Canada faces record population growth as Mark Carney stresses need to integrate four million newcomers
Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney has criticised Canada’s recent immigration policy, pointing to what he called “failures of execution” in handling the influx of newcomers, according to the Financial Post.
At an event hosted by Cardus, a Christian non-partisan think tank, Carney remarked that Canada had taken in more immigrants than the economy could manage effectively.
“It’s not even with hindsight, it’s in real time, you can see that we had much higher levels of foreign workers, students and new Canadians coming in than we could absorb,” he said.
The federal government has recently reduced its immigration targets for the next three years.
The new plan aims to bring in 395,000 newcomers in 2025 and 380,000 in 2026, representing a 21 percent decrease from the 500,000 target set for 2024.
The shift follows polling that revealed changing public sentiment toward immigration.
In October, a survey conducted by the Environics Institute and Toronto Metropolitan University found a majority of Canadians wanted less immigration for the first time in 25 years.
Statistics Canada reported that from 2023 to 2024, Canada’s population grew at a record pace of 3.2 percent, driven primarily by temporary immigration.
Carney said the focus now should be on managing the nearly four million newcomers already in the country, describing this period as an opportunity to get immigration “back on track.”
He added, “To my way of thinking that’s quite different than saying we don’t want immigration, that we don’t value new Canadians, we don’t grow as a society.”
Carney emphasised that immigration will remain a vital contributor to Canada’s economic future. He pointed to the country’s demographics and the need for both productivity and a growing labour force, noting that the latter would largely come through immigration.
“Now I can make a very economic wonky, but hugely important economic point around our demographics and it’s the fact that we need both productivity and a growing labour force, and that growing labour force is going to largely come through new young Canadians,” he said.
The revised immigration targets and Carney’s remarks reflect the challenges of balancing population growth with economic and societal capacity while recognising the importance of immigration in shaping Canada’s future.