FIRST READING: Carney’s ‘under control’ immigration still blowing out the numbers

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In a Tuesday social media post, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) provided a fact sheet on “the progress we’re making to restore immigration to sustainable levels.”

The number of foreign students entering the country is down 71 per cent. The number of foreign workers is down 57 per cent. Asylum claims are down 52 per cent.

“We are restoring balance to the system and reducing immigration levels to stabilize population growth and take pressure off essential services and infrastructure,” declares an accompanying webpage.

Here are the facts on the progress we’re making to restore immigration to sustainable levels. The latest data shows that as of August 2026

• We’re on track to meet our annual targets in all permanent resident categories.
• The number of students arriving in Canada is down 71%…

— IRCC (@CitImmCanada) October 27, 2026

The only problem is, the cited reductions are all pegged against the single most anomalous immigration surge in Canadian history.

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In the immediate post-COVID era, every Canadian immigration stream was blown to all-time highs. In just the two years between 2022 and 2024, the population soared by an estimated 2.2 million. It was the equivalent of adding 90,000 new people per month for 24 consecutive months.

So when Prime Minister Mark Carney and his immigration department claim that immigration has been brought “under control,” they’re often weighing the government’s performance against some of the most out-of-control immigration numbers ever charted in Canada.

When viewed more holistically, Canada’s immigration numbers remain at all-time highs almost everywhere. Some examples below:

The number of foreign workers has never been higher

On a federal government website entitled Key Numbers on Immigration, IRCC notes that the raw number of foreign workers entering the country is trending downwards. As recently as March 2024, 64,000 non-resident migrants entered the country on work permits in a single month. But as of August, this was down to 16,850.

This is “a clear sign that the measures we’ve put in place are working,” it states.

However, many of the foreign workers who entered Canada during the post-COVID surge are still here, and even a reduced number of new arrivals is simply adding to a population of non-resident workers that has never been higher.

As of August 2026, IRCC data show that there are 1,550,215 people in the country “who only hold a work permit.” This is actually slightly higher than in 2024, the usual benchmark for when Canadian migration numbers were at their most unchecked. At the close of 2024, the “work permit only” population stood at 1,465,185.

And both figures are well beyond what was considered normal just a few years ago. As recently as 2021, there were just 590,000 “work permit only” foreign nationals in the country.

This is part of the reason why, despite Ottawa’s efforts to reduce temporary migration, the number of “non-permanent residents” in Canada is still incredibly high.

In 2021, Statistics Canada recorded a “non-permanent resident” population of 1,326,000. As of July, even after more than a year of Carney government efforts to rein in immigration, the number of “non-permanent residents” in the country stood at about 2.8 million. In other words, roughly one in every 16 people in Canada is here on temporary status.

Intake of permanent immigrants is still at 100-year highs

Canada is slated to accept 380,000 permanent residents in 2026, about 1,000 per day.

Ottawa has said this is the “sustainable” figure, and represents a cut of nearly 20 per cent from the 500,000 permanent residents that the Liberal government had originally budgeted for 2026.

But even this reduced number will end up charting as one of the highest annual intakes of permanent residents over the last century. Between 1914 and today, just five years have been higher: 2021 (406,055), 2022 (437,635), 2023 (471,820) 2024 (483,655) and 2025 (393,530).

For context, the nine years of the government of Stephen Harper featured the highest levels of immigration since the First World War. In 2014, the last full year of Harper’s premiership, Statistics Canada noted that the immigration intake was at “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years.”

And yet, the average annual intake of permanent residents under the Harper government was about 220,000. The “reduced” figure of 380,000 is more than 70 per cent higher.

Student permits remain nearly double their pre-2015 level

In 2024, the number of foreign students in Canada topped out at more than one million. The all-time peak, charted in June 2024, was 1,032,950.

This means that, for a few months, Canada had as many international students as it had Nova Scotians.

Bringing this number down has indeed been one of the most conspicuous successes of the Liberals’ “sustainable” immigration plan. As of the most recent figures from August 2026, the number of international permit-holders in the country has dropped to 602,115 — a drop of more than 400,000.

Not all of those 400,000 have left the country. Ottawa has been open about its plans to shrink the foreign student population by earmarking some for permanent residency. And, in some cases, foreign students facing the expiry of their visa have simply claimed to be refugees.

But Canada is still bringing in foreign students at rates that would have been considered eye-watering in the pre-Liberal era. In 2015, the number of international students in Canada stood at 457,828 — about 25 per cent lower than the country’s current student population. As recently as 2010, it stood at 328,402 — nearly half of the current figures.

The asylum seeker backlog has never been worse

Here again, IRCC is claiming success in bringing down the raw number of asylum claimants entering the country each month. Throughout 2024, every month was yielding at least 10,000 foreign nationals claiming to be refugees. In October 2023 alone, the federal government charted 16,315 new asylum claimants — an average of one new asylum claimant every three minutes.

As of August, the intake is down to just 4,575.

“The number of asylum claims from people crossing between ports of entry has since dropped from an average of 165 claims a day in March 2023 to 13 claims a day,” reads an IRCC website.

However, even if the intake is down, it’s still being added to a record-high mountain of pending claims.

At the close of 2021, Canada had about 160,000 asylum claimants in the country — which itself was a record high driven by several years of illegal border-crossers entering Canada from the United States. As of July, it’s 530,000.

This is Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pictured at the exact moment that he asked Housing Minister Gregor Robertson to “reprimand himself,” throwing in a handslap gesture for effect. Robertson had risen to “reprimand” Poilievre for suggesting that high immigration was a driver of housing unaffordability. To which Poilievre immediately produced a document from Robertson’s own ministry stating “one of the drivers of the housing shortage has been the strong growth in housing demand driven by immigration-led population growth.”

In a recent podcast appearance, Conservative MP Jamil Jivani entrenched his position as Canada’s leading right-wing critic of Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

“I often look at him and say, ‘that is the last thing I ever want to be, is Doug Ford.’ Last thing I ever want to be. I never want to look in the mirror and say ‘I was a guy who sold out as a conservative to have liberals love me,’” Jivani said in an appearance on Can’t Be Censored.

Jivani, now the Conservative MP for Durham, used to work for Ford as both a special adviser and as Advocate for Community Opportunities — two positions that Ford had created specifically for Jivani after reading his book, Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity.

Nevertheless, the two fell out pretty hard over the issue of COVID-19 lockdowns. As Jivani described it, his job became “watching these guys screw up the COVID file; too many lockdowns, they (were) locking kids out of school more than any other province.”

Ever since, Jivani has been one of the most cutting critics of Ford. In Can’t Be Censored, Jivani claimed that a not-insubstantial number of Ford’s caucus agree with him, but aren’t able to speak up about it.

Said Jivani, “I would love it if he came out and said ‘let’s do a leadership review.’”

This is from a new Environics Institute poll showing that immigration skepticism is higher among non-white Canadians than it is among white Canadians. The latter is more likely to believe that current immigration levels are fine, that integration isn’t a problem and that asylum claimants were all telling the truth.

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