Thank you very much, Ms. Kayabaga, for the question. This is extremely important.
My view is that Canada needs more people for economic and demographic reasons. A lot of people, I think, see the 500,000 we intend to welcome as permanent residents in a couple of years as a really big number. But it's really important, to the point of your question, to recognize that a lot of people are already here and they're going to transition to permanent residency.
There are a number of different elements to the strategy to continue to welcome as permanent residents people who are already here. Last year, searching my memory, about 157,000 new permanent residents were already international students. The kinds of things we do to facilitate their transition to permanent residency include the extension of post-graduate work permits and the automatic extension for those who are facing potentially soon-to-be-expired post-graduate work permits.
We want to continue to open up the NOC codes for different occupations. We recently had an announcement that will enable 16 new professions to quality under the express entry system. We have a new tool we're going to deploy this coming year that will allow us to more nimbly target people in key shortages, including in sectors that have workers who are here temporarily to prevent them from leaving and making it worse.
There are other opportunities I want to explore that were outlined in the response we tabled to our colleague Randeep Sarai's private member's motion, motion 44, which include examining whether we should be doing targeted draws for people who are already here and continuing to look at the point system to see how it's going to satisfy people who have Canadian work experience.
There's not one silver bullet, but recognizing that people are using our temporary pathways as a stepping stone to permanent residency, and planning accordingly, is something we must do. Next on the list is to make good on my mandate letter commitments the Prime Minister has given to me to create a pathway to permanent residency for temporary foreign workers and international students.