Canada’s immigration system is a mess in more ways than one. Over the last decade, the Liberals have taken a system that was admired around the world, supported here at home and they trashed it.

Support for immigration is falling across the country, and other countries now look at us as a cautionary tale rather than an example to follow.

LILLEY: Numbers show Canada's immigration system failing on all fronts Back to video

No part of the system works properly anymore, and despite Prime Minister Mark Carney promising to clean up the mess created by his predecessor Justin Trudeau, it’s not happening. Our system is still bringing in people faster than we can absorb them, and as this week’s report from the Auditor General showed, there are not sufficient guardrails or oversight.

Canada’s various immigration streams went from taking in roughly 579,000 people in 2015 to taking in 1.36 million by 2024. The numbers are pulling back a bit, but not nearly enough to bring balance to the system.

In the permanent resident stream — these are people who have been selected to live permanently in Canada and are on the path to citizenship — we went from 271,845 in 2015 to 483,640 in 2024.

That’s a 78% increase just for permanent residents and while the Carney government cut that back to 393,500 in 2025, that’s still a 45% increase over the 2015 numbers.

The number of international students grew from 219,000 in 2015 to 515,000 in 2024, but the peak year was 2023, when 680,000 visas were issued. Temporary foreign workers increased from 73,000 in 2015 to 191,000 in 2024 and asylum claims went from 16,000 in 2015 to 172,000 in 2024.

The Liberal plan released as late as November 2023 called for increasing immigration as high as 550,000 this year.

It was only the deteriorating economic conditions and worsening public sentiment that saw the government change course.

The current immigration plan still calls for permanent residence numbers to fall within a range of 350,000 to 420,000 from now until 2028. While the government promotes their immigration plan as being about jobs and the economy, only about 245,000 of those new permanent residents are considered part of the economic immigrant stream.

The rest fall under refugees, humanitarian grounds and family reunification.

According to the latest population estimate, Canada’s temporary population is 2.6 million or about 6.5% of the total population of 41 million. The Carney Liberals are still promising to get Canada’s temporary population to below 5% of the total, down from a high of 7.5% in October 2024.

Even a temporary population of 5% is higher than it should be, another sign of a system out of control.

Between when the Liberals took power in 2015 and the peak of student mania, the international student population in Canada increased threefold from 219,000 to more than 680,000.

As we learned this week from Auditor General Karen Hogan, this was a system rife with abuse.

The audit released Monday showed that, over two years, more than 153,000 students were flagged as potentially non-compliant with study permit conditions but the department, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, could only investigate 2,000 cases per year. That in itself is a problem but so too are the results from a system that seemed to turn a blind eye to abuse.

The Auditor General found that of 4,057 investigations opened, 1,654 of them were shut down because the students simply ignored requests for information. Don’t answer the call from the Canadian government and you can just stay in the country indefinitely.

The department identified 800 study permits issued between 2018–2023 that were obtained with fraudulent documents or misrepresentation. You would think that would be grounds for those individuals to be kicked out, instead the audit found that the government didn’t seek any enforcement measures and later approved new visas for 351 of the fraudsters.

Of those 800 people who gained access through fraudulent means, 110 of them would claim asylum.

Asylum abuse is the norm, not the exception

Canada’s asylum and refugee system is supposed to be there for people fleeing war and persecution and for many years, that’s what it was. Today, it is abused as back-door entry into Canada for people who are really just economic migrants but don’t want to wait in line.

How else do we explain Canada’s refugee system going from 16,000 in 2015 to 172,000 in 2024?

The Carney government brags that they’ve reduced that number by more than one-third to 113,000 but that is still seven times higher than when the Liberals took office.

The 110 international students claiming asylum rather than going home when their visa expired are part of the problem. In 2024, 20,245 international students claimed asylum while roughly 11,000 temporary foreign workers did the same.

The majority of asylum claims made in Canada today are made by people already in the country, not those showing up at border crossings, ports or airports.

If they are always here, are they temporary workers?

“Increasingly, more and more businesses are relying on temporary foreign workers in a way that is driving down wages in some sectors,” then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in April 2024.

It was a shocking admission from the political leader whose government had ramped up the Temporary Foreign Worker Program by removing guardrails in 2022. Prior to the Trudeau government making changes to the program in April 2022 the number of people coming to Canada had crept up from about 73,000 to 103,000.

After the changes were introduced, use jumped to 135,000 in 2022 and then up to 192,000 by 2024.

Two weeks ago, on the same day that Statistics Canada announced the unemployment rate had increased to 6.7% nationally, they announced the expansion of the Temporary Foreign Wimorker Program. Youth unemployment is above 14% and the Carney government is going to allow restaurants in certain areas to bring in foreign workers, a move that comes after heavy lobbying by Tim Horton’s and A&W franchisees.

© Edmonton Sun