FIRST READING: Slashing immigration has already been good for the Canadian economy

A for rent sign is displayed on a house in Ottawa on Friday, Oct. 14, 2022. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

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TOP STORY

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New figures show that the extent of the Liberals’ promised cuts to immigration have already begun to slip, even as a new report finds that Liberal immigration cuts have mostly been good for the economy.

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After the Liberal government promised last year to slash immigration rates in order to avoid overwhelming “community capacity,” Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada was told to hew to a target of bringing in 673,650 new temporary migrants in 2025.

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A new analysis by the Association for Canadian Studies, however, found that in the first six months of 2025, temporary migration has already hit 557,335; 82 per cent of the total.

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Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, wrote in an email to the National Post that the federal government will likely only meet their promised reductions when it comes to international students, while exceeding targets for both the temporary foreign worker program and the International Mobility Program.

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In an analysis published Tuesday, TD economists concluded that the slowdown thus far has already yielded cheaper homes and more jobs.

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On unemployment in particular, the report estimated that if Canada had not dialled back immigration, unemployment would currently be sitting at eight per cent, instead of the 7.1 per cent posted in the most recent Statistics Canada figures.

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“The federal government’s revised immigration policy is beginning to pay dividends in returning balance to a stretched social infrastructure,” it read.

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Analysts had assumed that the reduction in immigration would reduce spending, by simple virtue of the fact that there were fewer consumers in the Canadian economy.

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Nevertheless, they found that the exact opposite happened, a trend they credited in part to the fact that Canadian immigration intake had shifted dramatically towards low-skilled young people without all that much spending money.

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“The contribution to consumer spending from newcomers during the population surge was muted relative to past periods,” it read.

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The immediate post-COVID era has been marked by some of the highest immigration rates in Canadian history, particularly in the realm of temporary migration.

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In just the three years after 2022, Canada added 3.1 million people; an average of 86,000 per month.

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This has disproportionately come via massive increases to temporary immigration streams such as temporary foreign workers and student visa holders. As of the most recent figures, the number of non-permanent residents in the country stood at 3,024,216; well above the 1.3 million temporary residents counted as recently as 2021.