Carney needs to completely overhaul the Trudeau-era immigration system, report says

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa on Friday, Aug. 21, 2026. Photo by Hyungcheol Park /Postmedia

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OTTAWA — Canada needs to overhaul the Trudeau-era immigration system so that applicants are selected largely on their ability to boost the economy, a new think tank report suggests, part of a wide-ranging set of policy suggestions for governments at all levels.

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The C.D. Howe Institute report, to be released Thursday, argues that Canada should go back to assessing skilled immigrant applicants based on a points system designed to evaluate their likelihood to succeed economically. That system, which was quietly dropped by former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government in 2023, ran for two decades by rating applicants on key metrics such as education, work experience, language skills and a demonstrated ability to earn a living.

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But that changed about three years ago, the report says, when Ottawa started focusing on other metrics, such as preferences for certain professions and applicants who could speak French.

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The think tank’s report, a wide-ranging set of policy recommendations to boost Canada’s lagging productivity and economic growth, said the old system worked better because it focused on applicants who were most likely to do well and meant fewer new Canadians doing work that didn’t match their skills.

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“The highest scores got in,” the report says.

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If adopted, the change would mark another key policy from the Trudeau era to be cancelled or sharply curtailed by Prime Minister Mark Carney. The current Liberal government has already changed direction on such Trudeau-era policies as the consumer carbon tax, a proposed capital gains tax increase and higher immigration levels.

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The recommendations on immigration form a key part of the report’s focus on human capital, one of eight policy areas that it addresses. It also calls for governments to do more to verify foreign credentials used in immigration applications, raise admission standards for international students, link immigration levels to economic growth and select more immigrants who are likely to be entrepreneurs.

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The report, called The Productivity Blueprint: An Agenda for Higher Living Standards in Canada, calls for more than 100 policy changes that would help close the gap between the country’s lagging productivity and that of other industrialized countries. Between 2014 and 2024, real gross domestic product per capita, one of the most common measures of living standards, grew just 3.5 per cent in Canada, the worst performance among nine peer countries. In the U.S., by comparison, the economy grew 20.2 percent during that same period based on the same metric.

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Productivity, which measures how much is produced per hour worked, is considered the primary lever behind rising incomes and living standards.

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Jeremy Kronick, the institute’s chief executive officer, was quoted in a release saluting some of the Carney government’s steps to boost the economy, such as its new Major Projects Office and the accounting changes for business investment, but said long-term improvement will take a commitment to change. “There’s no quick fix for productivity,” he said. “If Canadians want stronger wages and living standards over the long term, raising productivity needs to be Canada’s number one priority.”