Ministers may decrease temporary residents by making them permanent
One way Canada plans to shrink the number of temporary residents is to offer them the opportunity to remain permanently, the immigration minister said Friday, but that doesn’t mean everyone who wants to stay will be able to.
Marc Miller met his provincial and territorial counterparts for the first time since he announced an unprecedented plan to set limits on the number of new temporary residents.
The aim is to rein in runaway growth, which has put pressure on the housing market and other services. The minister set a goal to reduce the number of temporary residents over the next three years to five per cent of Canada’s population, down from the 6.2 per cent it was in 2023.
Several ministers warned the new policy would create added demand for their provincial immigration programs as temporary residents apply to stay in the country. They pitched expanding their provincial programs as a win-win solution to keep people in Canada permanently.
“The fact people are already here, their impact on affordability has already been baked in, so it’s smart,” Miller said. “But it doesn’t mean by extension that everyone’s entitled to stay here or be here in Canada.” Ottawa can also do more to seek people who are already in Canada when it comes to federal permanent residency programs, he said.
The new targets for temporary residents will be developed over the summer and published in the fall. The government hasn’t yet settled on the limits it needs to set on new visas to reduce the temporary resident population.
Miller asked provinces to share whatever data they have on the temporary resident population in their borders, including how many end up staying permanently under provincial nominee programs. He has also asked for a better picture of their capacity for newcomers and the pressure population growth is creating in their jurisdictions.
Already Miller has announced plans to scale back the number of international students by putting a two-year cap on new admissions in January.
The government is also attempting to speed up the time it takes to process asylum claims and, in the recent federal budget, included legislative measures designed to make the deportation process faster when those claims are denied.
The final and largest category that has yet to be addressed is temporary work permit-holders.
How to allocate a finite number of temporary visas was a focus of the talks, the ministers said in a statement after their meeting.
In 2018, there were 337,460 people with temporary work visas. By 2022, that number swelled to 605,851.
Miller has said it’s a workforce the labour market has become addicted to.
Saskatchewan Immigration Minister Jeremy Harrison says his province hasn’t seen the same influx in temporary residents as some others, but the goal is still to transition them to permanent residency as much as possible.
But in Manitoba, announcements out of Ottawa about scaling back temporary immigration have been met with an overwhelming surge in applications to the provincial nominee program for permanent residency.
This week, Miller agreed to Manitoba’s request to extend the federal work permits for 6,700 newcomers whose visas were set to expire by the end of the year, to give them time to apply to stay in Canada permanently through the provincial nomination program.