FIRST READING: Immigration is higher than Ottawa has been telling us (and it’s set to go back up)

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In the same week Ottawa revealed that immigration numbers weren’t contracting nearly as much as they’d said, Prime Minister Mark Carney mused about raising them back to never-before-seen highs.

Earlier this year, Government of Canada figures showed that, for the first time, Canada’s population had contracted over the course of a calendar year. In 2025, according to those estimates, the Canadian population had gone down by about 102,000.

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Then, earlier this month, Statistics Canada revised the figures and reported that Canada was actually still adding people by the hundreds of thousands.

According to the revised estimates, instead of going down by 102,000, the Canadian population in 2025 actually went up by 280,000.

Only a few days later, on Sept. 27, the New York Times published a lengthy interview with Carney in which he pledged to eventually “resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada.”

“So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control,” he said.

In the New York Times interview, Carney acknowledged the unprecedented migration surge that entered Canada in the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, saying it had put undue pressure on housing and the education system – and that the Canadian student visa program was being exploited by “degree factories.”

But he framed the problem as one of unanticipated “overshoots,” and anticipated being able to raise targets once immigration was “under control.”

Even if 2025 had indeed been a year of population contraction, even that statistic would have only been possible because Canada was coming off the most dramatic migration surge in its history.

In just three years between 2022 and 2025, the Canadian population surged from 38,559,788 to 41,435,888 – an increase of 2.8 million.

Put another way, at the beginning of 2025, roughly one in every 16 people in Canada had arrived in the country within the last three years.

If Canada’s meteoric population growth has tapered off, it’s largely due to new federal constraints on temporary migration streams, particularly student visas.

In contrast to the record high 684,000 student permits handed out in 2023, in 2025 Ottawa set the target closer to 437,000.

Nevertheless, as was revealed by Statistics Canada’s recent revision of its population numbers, it’s hard to know exactly how many people who entered Canada as students are still in the country.

Statistics Canada wrote in a Sept. 23 statement that it had raised its 2025 population estimates due to a new calculation accounting for the large numbers of temporary migrants who had either left the country before their permit expired, or were remaining in Canada on expired papers “while their extension application is being processed.”

But the StatCan figures are all just educated guesses. Because, as has been pointed out by critics in the Conservative party, Canada doesn’t actually have any reliable figures on whether temporary migrants are leaving the country at the expiry of their visa.

At a House of Commons hearing earlier this year, a Tory critic asked Immigration Minister Lena Diab why Canada wasn’t tracking migrant exits, prompting Diab to call it a “good question.”

“I wondered the same thing, but that’s how Canada has been throughout its history,” she replied, before saying Ottawa was working on a pilot program to do just that.

All the while, the rate of asylum-seekers living in Canada continues to reach all-time highs.

In his New York Times interview, Carney said that asylum-seekers “are down by one-third on a flow basis.”

But here again, the reduction is only coming after a meteoric surge in the category, while the net number of asylum-seekers in the country is officially larger than the population of Halifax.

According to the most recent Government of Canada figures, there are 530,000 foreign nationals living in Canada as asylum claimants. This is up 50,000 from when Carney first took office in April 2025.

It’s also more than three times higher than the 160,000 asylum-seekers counted as recently as 2022.

As noted in an analysis by Better Dwelling, Statistics Canada’s revised population estimates don’t just mean that there are 382,000 more people in the country than expected.

It also means that several other indicators are slightly worse, including unemployment and GDP per capita.

According to Better Dwelling, the population revision means that the latest unemployment rate, officially estimated at 6.7 per cent, is probably closer to 7.6 per cent. “That would make it the third-highest report since the pandemic,” it read.

Sept. 20 witnessed the first time that a Canadian prime minister visited Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, two small French islands located just off the coast of Newfoundland. Prime Minister Mark Carney had gone there for a summit with French President Emmanuel Macron. But just a week later, France would enrage Newfoundlanders by authorizing its fishermen to start harvesting more than $20 million of snow crab on an underwater chunk of land that is just outside Canadian territorial waters. As Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham said in a statement, “let me be clear: France has no authority to fish snow crab on Canada’s continental shelf. And Newfoundland and Labrador will not stand for it.”

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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