TORONTO — A slowdown of immigration to Canada due to the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to derail a major source of economic and labour force growth, according to a report from the Royal Bank of Canada.
The shortfall jeopardizes the ability of the country to find employees needed in sectors such as health and elder care as the baby boom generation moves into retirement over the next few years, the report says.
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It calls on the federal government to find new ways to encourage more immigrants to move to Canada.
“Canada does rely on having large numbers of people coming to the country to fuel growth and, if we see these large declines, one concern could be that people may decide maybe they don’t want to come to Canada anymore,” said report author Andrew Agopsowicz, a senior economist for RBC who studies labour trends.
“I think it’s really important for Canada to ensure the process is clear and that we still put out this attitude that we are open and we want people from the rest of the world to come to our country.”
Canada added 34,000 permanent residents in the second quarter, down 67 per cent from the same period last year, the RBC study said.
Meanwhile, new permanent residency applications to Canada were down 80 per cent and just over 10,000 new study permits were processed, down from 107,000 a year earlier.
Despite a recent recovery in the pace of immigration, the bank expects to see only 70 per cent of the originally targeted 341,000 new permanent residents at the end of the year, a decline of about 100,000 people.
The shortfall is particularly bad news for elder care as labour shortages have gotten worse in the wake of the pandemic’s deadly sweep through the country’s nursing homes, said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of health policy research at the National Institute on Ageing at Ryerson University and director of geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital.
“We’ve been having a huge struggle finding workers and retaining workers in this sector for years … and we were only keeping it afloat by often recruiting immigrants who are willing to take on these jobs that we as Canadians didn’t want to do,” he said.
“The fact it’s low paid and not valued also speaks to one of the reasons it’s been incredibly hard retaining (staff).”
Sinha said higher wages are needed not only to recruit Canadian-born workers but also to keep ambitious immigrants on the job longer.
Canada’s ability to attract immigrants with meaningful work as the economy struggles to rebound from the pandemic may be difficult.
A Statistics Canada report published Thursday finds that recent immigrants were harder hit by pandemic-related job losses, with 17 per cent becoming unemployed from March to April compared with 13.5 per cent of workers who are Canadian-born or immigrants who have been in Canada more than 10 years.
The percentage was higher, almost 20 per cent, for recent female immigrants.
The difference is significant, said Statistics Canada analyst Feng Hou, adding it is attributed mostly to recent immigrants having less work experience and earning lower wages.
“From past experience, when immigrants come during hard times, they tend to have a hard time finding jobs,” he said, adding there’s no data as yet to tell if that will happen in the current environment.
Travel restrictions that began in March and continue today make it difficult for people to physically come to Canada, Agopsowicz said.
At the same time, the lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic slowed processing of applications in Canada and prevented potential immigrants from accessing programs to ease application in their home countries.
An unknown is whether the COVID-19 virus, which hits senior citizens hardest, will have a dampening affect on the desire of foreigners to come to Canada and leave behind their vulnerable elderly relatives, Agopsowicz said.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty, I think, when people arrive already during normal times, so I think people are starting to work through what that means,” he said.
“This may be somewhat of a lost year (but) is this going to be easy to recover from next year in terms of bringing increased numbers back?”
Only about 20 per cent of new permanent residents are former students or temporary workers, he pointed out, suggesting Ottawa could do more to try to convince those people to permanently reside in Canada to bolster numbers.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 20, 2020.
OTTAWA – The parliamentary budget officer says the federal government likely failed to keep its deficit below its promised $40 billion cap in the last fiscal year.
However the PBO also projects in its latest economic and fiscal outlook today that weak economic growth this year will begin to rebound in 2025.
The budget watchdog estimates in its report that the federal government posted a $46.8 billion deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pledged a year ago to keep the deficit capped at $40 billion and in her spring budget said the deficit for 2023-24 stayed in line with that promise.
The final tally of the last year’s deficit will be confirmed when the government publishes its annual public accounts report this fall.
The PBO says economic growth will remain tepid this year but will rebound in 2025 as the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts stimulate spending and business investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says the level of food insecurity increased in 2022 as inflation hit peak levels.
In a report using data from the Canadian community health survey, the agency says 15.6 per cent of households experienced some level of food insecurity in 2022 after being relatively stable from 2017 to 2021.
The reading was up from 9.6 per cent in 2017 and 11.6 per cent in 2018.
Statistics Canada says the prevalence of household food insecurity was slightly lower and stable during the pandemic years as it fell to 8.5 per cent in the fall of 2020 and 9.1 per cent in 2021.
In addition to an increase in the prevalence of food insecurity in 2022, the agency says there was an increase in the severity as more households reported moderate or severe food insecurity.
It also noted an increase in the number of Canadians living in moderately or severely food insecure households was also seen in the Canadian income survey data collected in the first half of 2023.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct 16, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says manufacturing sales in August fell to their lowest level since January 2022 as sales in the primary metal and petroleum and coal product subsectors fell.
The agency says manufacturing sales fell 1.3 per cent to $69.4 billion in August, after rising 1.1 per cent in July.
The drop came as sales in the primary metal subsector dropped 6.4 per cent to $5.3 billion in August, on lower prices and lower volumes.
Sales in the petroleum and coal product subsector fell 3.7 per cent to $7.8 billion in August on lower prices.
Meanwhile, sales of aerospace products and parts rose 7.3 per cent to $2.7 billion in August and wood product sales increased 3.8 per cent to $3.1 billion.
Overall manufacturing sales in constant dollars fell 0.8 per cent in August.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 16, 2024.
