Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is preparing the ground for another mass immigration push, despite the pressure Justin Trudeau’s open-door policies placed on housing, public services and Canadian workers.
Rather than abandoning the already flawed model that helped create the crisis, the Liberal Party is considering reviving it, while India’s High Commissioner to Canada has already floated the prospect of 15 million additional immigrant workers over the next decade.
Dinesh K Patnaik reignited the controversy in an interview with Canadian broadcaster CPAC on 9 October, arguing that Carney’s ambition to generate $1 trillion in investment could require 15 million additional workers. Patnaik pointed to immigration and international recruitment, including from India and other Asian countries, as potential solutions to Canada’s labour demands.
The remarks follow Carney’s own declaration that Canada would eventually resume increasing immigration. Speaking to The New York Times in September, the prime minister said Ottawa had brought immigration under control after the disastrous overshoots recorded under the previous Trudeau governments. ‘Now the question starts to become: when do we resume some controlled increase in the populationwhich is the nature of Canada?’ he said, adding: ‘So that will happen.’
Canada’s population stood at approximately 41.8 million in July 2026, with one in five residents aged 65 or older and the fertility rate having fallen to a record low of 1.25 children per woman in 2024. Annual population growth has slowed sharply from 2.8 per cent in 2023–24 to just 0.5 per cent in 2025–26, largely reflecting the reduction in immigration. However, despite the restrictions, Canada still hosts nearly 2.8 million non-permanent residents, accounting for 6.7 per cent of its population.
Carney presents immigration as an economic necessity, arguing that Canada needs population growth to address labour shortages and offset demographic decline. Yet this is precisely the economic logic that underpinned Trudeau’s disastrous immigration experiment: importing ever-greater numbers of people to inflate overall economic output while failing to ensure that housing, infrastructure and public services could accommodate them, not to mention the problems with integration. The same issues are currently driving Western Europe to the edge, squeezing the establishment from both political extremes.
Under Trudeauthe Liberals pursued increasingly permissive immigration policies, targeting 500,000 permanent residents annually while allowing temporary worker and international student programmes to expand dramatically. Canada admitted nearly 484,000 permanent residents in 2024, while its population had already surged by 1.27 million in 2023 alone. International migration accounted for almost 98 per cent of that increase, placing enormous additional pressure on an already overstretched housing market.
The Bank of Canada acknowledged that increased demand linked to immigration contributed to rising rents as housing construction failed to keep pace. The crisis eventually forced the Liberals into a humiliating retreat, reducing immigration targets and restricting temporary arrivals after years of pursuing record-breaking inflows. Yet even after those cuts, Ottawa still plans to admit 380,000 permanent residents and 385,000 new temporary residents in 2026.
Conservatives have fiercely opposed Carney’s decision to return to higher immigration. Conservative Shadow Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Michelle Rempel Garner accused the Liberals of overwhelming housing, healthcare and employment opportunities, demanding that immigration levels go ‘way down, not up’. She also challenged the influence of business interests seeking cheaper foreign labour, raising questions about whose economic interests another immigration surge would actually serve.
The government is expected to publish its next immigration plan around 1 November.
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