Thank you, Ms. James.
Yes, I agree entirely. First, we all know that we will be facing a growing challenge of a shrinking labour market as the baby boomers retire and as the average age of the Canadian population gets older. We project that in a few years all net labour force growth in Canada will be attributable to immigration.
Those who think we can solve that problem through immigration alone are profoundly mistaken. The C.D. Howe Institute has calculated that for us to merely maintain the current average age ratio in the Canadian population through immigration alone would require that we more than quadruple immigration levels to go up to about 4% intake per year of our population. That would require us going to over one million immigrants a year right now and bringing in seven million a year by the end of the decade.
Perhaps some people think that's viable. I don't. Eighty percent of Canadians are telling us immigration levels should not be increased, and I don't think those Canadians are saying that because they're hostile to immigration. On the contrary, they want to make sure newcomers succeed and that we have the capacity to integrate them.
We cannot solve the labour market challenges through immigration alone. It has to be part of the solution. Another important point is that of the immigrants we currently receive, only about 20% of them are what we would call primary economic immigrants who are assessed according to their human capital. About 80% of immigrants we receive are either the spouses and dependants of economic immigrants, or they're subsequently sponsored family members, or people in our humanitarian classes like refugees and asylum seekers. So eight out of ten immigrants to Canada are not primary economic immigrants.
Maybe we need to look at increasing the ratio of those who are primary economic immigrants to address the labour market shortages. Those who would seek to reduce the overall percentage of economic immigrants are undermining one of the primary objectives of immigration policy and the rationale that we present to Canadians for consistently high levels of immigration.
Finally, I would agree entirely that we need to do a much better job of greater labour market participation in Canada. We have certain regions and populations with long-term high rates, double-digit rates, of unemployment. We should not be in a situation where we have some regions in the country with double-digit unemployment, but businesses are telling us that they cannot get Canadians to work and they need to bring in temporary foreign workers. There's something profoundly wrong with that. So whether it's helping aboriginal Canadians in the west, for example, to move to gainful employment or other labour market remedies, we do need to increase participation in the workforce by people who are already in Canada.