Poilievre says he would cut population growth after Liberals signal immigration changes coming

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Thursday he would rein in Canada's population growth if elected, claiming the Liberal government has "destroyed our immigration system" and insisting on cuts to the number of people arriving in order to preserve a program that was once widely supported.

Speaking to reporters on Parliament Hill, Poilievre said immigration was "not even a controversial issue" before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected, but a surge in international students and low-wage temporary foreign workers has ruined the "multigenerational consensus" that bringing more people to live here is a good thing.

"The radical, out-of-control NDP-Liberal government has destroyed our system," Poilievre said. "We have to have a smaller population growth." 

Poilievre said a future Conservative government would tie the country's population growth rate to a level that's below the number of new homes built, and would also consider such factors as access to health-care and jobs.

That's an imprecise metric that makes it difficult to pinpoint just how many permanent residents or non-permanent residents such as temporary foreign workers, international students and refugees would be admitted on Poilievre's watch.

Poilievre has previously said immigration levels should be tied to housing starts. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) reported roughly 255,000 housing starts in July.

The federal government has already said it will admit about 485,000 permanent residents — immigrants who intend to settle here on a permanent basis — to Canada this year, with the target rising to 500,000 in both 2025 and 2026. 

In an apparent reference to research from Mike Moffatt, the senior director of policy at the Smart Prosperity Institute who has studied immigration and housing, Poilievre said Canada "cannot grow the population at three times the rate of the housing stock, as Trudeau has been doing."

The government hasn't offered a hard target for the non-permanent resident streams but has already announced an initiative to rein in the number of international students and, at the Liberal cabinet retreat in Halifax earlier this week, announced a crackdown on low-wage temporary foreign workers (TFWs).

The number of non-permanent residents has been growing at a breakneck pace in the post-COVID era after the federal government relaxed regulations around TFWs and allowed Canada's colleges and universities to dramatically expand the international student body.

In the last three years, the number of non-permanent residents — a category that includes TFWs, international students and asylum seekers — has more than doubled from about 1.3 million in 2021 to nearly 2.8 million in the second quarter of this year, according to data compiled by Statistics Canada.

Of that figure, 1.3 million people are in Canada on work permits, a category that includes TFWs.

The low-wage TFW sector, which has admitted workers in food services but also in sectors such as construction and hospitals, has grown from 15,817 such workers in 2016 to 83,654 in 2023, according to federal data.

The forthcoming changes to the low-wage stream will reduce the number of TFWs by about 65,000, the government has said, which brings it back to pre-pandemic levels.