Is Canada's Immigration System Under Control? A Data Check

Temporary residents are down from their peak but still well above the government's 5% goal. Asylum claims have fallen sharply, though about a quarter of a million claims are still waiting for a decision. Young Canadians are staying unemployed longer than at any time since at least 2000. And the new permanent resident plan is bigger than its headline number.

Figures are from Statistics Canada, IRCC, the Immigration and Refugee Board, CMHC, CIHI, the OECD, the World Bank and the UN refugee agency, as published by November 13, 2026. Every chart names its source, and the full list with table numbers is at the end.

The Numbers in Brief

01What Carney Promised

The Liberal platform, released April 19, 2025, was specific. It promised to "return immigration to sustainable levels by capping the total number of temporary workers and international students to less than 5% of Canada's population by the end of 2027", and to "stabilize permanent resident admissions at less than 1% of Canada's population annually beyond 2027".

In the French-language debate on April 16, 2025, Carney put it more bluntly: "The system isn't working", and "that's why we need a cap for a period of time so we can increase our ability to welcome newcomers". In the English debate the next night, CBC reported he never got to answer the immigration attacks on him, so the French debate is the clearest statement of what he said on the campaign trail.

The 5% test is the one that can be scored today. The government's own measure counts every temporary resident, including asylum claimants. Here is where it stands.

So the share is falling, but it is not yet near the line. The Parliamentary Budget Officer projected in February 2026, before Statistics Canada's September revision, that the share would get to just under 5% by the end of 2027, and only because about 148,000 temporary residents are being made permanent residents along the way. Without those transitions, the PBO put it at 5.3%. The PBO noted that these transitions "reflect changes of residency status rather than new inflows", so they lower the temporary share without changing the size of the population.

The permanent resident promise, under 1% of the population a year after 2027, is easier to keep. The new plan's 380,000 a year works out to about 0.9% of today's population.

02"Under Control": What They Said

I went looking for anyone in government saying the problem was fixed. Nobody used that word in anything I found. What they said, over and over, was that control had been taken back. Here is the trail, in their words.

• April 19, 2025Liberal platform: "Return immigration to sustainable levels"
• May 27, 2025Speech from the Throne: "restoring balance to the system"
• November 4, 2025Budget 2025: "We are taking back control over the immigration system."
• February 24, 2026Carney, House of Commons: "We have the immigration system under control, and we are supplying the health care Canadians need."
• February 25, 2026Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab, House of Commons: "We are on track, and we have met all our targets."
• March 25, 2026Carney, House of Commons: "regaining control of the immigration system"
• July 29, 2026Carney, Red Deer, Alberta (The Canadian Press): "taken back control"
• September 2026Carney, New York Times interview (reported by The Canadian Press, September 29): "when do we resume some controlled increase in the population"
• October 21, 2026Carney, Parliament Hill (The Canadian Press): "retaken control ... will not budge from overall levels that are sustainable"
• November 5, 2026Budget 2026 cover letter, signed by Carney and Finance Minister Champagne: "The government of Canada has taken back control of immigration"

To be fair to the government, the same people have also said the job is not finished. When the Auditor General reported in March 2026 that IRCC had not followed up on hundreds of suspected fraud cases in the international student program, Diab said "the measures are working, but more can be done". IRCC's own briefing notes say hitting the 5% target "is contingent on many factors, including client behaviour which can be difficult to accurately predict". And in Red Deer last July, right after saying control had been taken back, Carney said overall levels were still putting pressure on housing and that the country needed "a few more years of restraint". In October he said the government was "getting them to that level now".

The shifting student cut

One thing that jumped out: the size of the cut to international students changes depending on who is talking, and when.

These can all be true at once, because they measure different things. New arrivals can collapse while the number of students already living here falls much more slowly. But it is worth knowing which number you are being given.

03The New Plan, Untangled

The 2027-2029 Immigration Levels Plan was tabled on November 5, 2026, the same day as Budget 2026. You may have seen it described as up to 2.2 million new permanent residents over three years. That number is not in the plan. Here is what is.

Two other measures sit on top of that. IRCC says admissions under the one-time initiative for protected persons are "in addition to" the targets, and the plan describes the new 2027 measure as "additional space to process permanent residence applications". Neither document says exactly how the worker initiative or the 2027 measure count against the 380,000.

One-time initiatives giving permanent residence to up to 115,000 protected persons and 33,000 work permit holders already in Canada, spread over 2026 and 2027. About 46,400 of them had been admitted by the end of August 2026.
A new 2027 measure in Budget 2026 offering permanent residence to "up to 200,000 temporary residents already in Canada" by the end of 2027, including 100,000 workers eligible for Express Entry or a provincial nominee program. The Canadian Press reported that the other half would clear a backlog of humanitarian cases, including about 50,000 former Hong Kong residents and Ukrainians. Of that group, Diab said: "These are, for the most part, people that are already in Canada".

The plan also sets new temporary arrivals at 370,000 a year: 220,000 workers and 150,000 students. Add three years of that to three years of permanent residents and you get 2.25 million. That is likely where the "2.2 million" comes from, and about half of it is temporary.

So, depending on how you count, the next three years bring 1.14 million permanent residents (the official targets only); about 1.42 million permanent residence grants (the targets plus the extra measures used in full, leaving out temporary arrivals); 2.25 million permanent and temporary admissions (the targets plus temporary arrivals, leaving out the extra measures); or about 2.53 million if you count everything. At the top of every range, permanent residence grants could reach about 1.55 million. For 2027 alone, CP worked out that the total could pass 600,000.

Targets keep moving

Part of what makes this confusing is that every November a new three-year plan restates the next two years. Only the first year is firm. The target for 2026 was 500,000 in the plan tabled in November 2023, then cut to 380,000 a year later. Here are the targets set for each year against what actually happened.

The plan for 2024-2026 set 485,000, then 500,000 and 500,000. The 2025-2027 plan cut that to 395,000, 380,000 and 365,000. The 2026-2028 plan raised 2027 back to 380,000, and the new plan holds 380,000 through 2029. In 2025 Canada admitted 393,770 permanent residents against a target of 395,000, so the government has essentially met its headline numbers, within the published ranges. The 2020 gap was COVID.

About half are already here

A permanent resident target is not the same as new people arriving. IRCC says that in recent years "about half of new permanent residents were already living in Canada as non-permanent residents". For 2025, IRCC's annual report gives the two biggest pieces:

For 2027, both extra measures are explicitly for people already living here. If they are used in full, a clear majority of the permanent residence grants that year would go to people who are already in the country. That is my inference, not an official number, but it matters: those grants change someone's status, not the size of the population.

04Temporary Residents Since Carney Took Office

Statistics Canada counts every non-permanent resident each quarter: workers, students, asylum claimants and their families. On September 23, 2026 it revised the whole series back to 2021, after finding many more permit extensions in IRCC's records. The revision raised the April 1, 2026 count by about 240,000, while some earlier quarters were revised down. Stories and reports from before that date, including the PBO's February 2026 report, which put the peak at 7.6%, used the older numbers. The revised peak is 7.2%.

The picture since Carney took office is more mixed than either side tends to say. The total is down 145,948 (-5.0%) from April 1, 2025 to July 1, 2026. But that drop is almost all students. People here on a work permit alone are actually up, and so is the asylum group, which only turned down in the most recent quarter.

Statistics Canada table 17-10-0121-01, revised September 23, 2026. Each person is counted once, in one category.

The flow numbers tell the same story from the other end. IRCC issued 496,175 new study permits in 2023 and 293,835 in 2024. In 2025, new student arrivals fell another 61% and new worker arrivals fell 47%, according to IRCC's March 2026 briefing to the House immigration committee.

05Where Population Growth Came From

Canada's population grew by just 189,425 people, or 0.5%, in the year to July 1, 2026. Statistics Canada says that is the slowest growth since 1915/16. Two years earlier, in 2023/24, it grew by more than a million.

Almost all of the growth in the boom years came from immigration and temporary residents, not births. In 2022/23, 98.2% of growth came from international migration. In 2025/26 it was still 80.1%, but of a much smaller number.

One more thing on the revision. Before September 23, Statistics Canada's numbers showed the population shrinking for three straight quarters, from mid-2025 into 2026, and its August GDP release said per-person output rose "as the Canadian population declined for the third consecutive quarter". In the revised numbers, the population fell in only one quarter, the last three months of 2025, and only by about 7,000 people.

For more on this, see our Canada population growth analysis.

06Asylum: Claims, Backlog and Acceptance

This is where the change is biggest. Asylum claims went from 16,040 in 2015 to a record 171,840 in 2024, then fell to 113,105 in 2025. In the first eight months of 2026 there were 37,775, down 52% from the same months of 2025 and 68% from 2024.

Two things drove it. Visa rules were tightened in 2024, before Carney, which cut airport claims. Then Bill C-12, which received royal assent on March 26, 2026, made claims ineligible for a refugee board hearing if they are made more than a year after a person's first entry into Canada after June 24, 2020 (even if they have since left and come back), or more than 14 days after crossing the U.S. land border between official ports. People caught by these rules still have access to a pre-removal risk assessment. The rules apply to claims made on or after June 3, 2025, the day the earlier version of the bill was tabled.

The backlog

Fewer claims coming in has not yet cleared the claims already waiting. The refugee board's pending inventory grew from 9,999 at the end of 2015 to a peak of 299,855 in December 2025. It has since fallen, to 252,387 at the end of September 2026. In February 2026 the board said a claim referred then would wait about 44 months for a decision.

How Canada's acceptance rate compares

Canada accepts a much larger share of asylum claims than its peers. Using the UN refugee agency's measure for first decisions in 2025, which counts claims accepted out of those decided on their merits and leaves out abandoned and withdrawn cases:

Acceptance rates depend heavily on where claimants come from, which cases reach a decision, and each country's legal standards, so a higher rate does not by itself mean weaker control.

Measured the refugee board's own way, accepted claims as a share of everything finalized, Canada's rate has stayed around 62% to 63% in most years. But a growing share of claims are now being abandoned or withdrawn before a decision. That share was 5.5% in 2015 and 39% in the first half of 2026. The board does not say why. The timing lines up with Bill C-12, but that is an inference.

My arithmetic from the Immigration and Refugee Board's yearly Refugee Protection Division statistics.

Acceptance by country

The rate also varies enormously by where claimants come from. India sent the most claims in 2025. Only 22% of finished Indian claims were accepted, but 53% were abandoned or withdrawn before a decision; of those decided on the merits, 47% were accepted.

Immigration and Refugee Board, Refugee Protection Division statistics for 2025.

What it costs

The best-documented cost is health care. The Interim Federal Health Program, which covers asylum claimants and some others, cost $211 million in 2020-21 and $896 million in 2024-25, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which projects almost $1.0 billion in 2025-26 and over $1.5 billion by 2029-30. Ottawa has also given provinces and cities about $1.8 billion for interim housing since 2017, and spent about $1.2 billion on IRCC-run hotels from 2020 until they closed on October 1, 2025.

I covered the full 46-year history of refugee claims in 46 Years of Refugee Claims in Canada.

07Young Workers

The unemployment rate for 15- to 24-year-olds averaged 13.8% in 2025, the highest since 2012 outside the pandemic. It hit 14.6% in September 2025, which Statistics Canada called the highest outside COVID since September 2010, and was 13.7% in October 2026. The gap between young people and everyone else widened from 4.7 points in 2022 to 7.0 points in 2025.

The more striking number is how long young people stay unemployed once they are. The average spell for an unemployed 15- to 24-year-old reached 17.9 weeks in February and again in September 2026, the longest since at least 2000. In October 2022 it was 9.2 weeks. The share of unemployed young people out of work for more than six months hit 20.4% in May 2026. In 2019 it averaged 6.8%.

Summer jobs tell the same story. The unemployment rate for returning students in July was 17.5% in 2025, the highest July since 2009 apart from 2020, and 15.1% in July 2026, still above the 2017-2019 average of 12.6%.

How much of this is immigration? The Bank of Canada has noted that both groups have struggled, without attributing youth unemployment to immigration. Governor Tiff Macklem said in December 2024 that "it has been especially hard for young people and newcomers to Canada to find work", and the Bank's July 2024 Monetary Policy Report said the softening job market "has made it even harder for newcomers to find a job". Statistics Canada's own spring 2026 review of the youth job market pointed to uncertainty weighing on hiring, not to population growth. More competition for entry-level jobs and slower hiring are both in the data. I would not pretend to know the split.

We track this in more detail on our Canada youth unemployment page.

08Income per Person

Population growth makes the whole economy bigger, but what matters to most people is output per person. Canada's real GDP per person peaked in the third quarter of 2022 and, as of the second quarter of 2026, was still below that peak and only 1.7% above where it was in mid-2019. In late 2024 Statistics Canada reported six straight quarterly declines. Later revisions softened that streak, so treat it as what was reported at the time.

Compared with other countries, Canada's growth has been slower. On the World Bank's measure, GDP per person in constant 2021 dollars adjusted for purchasing power, Canada grew 19.8% from 2000 to 2025. The U.S. grew 39.8% and the OECD as a whole 35.6%. Canada went from 88% of the American level to 75%. GDP per person also reflects productivity, investment and commodity prices, not just population growth. Press play.

Wages have done a little better than output. Average hourly wages rose from $25.87 in 2015 to $36.40 in 2025. After inflation that is a gain of 8.5%, under 1% a year. Business-sector labour productivity, the thing that pays for raises over time, rose only about 4.7% from its 2019 average to mid-2026.

09Housing: Starts vs People

Canada started more homes from 2021 to 2025 than in any five-year stretch on record. It was not enough to keep up, because the population grew faster still. The all-time peak for starts is still 1976, at 273,203. What changed is how many people were added for every home started.

In 2023 Canada added about 1.1 million people and started 240,267 homes, 4.61 people for every start, the highest in the series back to 1972. In 2025, with population growth slowing sharply, it fell to 1.23. By decade:

Average household size in Canada is about 2.4 people, which makes this ratio a rough pressure indicator: well above 2.4, population is outrunning new construction. It is not a precise shortage measure, since starts are not completions, and demolitions, vacancies and how many new households form all matter too. CMHC's Fall 2026 Housing Supply Report says Canada needs roughly 417,000 to 469,000 homes a year to restore pre-pandemic affordability by 2036. On current trends it expects about 231,000.

Rent shows where the pressure went. From 2002 to 2019 rent rose more slowly than prices in general. From 2019 to 2025 rent rose 30.6% against 20.7% for all prices, and the 8.2% jump in 2024 was the biggest since 1982. A Bank of Canada staff article in September 2026 (which, like all such articles, does not necessarily reflect the Bank's official view) concluded that asking rents surged from 2021 to 2024 mostly because of demand, which "reflects strong population growth, particularly among groups that are more likely to rent, such as newcomers".

The full series, with the U.S. for comparison, is on our Canada housing starts vs population page.

10Health Care

Health care is harder to tie to immigration directly, but the access numbers have slipped. The share of adults with a regular health care provider was stable at around 85% from 2017 to 2022, then fell to 82.8% in 2023, though Statistics Canada changed the survey question in 2022 and 2023, so the years are not exactly comparable. Recent immigrants are the most likely to go without: 31% in 2024, against 18% of non-immigrants.

To be fair, the number of doctors has not collapsed. CIHI says family physician numbers rose about 20% in a decade, "narrowly keeping pace with population growth", though family physicians per 10,000 people slipped from 11.8 in 2020 to 11.5 in 2024. Per person, Canada has fewer practising doctors than the OECD average, and in 2023, Statistics Canada said, the population grew at its fastest rate since 1957.

11Births vs Immigration

Part of the reason immigration drives nearly all of Canada's growth is that Canadians are having fewer children than ever. The total fertility rate was 1.26 children per woman in both 2024 and 2025, the lowest on record, well below the 2.1 needed to replace the population. Among 20 high-income countries Statistics Canada compared, Canada had the seventh lowest. And 43.8% of mothers who gave birth in Canada in 2025 were born in another country.

Births minus deaths added 37,644 people in 2025/26. In 2008/09 it added 145,361. In a November 2025 study, Statistics Canada said that without births to and deaths of people born abroad, natural increase would have been negative since 2022.

12Canada in Any Year

Pick a year from 1971 to 2025 to see the numbers side by side. Immigration and births are for the July-to-June year starting that summer. Press play to run through all of them.

Statistics Canada tables 17-10-0009-01, 17-10-0008-01, 34-10-0126-01, 14-10-0327-01, 13-10-0418-01 and 17-10-0121-01. Youth unemployment starts in 1976, fertility in 1991 and the temporary resident share in 2021.

13Sources and Method

Every number in this article comes from a government statistical agency, a federal department, a parliamentary officer or an international body. Where I did the arithmetic myself, the text says so. Statistics Canada revises its numbers, sometimes a lot, so every figure here is the version published as of November 13, 2026. The temporary resident and population numbers use the September 23, 2026 revision; the GDP per person series was released before it.

Definitions. "Temporary residents" are Statistics Canada's non-permanent residents: work and study permit holders, asylum claimants and protected persons, and family members. Asylum acceptance "on the merits" leaves out abandoned and withdrawn claims; "share of finalized" includes them. Quotes from the April 16, 2025 French-language debate are CBC's English rendering.

Source documents

• Liberal Party of Canada: Canada Strong platform (April 19, 2025), page 43
• CBC: Front-runner Carney faces jabs from all sides at French-language debate (April 16, 2025)
• CBC: Fractious debate sees leaders trade blows over Trump, Trudeau and the cost of living (April 17, 2025)
• House of Commons Debates, February 24, 2026 (Hansard)
• Carney, Oral Questions, February 24, 2026 (openparliament.ca)
• Diab, Oral Questions, February 25, 2026 (openparliament.ca)
• Carney, Oral Questions, March 25, 2026 (openparliament.ca)
• The Canadian Press: Carney says government has taken back control of immigration (July 29, 2026)
• The Canadian Press: Carney suggests immigration increase is on the horizon (September 29, 2026)
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: births, deaths and population growth (November 13, 2025)
• The Canadian Press: Ottawa will not budge from sustainable immigration levels (October 21, 2026)
• The Canadian Press: Diab on the immigration plan (November 9, 2026)
• The Canadian Press: Auditor General on the international student program (March 23, 2026)
• Budget 2026, Chapter 3 (November 5, 2026)
• Budget 2025 (November 4, 2025)
• IRCC: Supplementary information for the 2027-2029 Immigration Levels Plan
• IRCC: Immigration Levels Plan briefing, CIMM (March 23, 2026)
• IRCC: Admissions by category and year (CIMM, 2025)
• IRCC: Permanent residents, key numbers
• Parliamentary Budget Officer: Immigration levels plan analysis (February 26, 2026)
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Canada's population estimates, second quarter 2026 (September 23, 2026)
• Statistics Canada: Table 17-10-0121-01, non-permanent residents by type
• Statistics Canada: Table 17-10-0008-01, components of population growth
• IRCC: Key numbers, asylum claims (data as of August 31, 2026)
• IRCC: Bill C-12 measures become law (March 2026)
• Immigration and Refugee Board: Volume reports
• Immigration and Refugee Board: Refugee protection claims, 2025
• Immigration and Refugee Board: Senate committee briefing on Bill C-12 (February 2026)
• UNHCR Refugee Data Finder: asylum decisions, 2025
• Eurostat: first-instance asylum decisions (migr_asydcfsta)
• Parliamentary Budget Officer: Projecting the cost of the Interim Federal Health Program (February 2026)
• IRCC: Support for asylum seekers, Senate briefing (February 9, 2026)
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Labour Force Survey, October 2026
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Labour Force Survey, July 2026
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Recent developments in the Canadian economy, spring 2026
• Bank of Canada: Opening statement, December 11, 2024
• Bank of Canada: How newcomers impact the Canadian economy (MPR, July 2024)
• Bank of Canada: Why asking rents have surged in Canada since 2021 (September 29, 2026)
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: GDP, second quarter 2024
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: GDP, third quarter 2024
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: GDP, second quarter 2026
• World Bank: GDP per capita, PPP (constant 2021 international $)
• CMHC: Housing Supply Report, Fall 2026 (September 10, 2026)
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Health of Canadians (March 5, 2025)
• Statistics Canada: Regular health care provider access among immigrants and non-immigrants (April 22, 2026)
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Wait times for specialist care (July 29, 2025)
• CIHI: Emergency department visits and lengths of stay
• CIHI: Health workforce 2024
• OECD: Health at a Glance 2025, Canada country note
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Fertility in Canada, 2025 (September 23, 2026)
• Statistics Canada, The Daily: Births, 2025 (September 23, 2026)

14More on DaveManuel.com

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• Canada population growth analysis
• Canada youth unemployment
• 46 years of refugee claims in Canada
• Mark Carney net worth
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