Reduction in Immigration: Government of Canada reduces Immigration

News release

October 24, 2024—Ottawa—Today, the Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, announced the 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan: a plan that will pause population growth in the short term to achieve well-managed, sustainable growth in the long term. For the first time ever, the levels plan includes controlled targets for temporary residents, specifically international students and foreign workers, as well as for permanent residents.

Immigration is essential to our country’s economic success and growth. As Canada reopened following the pandemic, the needs of businesses were greater than the supply of workers available to support their recovery. We took decisive measures to attract some of the world’s best and brightest to study and work in Canada, and to integrate them into the economy quickly. This meant a faster economic recovery. It also meant that robust immigration helped prevent a recession, while contributing to Canada’s workforce.

In response to the evolving needs of our country, this transitional levels plan alleviates pressures on housing, infrastructure and social services so that over the long term we can grow our economic and social prosperity through immigration. This unprecedented plan offers a comprehensive approach to welcoming newcomers—one that preserves the integrity of our immigration programs and sets newcomers up for success. Canadians also expect a well-managed immigration system from the Government of Canada.

The 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan is expected to result in a marginal population decline of 0.2% in both 2025 and 2026 before returning to a population growth of 0.8% in 2027. These forecasts account for today’s announcement of reduced targets across multiple immigration streams over the next two years, as well as expected temporary resident outflows resulting from the 5% target, natural population loss and other factors.

With this year’s levels plan, we have listened to Canadians. We are reducing our permanent resident targets. Compared to last year’s plan, we are:

• reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025
• reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 380,000 in 2026
• setting a target of 365,000 permanent residents in 2027

The Levels Plan also supports efforts to reduce temporary resident volumes to 5% of Canada’s population by the end of 2026. Given temporary resident reduction measures announced in September and this past year, Canada’s temporary population will decrease over the next few years as significantly more temporary residents will transition to being permanent residents or leave Canada compared to new ones arriving.

Specifically, compared to each previous year, we will see Canada’s temporary population decline by

• 445,901 in 2025
• 445,662 in 2026
• a modest increase of 17,439 in 2027

These reductions are the result of a series of changes over the past year, including a cap on international students and tightened eligibility requirements for temporary foreign workers, implemented to decrease volumes and strengthen the integrity and quality of our temporary resident programs. The changes are designed with long-term economic goals in mind to make sure that we continue to attract the best and the brightest.

These changes will help provinces, territories and stakeholders align their capacities and allow the population to grow at a sustainable pace as we encourage institutions to do their part in better welcoming newcomers.

Other measures from the 2025-2027 Immigration Levels Plan include the following:

• Transitioning more temporary residents who are already in Canada as students and workers to permanent residents
  Representing more than 40% of overall permanent resident admissions in 2025, these residents are skilled, educated and integrated into Canadian society. They will continue to support the workforce and economy without placing additional demands on our social services because they are already established, with housing and employment.
• Focusing on long-term economic growth and key labour market sectors, such as health and trades
  Permanent resident admissions in the economic class will reach 61.7% of total admissions by 2027.
• Strengthening Francophone communities outside Quebec and supporting their economic prosperity
  Of the overall permanent resident admission targets, Francophone immigration will represent
  • 8.5% in 2025
  • 9.5% in 2026
  • 10% in 2027

Through this plan, we are using our existing programs so that everyone—including newcomers—has access to the well-paying jobs, affordable homes and social services they need to thrive in our beautiful country.

Quotes

“Today’s announcement is the next step in our plan to address the evolving immigration needs of our country. While it’s clear our economy needs newcomers, we see the pressures facing our country, and we must adapt our policies accordingly. These changes will make immigration work for our country so that everyone has access to the quality jobs, homes and supports they need to thrive. We have listened to Canadians, and we will continue to protect the integrity of our system and grow our population responsibly.”

– The Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship

Quick facts

According to Statistics Canada, immigrants are making important contributions across every sector of Canada’s economy—namely, health care, construction and transportation. When it comes to Canada’s residential construction sector, immigrants play a key role, accounting for 23% of all general contractors and residential builders.

Canada’s population has grown in recent years, reaching 41 million in April 2024. Immigration accounted for almost 98% of this growth in 2023, 60% of which can be attributed to temporary residents.

This plan to right-size population growth after the post-pandemic surge will support continued robust GDP growth and enable GDP per capita growth to accelerate throughout 2025 to 2027, as well as improve housing affordability and lower the unemployment rate. 

Reducing the volume of immigrants will help to alleviate some pressure in the housing market, with the housing supply gap expected to decrease by approximately 670 000 units by the end of 2027.

The temporary resident targets in the levels plan do not include short-term visitors or seasonal workers, who are not captured in annual population estimates. Targets are for the number of net new temporary residents entering Canada each year. 

The Government of Canada has put in place measures to manage the volume of temporary resident arrivals, uphold the integrity of our immigration system and protect vulnerable people, including

reforming the International Student Program

tightening eligibility requirements for

temporary foreign workers

post-graduation work permits

work permits for spouses of international students and temporary foreign workers