On March 7, a little over two weeks before the writs were dropped for the recent federal election, Marc Miller made one of his final announcements as immigration minister. It was touted as “action to support housing with new immigration measures.” The most significant measure was the regularization of 6,000 out-of-status construction workers across the country. Of course, these are not new workers, so the measure doesn’t really resolve the labour shortage in the sector. It means perhaps 6,000 fewer deportations, but even that is far from sure.
What the announcement reveals is timid recognition of one of the most tragic outcomes and perhaps the greatest failure of the two-step immigration system normalized by the federal government over the last decade: the growing number of undocumented people in Canada. At the beginning of 2024, CIBC estimated their number at upwards of a million, and that number will not have gone down in the last year.
At the end of 2021, Justin Trudeau had given then–Immigration Minister Sean Fraser a mandate (which Miller inherited) to regularize the status of as many of these people as possible. But the only attempt was a small pilot project in the construction sector in the Greater Toronto Area. The program strained to deliver permanent residency to a little over 1,000 people over five years, more than half of whom would have been dependents. Regularization programs are not popular with the general public, are almost never unconditional and rarely meet their targets, which are estimates based on often limited and unreliable data.
The number of people in Canada with expired permits and visas, whether out-of-status or not, creates another major problem facing the new government. Statistics Canada assumes they have left the country 120 days after the expiration date of the permit or visa and does not include them in population statistics, thereby skewing demographic projections. Reliable demographic data are critical to financial forecasting and development planning at all levels of government and in the private sector.
Then, of course, there’s the question of the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States. Is the United States under Donald Trump a safe third country for immigrants? The Supreme Court of Canada decided that the agreement was constitutional, because of legislative “safety valves” which “include, for example, discretionary exemptions on the basis of humanitarian and compassionate or public policy grounds.” It did not address whether the United States constitutes a safe third country, because the specific case did not allow it to rule on the question.
Rather, it returned the claim to the Federal Court, given “the lack of factual findings on which the Supreme Court could rely, the complexity of the record and conflicting evidence, and the profound seriousness of the matter.” The new government will be facing a major legal, moral, political, and, I would add, administrative and intergovernmental dilemma on this issue. One potential lifeline would be if the U.S. Supreme Court declares the Trump deportation policy unconstitutional and the administration abides by the decision, ensuring due process prior to deportation.
Another concern will be the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, which was greatly expanded under the Trudeau government. This program ties foreign workers to their employer and was denounced as a contemporary form of slavery by a UN rapporteur in September 2023. Little or nothing has been done to reform the basic structure of the program.
The list is long, so let us conclude with the backlogs of applications of all sorts facing Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Immigration and Refugee Board. The IRB was finalizing (before appeals) almost 7,000 asylum claims a month on average in the first three months of 2025, an increase of close to 60 percent compared to processing times in 2023. Nevertheless, more than 280,000 claims were pending at the end of March, and although the monthly numbers of claims received were lower in the first trimester, they are still coming in faster than they are being finalized.
It is also worth mentioning that the number of asylum claims from people who entered the country with legal travel documents, as opposed to claims made at a point of entry, increased from 28,000 in 2022, a level similar to those encountered before the pandemic, to 72,000 in 2023 and 114,000 in 2024. This coincides with the federal government’s decision to lower permanent and temporary immigration levels. Any decision on asylum seekers from the United States could also have a major impact on this picture.
Meanwhile, the pace of asylum claims is likely to be reduced dramatically if the legislative reforms announced on June 1 are adopted. In particular, asylum claims from international students and temporary workers whose permits are about to expire or have expired would no longer be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board.
In his first press conference after the election, Prime Minister Mark Carney reiterated the pledge that the government made last year to lower the proportion of non-permanent residents to 5 percent of the Canadian population by 2027. Few experts believe this will be achieved.
Other than those generated by Trump’s immigration policies, all these issues have been created or exacerbated by the government’s shift over the last decade from a one-step to a two-step immigration system. Restoring order to the system will require a significant amount of time and more thorough consultation and collaboration with the provinces. The clear economic, demographic, and humanitarian objectives of Canada’s immigration policy must be clarified and balanced in a way that allows Canadians to see that the system reflects both the compassion inherent in their values and the control they have come to expect in the past.
