Canada has unveiled plans for a big increase in the number of immigrants entering the country, with a goal of seeing 500,000 people arrive each year by 2025 as it seeks to address a critical labor shortage.
Immigration Minister Sean Fraser revealed the new plan on Tuesday. It puts a heavy emphasis on admitting more permanent residents with needed work skills and experience, alongside more-modest targets for family members and refugees. The opposition Conservative Party welcomed the plan.
“Make no mistake. This is a massive increase in economic migration to Canada,” Mr. Fraser said. “We have not seen such a focus on economic migration as we’ve seen in this immigration levels plan.”
The new plan envisions a flood of new arrivals that will see 465,000 people come in from outside the country in 2023, rising to 500,000 in 2025. By comparison, the immigration department says 405,000 permanent residents were admitted last year.
Most of those new arrivals will be what are known as economic immigrants, who will be expected to fill some of the roughly 1 million jobs that are currently sitting empty across various sectors of the economy.
“There were a million jobs available in the Canadian economy at a time when immigration already accounts for nearly all of our labor force growth,” Mr. Fraser said. “We cannot maximize our economic potential if we don’t embrace immigration.”
While the influx could put even more pressure on already scarce affordable housing in many parts of the country, Fraser suggested the new workers could actually enable the construction of more homes by addressing a shortage of tradespeople.
While most of the planned growth in immigration over the next three years will be focused on bolstering the economy, the new plan also calls for a small increase in the number of family members who will be admitted into Canada. It also projects an overall decrease in the number of refugees, from a high of 76,000 in 2023 to fewer than 73,000 in 2025, which Mr. Fraser attributed to the government’s plan to finish resettling 40,000 Afghan refugees next year.
“In each of the last two years, we have resettled more than one-third of the total number of refugees who were settled globally,” he added. “And each of the last three years, we have resettled more refugees than any other country in the world.”
Despite the decrease, a representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees welcomed the government’s continued support for accepting asylum seekers fleeing war and other threats.
“The United Nations Refugee Agency welcomes Canada’s continued commitment to refugee resettlement as part of its overall immigration growth plan,” UNHCR Representative in Canada Rema Jamous Imseis said in a statement.
The response from Canadian industry was more mixed, with the Business Council of Canada arguing the government’s plan didn’t go far enough in addressing the country’s unprecedented labor shortage.
Opposition Conservative immigration critic Tom Kmiec also welcomed the plan to dramatically increase the number of new arrivals in Canada, but questioned whether the government would actually be able to meet its own targets.
