Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Oct. 24Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
For a moment, Justin Trudeau admitted that his government had made a mistake in letting the temporary resident numbers surge and the population grow at a nearly unprecedented rate.
“We didn’t get the balance quite right,” he told reporters.
The word “quite” was unwarranted, but for this prime minister, it was a step.
Mr. Trudeau doesn’t love to tell people his government messed up. But here were the Liberals making a 180-degree turn on immigration policy, slamming the brakes on new arrivals, planning to cut the number of temporary residents drastically, and telling Canadians that population growth would be put on “pause” for a couple of years.
It’s too bad Mr. Trudeau couldn’t quite stick with the mea culpa all the way through the whole press conference. He became defensive when asked if he was admitting failure: “No, on the contrary,” he said, before talking about how the Canadian immigration system has always been flexible.
He’d come so close to accepting responsibility. The right answer was to concede a mistake – first because there was an obvious failure in the uncontrolled postpandemic surge in temporary residents that fuelled nearly unprecedented population growth, and secondly because that’s the smart political move.
Admitting a mistake is a good way for a politician to send a message that they’re changing course to fix things. In this case, it’s a mistake that fuelled a housing crisis and soured support for immigration in a country known for welcoming newcomers. And Mr. Trudeau has already taken a lot of blame for it.
Certainly, the policy announcement was a flashing turn signal indicating a course correction.
Annual immigration targets will be slashed, and the numbers of temporary residents cut so sharply that Canada’s population will actually shrink slightly in each of the next two years – for the first time ever.
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The headline number – a cut in the 2025 target for new permanent residents to 395,000 from 500,000 – was as much a political statement as policy planning. It was the easy-to-read signal that immigration will be curbed.
But the real cause of Canada’s recent population surge was the booming numbers of international students and temporary foreign workers that brought the ranks of temporary residents to roughly three million people. Ottawa has now set a goal of reducing that number by roughly 445,000 a year in each of the next two years.
No one can doubt that’s an about-face. Immigration Minister Marc Miller more or less admitted it was a repair job.
He said Canadians still largely support immigration but were right to question the numbers. He blamed provincial governments – presumably with Ontario’s in mind – for allowing poorly regulated colleges to recruit vast numbers of foreign students, but said Ottawa accepted responsibility for not acting sooner to police them. He said the numbers had an impact on housing shortages and affordability but weren’t the cause of all the problems.
Admitting those things also makes it easier to tout the benefits of a change in course: Mr. Miller said that the pause in population growth will eliminate the need to build more than 600,000 housing units.
The admission was necessary: The federal government needed to make the concession to change direction. Now it has. Still, there will be lingering damage.
For one thing, the nation-building part of immigration – accepting permanent residents – has now been commandeered to help reduce the number of temporary residents by roughly 230,000 over the next three years. Lower-skilled temporary residents already in Canada will be chosen before higher-skilled people applying from abroad.
A bigger potential problem looms in the huge numbers of temporary residents the government expects to leave the country: 1.3 million in 2025 and more than 1 million in 2026. Some large number will probably stay.
Last year, Benjamin Tal, the deputy chief economist at CIBC Capital Markets, estimated that there were one million temporary residents still in Canada after their visas expired. And the federal government has yet to find a way to count them, let alone remove them.
What was announced Thursday won’t solve all those problems. But the government needed to turn its back on the mistakes it made from 2021 to 2023.
The U-turn is unusual for governments, and out of character for this one. But it had become a political necessity to tell Canadians the Liberals are changing course. Mr. Trudeau even admitted he made a mistake. Or sort of.
