Clearly, we have volumes in this country that are unprecedented, of immigration, and I think that's a good thing. Today, we're announcing we will reduce the number of immigrants we bring in. Mr. Speaker, we are taking back control over the immigration system.

SANGEETA: For a long time, Canada has been welcoming to newcomers. But now that door seems to be closing. We've done an about-face in just a couple of years. What does that mean for the country? Is the system broken? Let's unravel the Canadian immigration system. Let's start with a look at why we have immigration in the first place.

SANGEETA: The Immigration Act lays out several objectives, but there are three main ones. The first is to add to the socio-economic fabric of our country. People are selected based on what they would contribute to our country, based on their background, based on their talents. The second is for family reunification. We want to allow Canadians and permanent residents to be reunified with their close family members. And the third is for refugee protection and for humanitarian and compassionate grounds. We are a country where we want offer sanctuary and protection to those who would need it.

SANGEETA: So how do those ideas tie directly to Canada's needs?

ELIZABETH: It is very clear that our own birthrates in this country is not gonna be enough to sustain our population growth that we need it to sustain. If we didn't have any immigration, our health care systems would be prohibitively expensive. Also, we need people not only as workers, but even as consumers. Without consumers, we don't have a need for services and goods. So our population needs to grow. We are then looking for people to join our communities. So that's what the immigration system is for.

But how's it work? Well, the Immigration Minister makes the rules.

ELIZABETH: The job of any Immigration Minister is very complicated, and they have to balance all of these interests. We want to serve our mandate, where we want to help those who are in need, but we can't necessarily open our doors to the world and let everybody who needs help come to the country. So all of these competing interests make our immigration system very complex and fascinating. And our immigration system has worked to achieve those goals. But recently, it's seen a lot of change.

ELIZABETH: Since the Act came into place 24 years ago, 2001, we have had fifteen Immigration Ministers. Each Minister, on average, stays around a year. That's a big problem. Most Immigration Ministers who come into their role probably don't have much immigration experience at all. And this is one of the most complex legal systems in Canada. It has a huge issue with fraud and balancing different interests. And it is one of the most important systems that will affect us and our future in this country.

This ministerial upheaval then collided with the pandemic in 2020. First, we will be denying entry to Canada to people who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

ELIZABETH: All of a sudden, we had to close our borders. And the Minister in charge then decided that people who are in country, we should let them stay in the country. And especially, there was a recognition, not only do we need what's called "high-skilled workers", many of the essential workers were people who were working in grocery stores, who were working in restaurants, in health care. So what the Minister decided to do at that point is to allow virtually everyone who was in a pool to immigrate. In the space of a few months, Canada let in all of the quotas for not just one year, but two years of permanent residents.

SANGEETA: That means there was no room to allow for more immigration to happen.

ELIZABETH: The idea then was to allow people to continue their work permits.

SANGEETA: So we can keep these high-skilled workers on the hook, and give them a reason to still come to Canada.

Then, we shuffled the Immigration Minister again. And this new Minister was in place for the start of the Ukraine war. Canada wanted to help Ukrainians, but...

ELIZABETH: Well, we didn't want to have all of them come as refugee claimants. So the new Immigration Minister comes up with a brand-new idea. Humanitarian work permits.

ELIZABETH: For the most part, this was never done before. For the first time, we had humanitarian work permits en masse offered to people. And then people started to question, "Well, why it is that when the Afghanistan situation occurred, "you didn't allow people from Afghanistan "to get work permits? "Or, you know, from other parts of the world. "Why is it all of a sudden "somewhere from Europe that you're allowing "this great benefit of humanitarian work permits?"

SANGEETA: So the new program expanded to allow people from other conflict zones to come to Canada under these new humanitarian work permits.

SANGEETA: Okay, let's recap this for a sec. We burned through our two-year quota of new permanent residents during the pandemic, handing them out to people who were already in the country to fill our labour gaps. After the borders opened up, we wanted new, high-skilled permanent residents to come to Canada, but the quota was used up. So we gave these people temporary work permits, so they could still come to the country. Then the Ukraine war happened, and we created new humanitarian work permits for people caught in that war and other conflict zones. That's a big influx of people coming to Canada that we hadn't accounted for.

ELIZABETH: And on top of that, we have another third group of people, the tremendous unchecked growth of international students. Before the pandemic started, the number of students were around 400,000, 500,000 or so. By 2023, those numbers had grown to around 900,000 in one year. And as a result, our population shot up. And international students have been very sought-after, not just by our government, but also the US. They're young, they bring in huge tuition dollars, and by the time they graduate, they're well-educated and able to enter the labour market. However, when the population saw this huge growth of international workers and students, suddenly people thought, "Oh, what's happening here?" The public's perception was turning. Before, we were always very welcoming for immigrants. We were very proud to do that, and all of a sudden, the story became "We have too many people in the country."

SANGEETA: So the federal government changed the rule again, and capped the number of international students who could come to Canada.

SANGEETA: So what's the consequence of all of this change to the immigration system? Remember earlier where we talked about the Immigration Minister making the rules? Well, there's another part of that that's led us here, and it's because of something called "ministerial instructions."

SANGEETA: Those are changes a minister can make to an immigration program without any Parliamentary input or consultation. As a result, immigration programs, especially economic programs in Canada, change mostly without warning, mostly without consultation of experts and stakeholders. This becomes a huge problem. This is a very complex system. It's a system where people prepare for years to try to qualify to immigrate. And so therefore, knowing what you have to do to qualify is very, very important to any applicants. Because of these very fast changes, it can be extremely frustrating, not only to the applicants who are trying to apply, but also to their employers who want to hire them.

ELIZABETH: We see a lot of people in Canada who are temporary residents. But permanent residency, these days, requires such a high level of skills that most people who had immigrated before wouldn't be able to do so today. ♪