverse that drop in public sentiment? For sure. The whole issue that we've been talking about is really important in terms of public sentiment,

because one thing that's been fairly clear about public attitudes to immigration is that people are for immigration if they believe it makes sense, it's planned, it's controlled, it is orderly. So the first thing that the government can do is try to make the system more rational. And the second thing they can do is at a time when there is a housing crisis and people are concerned about affordability, rather than undercutting the sort of nation building program of immigration that is permanent residency, you can cap the numbers of people who are being exploited. Dealing with the temporary residence explosion rather than the permanent residence explosion would certainly be a better way of increasing public confidence. And if you can't do it

all in one fell swoop, you can at least signal that you're moving on it in a step-by-step way. Kimball, thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through this today. Thanks very much. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Jay Coburn edited this episode. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.