Mark Carney’s new liberal government will have to tackle an immigration system increasingly perceived as broken by part of the population. In the campaign, its platform promised to stabilize permanent immigration to less than 1 % of the Canadian population beyond 2027. Is that a lot or little? And how does this target compare to the rate observed over the years?
To be elected to the post of Prime Minister, Mr. Carney tried to stand out from the immigration assessment of his immediate predecessor, Justin Trudeau. But the target of 1 % of permanent residents “is in fact very close to what we have experienced in the last 10 years”, underlines immediately Richard Marcoux, director of the demographic and statistical observatory of the French -speaking space.
It is in fact very exactly the historical average since the birth of the Confederation, in 1867.
In Quebec, the debate on immigration targets has rather focused in recent years on a number of immigrants to receive, the figure of 50,000 returning most often. “It is therefore an original way of calculating or presenting it, but 1 % still corresponds to the reality of Quebec and Canada in recent years,” recalls the professor of Laval University.
It is “undoubtedly even more logical” to proceed with a proportion rather than absolute figure: “the greater the population, the more the new immigrants keep the same weight” in the total basin, he notes.
“Politically skillful”
“It is even politically skillful, because it puts the importance of immigration into perspective,” notes Professor Marcoux.
Using an absolute number also means that the number of immigrants received increases from year to year, since this 1 % will apply to an increasingly large population. “Few people will do this calculation, that the number will grow each year,” said Charles Breton, director of the Center of Excellence on the Canadian Federation of the Public Policy Research Institute.
The message launched is therefore above all “to say that” 1 %is not much “, it seems reasonable,” he adds.
This “signal” on the part of the Liberal Party is consistent with the tone of the recent electoral campaign. To counter “the general impression of a certain loss of control”, Mr. Carney wanted to show that he resumed things in hand, that he has a target, according to Mr. Breton. After 15 to 20 years of a certain pro-immigration consensus on a national level, then the “very rapid” changes in public opinion, even the liberals wanted to show a certain “break”, he says.
Demographic growth in the average
The 1 % “does not seem enormous in the current context, it is a target that makes sense from a demographic point of view”, also maintains Michaël Boissonneault, professor of demography at the University of Montreal. It is logical today to compare the immigration rate at the rate of population growth, since it is 99 % of the latter which is due to immigration – a trend initiated from the early 1990s.
Forget the revenge of cradles to see the population grow. And the situation is even more marked in Quebec than in Canada as a whole: natural increase is already negative. There were 2750 more deaths than births in the province between October 2023 and October 2024.
This is also what the UN is planning this year for most high -income countries.
Around 1 %, it is in fact the average demographic growth of the last 30 years, according to Statistics Canada. In the “average scenario” of its demographic projections for Canada, the Federal Agency also uses the historic average of 1.12 % growth. This rate would gradually decrease to cost 0.79 % in 2072-2073; Canada would then have nearly 63 million people.
-In comparison, according to Statistics Canada, a high growth rate would be 1.59 %, and the lowest, 0.07 %.
“The countries which depend above all on immigration for their population growth do not really go beyond 1 %,” says Boissonneault, especially countries of comparable size in Canada. On the one hand, “more than 1 % can bring challenges regarding the integration and construction of housing,” he notes. And, on the other hand, “less than 1 % can make it difficult to maintain the size of the working age population and have consequences for the economy and the financing of pension systems”.
There is therefore no magic figure of population growth, note the two experts in demography. The 1 % thus seems to be continuity in their eyes.
Temporary immigration
The real break with the past is rather on the side of temporary immigration, which exploded between 2021 and 2024. Canada’s population growth rose to more than 3 % in 2023, its highest pace since 1957, the famous baby-boom era. Without temporary immigration, the growth rate would have been 1.2 %, Statistical Canada said last year.
The tightenings carried out in this area for a year should ensure that this component of immigration no longer increases, or even decreases. The combined effect could result in a slight decrease in the Canadian population from 2026, for the first time.
And this is where we could find ourselves on new ground. “We are at a really special moment in history, because if we look in the very long human term, we have always been in a demographic regime of many deaths, a lot of births,” explains Michaël Boissonneault.
Even until the early 2000s, we believed that the fertility rate was going to go up. Rather, he started to go down! “We tend to be too confident [en nos projections]but we are constantly mistaken about the future, ”he observes.
The fact remains that making the choice of the decrease of the population does not seem to appear on the program: “I do not think that our economies, in the current state, could bear a big decrease”, notes Richard Marcoux.
It was this paradigm that guided Canada, also believes its colleague Boissonneault. “For other countries, it is the growth of productivity that has become obsession, rather than population growth. »»
Quebec difference
In April, Standard & Poor’s brought his note for Quebec from Aa- à A+. The agency has allocated its discount to a series of factors, including the slowdown in population growth.
As the Bloc Québécois stressed in the campaign, the 1 % of Mr. Carney represents a number of permanent immigrants which exceeds the current targets of Quebec. Yves-François Blanchet then spoke of 80,000 permanent residents. The current population of the province being 9 million people, it would rather be 90,000 immigrants to follow the rest of Canada.
The Quebec government is the only one in the federation to decide on its own immigration levels. But by adopting a different pace in this area, the province sees its demographic weight within Canada decrease. “We cannot maintain a demographic weight when all the other provinces rely on immigration, it is inevitable,” says Richard Marcoux. In 1950, Ontario and Quebec had roughly the same population size, and it was not the birth rate that made Ontario increased its demographic weight. The neighboring province now has 15.9 million inhabitants, 1.7 times the Quebec population.
The phenomenon is not new: it has been running for 75 years. It is the real constant: Quebec chooses to receive fewer immigrants than the rest of the country, all guarded proportions. This difference is also reflected in the composition of the population. Throughout Canada, around 23 % of the population was born abroad; In Quebec, it is rather 15 %.
