FIRST READING: Carney’s ‘under control’ immigration still blowing out the numbers

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Intake of permanent immigrants is still at 100-year highs

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Canada is slated to accept 380,000 permanent residents in 2026, about 1,000 per day.

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Ottawa has said this is the “sustainable” figure, and represents a cut of nearly 20 per cent from the 500,000 permanent residents that the Liberal government had originally budgeted for 2026.

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But even this reduced number will end up charting as one of the highest annual intakes of permanent residents over the last century. Between 1914 and today, just five years have been higher: 2021 (406,055), 2022 (437,635), 2023 (471,820) 2024 (483,655) and 2025 (393,530).

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For context, the nine years of the government of Stephen Harper featured the highest levels of immigration since the First World War. In 2014, the last full year of Harper’s premiership, Statistics Canada noted that the immigration intake was at “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years.”

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And yet, the average annual intake of permanent residents under the Harper government was about 220,000. The “reduced” figure of 380,000 is more than 70 per cent higher.

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Student permits remain nearly double their pre-2015 level

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In 2024, the number of foreign students in Canada topped out at more than one million. The all-time peak, charted in June 2024, was 1,032,950.

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This means that, for a few months, Canada had as many international students as it had Nova Scotians.

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Bringing this number down has indeed been one of the most conspicuous successes of the Liberals’ “sustainable” immigration plan. As of the most recent figures from August 2026, the number of international permit-holders in the country has dropped to 602,115 — a drop of more than 400,000.

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Not all of those 400,000 have left the country. Ottawa has been open about its plans to shrink the foreign student population by earmarking some for permanent residency. And, in some cases, foreign students facing the expiry of their visa have simply claimed to be refugees.

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But Canada is still bringing in foreign students at rates that would have been considered eye-watering in the pre-Liberal era. In 2015, the number of international students in Canada stood at 457,828 — about 25 per cent lower than the country’s current student population. As recently as 2010, it stood at 328,402 — nearly half of the current figures.

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The asylum seeker backlog has never been worse

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Here again, IRCC is claiming success in bringing down the raw number of asylum claimants entering the country each month. Throughout 2024, every month was yielding at least 10,000 foreign nationals claiming to be refugees. In October 2023 alone, the federal government charted 16,315 new asylum claimants — an average of one new asylum claimant every three minutes.

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As of August, the intake is down to just 4,575.

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“The number of asylum claims from people crossing between ports of entry has since dropped from an average of 165 claims a day in March 2023 to 13 claims a day,” reads an IRCC website.

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However, even if the intake is down, it’s still being added to a record-high mountain of pending claims.

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At the close of 2021, Canada had about 160,000 asylum claimants in the country — which itself was a record high driven by several years of illegal border-crossers entering Canada from the United States. As of July, it’s 530,000.

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This is Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pictured at the exact moment that he asked Housing Minister Gregor Robertson to “reprimand himself,” throwing in a handslap gesture for effect. Robertson had risen to “reprimand” Poilievre for suggesting that high immigration was a driver of housing unaffordability. To which Poilievre immediately produced a document from Robertson’s own ministry stating “one of the drivers of the housing shortage has been the strong growth in housing demand driven by immigration-led population growth.” Photo by ParlVu

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IN OTHER NEWS

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This is Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pictured at the exact moment that he asked Housing Minister Gregor Robertson to “reprimand himself,” throwing in a handslap gesture for effect. Robertson had risen to “reprimand” Poilievre for suggesting that high immigration was a driver of housing unaffordability. To which Poilievre immediately produced a document from Robertson’s own ministry stating “one of the drivers of the housing shortage has been the strong growth in housing demand driven by immigration-led population growth.”