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TOP STORY
With Canada in the midst of a labour crunch, the Government of Canada has unveiled new targets to keep one-quarter of the the country’s labour force filled by immigrants.
The figure is contained in a new departmental plan released last Friday by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
In a section entitled “percentage of the Canadian labour force that is made up of immigrants and refugees,” the document indicates that the target is “≥ 25%.”
Although the target is a reduction from the extreme highs charted in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (when the figure hit 29 per cent), it still fixes Canada to a labour market comprised of historically high rates of immigrant and refugee workers.
As recently as 2011, the share of foreign-born workers in the Canadian labour force was 22.6 per cent, according to Labour Force Survey data compiled by the Bank of Canada. In 2006, it was 21.5 per cent.
It’s also significantly higher than the United States, which retains an immigrant labour force more in line with the Canada of 20 years ago. As of the most recent figures released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the foreign born accounted for 19.2 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force.”
The new targets occur against a relatively stagnant Canadian employment market where job growth has struggled for months to keep pace with high population growth.
In Statistics Canada’s most recent Labour Force Survey, the country added 8,800 jobs in the month of May. But since it added about as many workers, the unemployment rate actually went slightly up by 0.1 per cent.
“Overall, there has been virtually no employment growth since January,” it reads.
This is most noticeable for Canadians under the age of 25, many of whom are facing a summer jobs market that is one of the worst on record.
Youth unemployment is currently sitting at 11.2 per cent. Aside from COVID-19 lockdowns, this is the highest it’s been since the mid-1990s.
According to November research by King’s Trust Canada, the rise in youth unemployment has occurred in tandem with a massive increase in low-skilled positions being filled by temporary foreign workers.
Between 2016 and 2023, the report found that the rate of TFWs working in restaurants increased by 634 per cent, while those working in the retail sector increased by 456 per cent.
Since October, the Liberal government has been open about its intention to bring down Canadian immigration, with Prime Minister Mark Carney promising in a May 21 mandate letter to bring “overall immigration rates to sustainable levels.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s new departmental plan features much the same sentiment, and even notes that Canadians are losing faith with their immigration system.
“Organized human smuggling, fraud, and abuse of IRCC’s programs continue to pose challenges,” it reads. “This has had an impact on confidence in the immigration system.”
Nevertheless, many of the Carney government’s reduced targets are still way higher than the norm of just five years ago, and this is particularly true among temporary immigrants.
Prior to 2020, the number of “non-permanent residents” in Canada never exceeded three per cent of the overall population.
As of the most recent figures released by Statistics Canada, non-permanent residents now represent 7.1 per cent of the Canadian population.
Although Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has pledged to bring this down to five per cent, the target is still a 60-per-cent increase over the pre-COVID era.
It’s a similar story even among permanent residents. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s new department plan sets a target of “367,000 – 436,000” permanent admissions over the next fiscal year.
Although this is down from the 471,808 new permanent residents who came to Canada in 2023, it’s a marked increase over the 341,000 permanent residents Canada accepted in 2019.
And 2019 was not a particularly low-immigration year. At the time, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada was noting that it was surpassing immigration targets not matched since 1913.
IN OTHER NEWS
The Alberta separatist movement seems to be running into the same problem faced by Scottish nationalists and Quebec sovereigntists. Although a good portion of the residents in all three places are angry with the status quo and want to stick it to a central government, they’re not ready to commit to actually pursuing a national divorce. A recent Alberta byelection that separatists promised would be a breakthrough yielded just 19 per cent for the pro-independence option – which itself was split between two rival separatists. The race was notably in the same rural Alberta riding where a separatist actually did win a seat in a byelection in 1982 – only to lose it two-and-a-half months later in a general election.
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