EDITORIAL: Higher immigration is a looming disaster

High immigration levels add to Canada’s housing crisis and put a strain on the country’s health care system,

Published Oct 01, 2026  •  Last updated 4 minutes ago  •  2 minute read

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks about the trade dispute with the United States at the Davie Shipyard in Levis, Que., on Aug. 24, 2026. Photo by ANDREJ IVANOV /AFP via Getty Images

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Based on their record, Canadians should get very nervous whenever the federal Liberals start talking about increasing Canada’s immigration levels, again.

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Particularly so when Prime Minister Mark Carney casually signals the Liberals are about to do it not in Parliament, but in an interview with the New York Times.

Back when he was running for Liberal leader, Carney said excessive immigration under his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, was one of the reasons the Canadian economy was in bad shape before U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war.

Now he says things are under control and it’s time to start raising Canada’s intake levels again, with his government legally required to announce its immigration targets for 2027, 2028 and 2029 by Nov. 1.

Let’s review how we got here.

In 2022, the Trudeau government proudly announced it was dramatically hiking Canada’s immigration targets from 405,000 permanent residents annually — which at the time was a record high — to 465,000 in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 starting in 2025 and continuing at that level in subsequent years.

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Just two years later, having ignored warnings even from their own experts that their high immigration levels were contributing to Canada’s housing crisis and putting strain on the country’s already beleaguered health care system, Trudeau and Co. finally admitted they had made a mistake.

By then, polls showed most Canadians believed the immigration targets were too high, while the Liberals attributed criticism of their policies to racism, before they finally did an about face and lowered their immigration targets.

They reduced their 2025 target from 500,000 permanent residents to 395,000, to 380,000 in 2026 and to 355,000 in 2027.

They also announced reductions in Canada’s intake of non-permanent residents, including temporary foreign workers and international students, whose numbers had similarly spiralled out of control, although the Trudeau Liberals blamed businesses, the provinces and unscrupulous college diploma mills for those problems.

Now Carney claims the Liberals have Canada’s immigration system under control again and it’s time to return it to sustainable levels.

We agree with Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner, who said that based on the Liberals’ record to date, the Tories will continue to oppose their “reckless mass migration policies” because of their negative impact on housing, health care and jobs.

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