Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to appear today. It's my pleasure to contribute to the study of Canada's immigration system.
My remarks today draw upon my research into Canadian political behaviour as well as Macdonald-Laurier Institute's own recent analysis of Canada's immigration system. I want to focus on how Canadians are responding to immigration challenges and what these shifts entail for the long-term sustainability of Canada's current immigration regime. My remarks build off of the recommendations that my colleague Peter Copeland has already provided to this committee.
As recently as 2022, 85% of Canadians believed that immigration had a positive impact on Canada's economy, while over two-thirds of respondents also rejected the claim that Canadian immigration levels were too high. As we are all well aware, this apparent consensus quickly unravelled. Today, well over half of Canadians believe that current levels strain public resources and pose integration challenges.
What has changed?
It should first be made clear that Canadians have not rejected immigration in principle. Rather, what has been uncovered is what in reality has always been a much more ambivalent attitude. Most Canadians do not embrace high rates of immigration or multiculturalism as intrinsically valuable goods in and of themselves. Instead, they are what academics Randy Besco and Erin Tolley call “conditional multiculturalists”. They are willing to support policies as long as they recognize them as being in their own and in Canada's best national interest, despite expressing some cultural reservations.
Going forward, the success of Canada's immigration regime therefore depends on the perception that the system is properly justified, publicly accountable, well managed and capable of delivering broadly shared benefits. This is something that it has increasingly struggled to demonstrate.
In recent years, rapid increases in intake levels, combined with a growing reliance on temporary migration pathways, limited alignment with housing and service capacity, and weak enforcement, have created a perception that the system is no longer operating in a coherent manner. Moreover, as MLI's own research has demonstrated, major policy changes have been introduced with minimal public transparency and limited parliamentary engagement.
An argument has been offered that current conditions reflect something of a cyclical adjustment. The relevant academic research is quite clear that periodic push-back to immigration will usually follow deteriorating economic conditions and an increase in intake numbers. Seen this way, public consensus, with some policy adjustments, may recover. If economic conditions improve and affordability pressures lessen, Canadians will adapt to higher intake levels.
This view is incorrect. The current moment reflects more deep-seated structural challenges that call for a more comprehensive reset. This is clear in two ways.
The first is a clear and ongoing decline in social trust throughout Canada. Short of being an intrinsic strength, diversity will undermine a community's cohesion unless it is matched by a binding set of norms, behaviours and shared civic purpose. Once lost, social trust is hard to regain.
The second is the emergence of more sorted and durable social divisions around immigration, defined around characteristics like income, education level and region. If not properly addressed, these divisions promise to become more inflamed and permanent.
These concerns point toward the need for a more coherent and comprehensive immigration and integration regime, firmly aligned with Canada's absorptive capacity.
Immigration levels and composition must be tied to housing, infrastructure and institutional capacity while system incentives are recalibrated to support long-term integration rather than short-term demand. This includes reducing reliance on temporary migration streams, strengthening enforcement and oversight, and ensuring that pathways to permanent residency and access to public benefits are meaningfully conditioned on integration outcomes, including labour market participation, progress toward self-sufficiency and adherence to shared civic norms.
More fundamentally, this points toward the need to re-anchor immigration policy in a clearer understanding of its economic and social purposes. Without such a realignment, public confidence will remain weakened and increasingly difficult to restore.
Thank you.