Thank you.
I'm a professor in the department of economics at Carleton University. My research is on the economics of immigration.
I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to present on the topic of immigration processes in Canada.
This is a very broad topic. Given that I have five minutes for an opening statement, I'm just going to focus on what I think is the most pressing question related to the economic immigration process, specifically, the selection of economic principal applicants.
Since the late 1960s, Canada has mainly employed a human capital-based model of immigrant selection. Specifically, we have chosen economic principal applicants who have had education and language fluency, which makes them likely to have high earnings—perhaps not in the first year or two in Canada after arrival, but within a reasonable time frame.
I co-authored a 2025 study with Matt Doyle and Mikal Skuterud, published in the Canadian Journal of Economics, in which we make the case that if one wants to maximize economic welfare—usually measured, by economists at least, as GDP per capita—one would select economic principal applicants whose earnings, 10 years after arrival in Canada, are expected to be above the population average. As a rule of thumb, this is a sensible way to approach economic immigration.
Can it be done? I am certain that it can if we take immigrant selection seriously. If we look at the immigrant applicants and rank them based on factors such as education and language fluency, and then drill down into key details of education such as field of study, we will have much better outcomes for the strong applicants we would select. We might end up with a smaller economic intake, but it would be a much more successful one.
Many of you may be thinking that this is more or less what we do, but I would argue that we have shifted a long way from that. The category-based selection system allows governments to move away from prioritizing the highest-earning immigrants so as to pursue other policy options. Similarly, the growing provincial nominee numbers are too often focused on lower-skilled economic immigrants. This is another way in which we are seeing significant drift from our former human capital-based model.
While the potential pool of people wanting to come to Canada to live is arguably very large, many of them lack the language fluency and education needed to have higher earnings in Canada. What does this mean in practice?
Fundamental to economics is the idea of making choice under scarcity. We need to start thinking about highly skilled economic principal applicants as being scarce. Only when we do that will we see the layering on of other policy objectives, such as francophone targets for economic immigrants settling outside Quebec or prioritizing economic immigrants who will settle in small communities under provincial nominee programs. Layering these on top of the human capital model is pushing us away from our fundamental goal of raising GDP per capita, and this is costing our economy.
I thought I would try a couple of quick analogies. Prime Minister Carney often uses hockey analogies, so I thought I would try one, just to lighten things up. We are heading into the winter Olympics. Let's say that we had decided that the women's hockey team, rather than being based on the best available players, was based on the best available players while ensuring that at least one player comes from each province and territory. That might have value as a policy, as these individual women would be great role models for people in their communities, but I think everyone realizes that it would probably reduce the chances—perhaps dramatically—of winning Olympic gold.
There is no serious discussion of that, but I would argue that this is in the same spirit as our provincial nominee programs.
Similarly, what if the Government of Canada required that professional baseball players needed to be bilingual? It's pretty extreme. I was thinking English-French, not English-Spanish, so it's even more extreme. This policy would greatly limit the choices the Blue Jays organization would have and greatly reduce the chances of winning the World Series.
I would argue that this is in the same spirit as our francophone targets outside Quebec. To be clear, settling francophone immigrants inside Quebec makes perfect sense. I'm not critical of that.
For economic immigrants settling outside Quebec, restricting some fraction to being francophone is very unlikely to have any impact on those communities, yet to achieve this, we may have to divert away from outstanding unilingual anglophone or allophone applicants.
Ideally, the selection of economic principal applicants should be focused on individuals who will have above-average earnings in Canada within, say, 10 years of arrival. When other policy objectives are introduced, we should expect lower earning performance of the immigrants selected. We should also be honest and upfront about the trade-offs involved.
Thank you.