Carney’s Solution To The Explosion In Temporary Residents? Make Many Of Them Permanent Residents

Perhaps the most intractable policy disaster handed to Prime Minister Carney by the Trudeau government is the immigration file. The ugliest detail in that file is undoubtedly the astronomic increase in temporary residents (largely foreign workers, international students, and asylum seekers) – a population that expanded from 3.3% in 2018 to 7.5% in 2024. The Carney government’s solution is to limit the inflow of new temporary residents significantly, while at the same time giving permanent residency to many of the ones already on Canadian soil.

The Carney government’s first annual Immigration Levels Plan commits to “reducing Canada’s temporary population to less than 5% of the total population by the end of 2027”. To this end, Canada’s annual intake of new temporary residents will be cut from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026, and 370,000 in 2027 and 2028. This cut will hit international students the hardest, with annual new study permits cut in half from over 300,000 to 155,000 in 2026, and 150,000 in 2027 and 2028.

This major cut will ease the strain on Canada’s housing, healthcare, food banks, roads, and social services – a strain that is no longer denied by politicians, and is freely acknowledged across the political aisle. But, as is the case with many policies, the devil is the details. It turns out that one of the ways which the federal government intends to shrink the size of the temporary resident population is by making a large number of them permanent residents.

In the recently released 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, Immigration Minister Lena Diab says the Carney government intends to “give priority for permanent residence to temporary residents already living and settled in Canada, further reducing the number of new arrivals”.

How many temporary residents will get permanent residency under this plan is unclear, but we can extrapolate from the data we have.

The Carney government’s Immigration Levels Plan sets the annual permanent resident rate at 380,000 for the next three years – or, a total of 1,140,000. The very last Immigration Levels Plan of the doomed Trudeau government – which committed to transitioning many temporary residents to permanent residency – predicted that temporary residents would account for “more than 40% of overall permanent resident admissions in 2025”.

If the Carney government is heralding the idea of transitioning more temporary residents as a way to slow down the catastrophic population growth Canada has experienced in recent years, we can safely assume that this proportion will be at least a little bit higher than the Trudeau government’s rate. A rate of 50%, say, would mean that 570,000 temporary residents will receive permanent residency over the next three years.

But wait – the permanent residency giveaway gets even larger. In the Immigration Levels Plan, we also learn of two one-time initiatives to fast-track permanent residency for some refugees and give permanent residency to certain foreign workers. For some reason, these initiatives are not included in the annual permanent residency figures. A recent Globe and Mail article provides a tidy summary:

“Tuesday’s budget set out plans to freeze the number of permanent residents at 380,000 a year for three years.

But figures published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on Wednesday showed that an additional 148,000 permanent residents will be added to the official targets over the next two years through one-off initiatives.

That includes about 115,000 refugees, who will be allowed to settle here permanently over the next two years on top of the annual targets the government has set. The government also plans to grant an additional 33,000 work-permit holders permanent residency in 2026 and 2027.”

Bear with me for one more round of math. Three years worth of 380,000 permanent residents per year, plus an additional 148,000 permanent residents in one-off initiatives, gives us 1,288,000 permanent residents – just shy of 1.3 million. Our working assumption that 50% of this total will come from temporary residents gave us a figure of 570,000. Combining that figure with the additional 148,000 permanent residents, all of whom are refugees or foreign workers on Canadian soil, gives us a grand total of 718,000.

718,000 temporary residents will become permanent residents over the next three years – and that is based on the fairly cautious assumption that the Carney government will earmark just half of permanent resident admissions to temporary residents. If Ottawa chooses to be more aggressive, this figure could easily be higher.

There is an upside and a downside to this.

In one sense, this represents a win for immigration restriction. Canada’s political class has come to recognize that the Canadian public is now openly hostile towards the immigration-driven population growth that has overwhelmed hospitals, created a housing crisis, swamped food banks, fuelled road congestion in major cities, inflamed unemployment, and fractured social cohesion. Trudeau-era immigration policy has been thoroughly discredited, and tossed into the dustbin of history – politicians are now committed to taming population growth.

This is a major rhetorical and policy shift from just two or three years ago, when both both Conservative and Liberal politicians openly defended high immigration levels.

The downside is that, even as the Carney government recognizes that Canadians widely oppose immigration-driven population growth, it is unwilling to firmly show the population of temporary residents already on our soil the way to the door. This is a population that came here on temporary permits, and there is no discernible reason why they should stay a day longer than the expiration dates on those permits. As non-citizens, we owe them no obligations whatsoever.

There seems to be a troubling attitude in Carney’s cabinet that an effort should be made to keep a good portion of the millions of temporary residents admitted to Canada during the post-pandemic influx of the Trudeau years. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne recently told a Montreal business audience that temporary residents who have been in the country for four or five years are somehow not really temporary any longer.

I clipped his statement and posted it to Twitter. Here’s what he said:

“It’s not so temporary anymore when it’s been 4 or 5 years…your kids are 10 years old, they’re headed to high school…

It’s to our advantage to keep them…we need the workforce”

The fact that our politicians have finally come around to the idea of controlling immigration inflows is a welcome development, and an important first step towards dismantling Canada’s mass immigration policy.

However, the Carney government’s plan to grant permanent residency to hundreds of thousands of temporary residents on our soil is effectively a mass transfer of Canadian citizenship to largely low-skill foreign nationals who should be going back home when their permit expires.

I strongly doubt that this plan reflects the will of Canadians – with the possible exception of the business lobby, which is no doubt grateful that their access to cheap labour will be safeguarded.