Carney’s population pivot faces test in levels plan

Ottawa’s next immigration levels plan, due by Nov. 1, will show whether Prime Minister Mark Carney is ready to turn his talk of a “controlled increase” in Canada’s population into higher permanent resident targets.

Carney raised the question in a recent New York Times interview, according to The Canadian Press. He said the issue is “when do we resume some controlled increase in the population,” and that the government wants to make sure it has the system “under control.” He also said limited population growth is shrinking the economy, The Canadian Press reported.

The plan will be the government’s three-year outlook for 2027 to 2029, tabled under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Details of how the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada targets are set are posted on the department’s website.

The current plan calls for 385,000 permanent resident admissions in 2026 and 370,000 in each of 2027 and 2028, The Canadian Press reported. Two temporary measures add about 148,000 permanent residents over two years, outside that plan. Before the cuts began with the 2024-25 plan, the government had aimed for 500,000 a year.

The pressure to move is partly demographic. Statistics Canada estimated population growth of 0.5 per cent year over year as of July 1, and our earlier reporting on the slowest growth since the First World War era and on a revision that added about 300,000 people shows how much the baseline has shifted.

The sharpest drop has come from temporary residents. Benefits and Pensions Monitor, citing the same interview and federal figures, reported that student arrivals are down 60 per cent and temporary foreign workers are down 50 per cent. Asylum claimants are down by about one-third on a flow basis.

Non-permanent residents made up 6.7 per cent of the population on July 1. The government wants that share at 5 per cent by the end of next year, a target that Mikal Skuterud, a University of Waterloo economist, said will be hard to meet.

Skuterud sits on the C.D. Howe Institute’s immigration targets council, which urged Ottawa to keep trimming permanent resident admissions. The council recommended 380,000 in 2027, 350,000 in 2028 and 340,000 in 2029, and said the 5 per cent temporary resident figure should be a ceiling, with 3 per cent as the goal. Skuterud also warned Carney against listening to what he called “the business lobby” or using immigration to ease a tight labour market, The Canadian Press reported.

Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner has taken the opposite view. She said now is not the time to plan for more immigration and that levels “need to go down, not up,” according to The Canadian Press.

The Canadian Press said it asked Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab’s office whether increases to permanent residency are being considered and had not received a response when it published on Sept. 29. Canada News Media has not seen a government answer since.

For younger Canadians, the stakes are practical. Permanent residency backlogs and long waits already shape who can stay, as seen in the end of the caregiver pilot and a 76-month wait for some applicants. Federal Court delays add to the strain, with its immigration backlog nearly doubling in 2025.

Whether the new plan raises the 370,000 figures for 2027 and 2028, holds them, or shifts mix toward economic streams is not yet known. Express Entry draws continue in the meantime, including 5,000 invitations to French speakers this week.

The plan is expected within weeks. Until then, Carney’s remarks are a signal rather than a policy, and the numbers in the document will be the real test.

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Sources: via The Canadian Press (CP24, Sept. 29, 2026); Benefits and Pensions Monitor (Sept. 30, 2026).