Michael Bonner: It’s time to totally overhaul Canada’s immigration system

So many people want to immigrate to Canada that we can hardly accommodate them all. Our big cities feel cramped, social services are strained, and homeownership is increasingly out of reach for those below the age of 40.

But perhaps the surest proof of too many newcomers is this: 18 percent of all immigrants leave Canada within 25 years and don’t return. Surprisingly, half of those who leave are economic immigrants who were selected because they had skills that our country needs and because they had secured high-wage jobs before arriving here. This phenomenon was analyzed in a 2024 study by the Conference Board of Canada called “The Leaky Bucket.” The study concluded that so many immigrants leave because they have not formed a permanent economic or cultural attachment to Canada, they find better opportunities elsewhere, and the number of annual departures is growing.

That fact—that nearly one in five of our immigrants leave Canada within 25 years—should be an obvious sign of disorder. It means that our immigration policy is increasingly deleterious both to Canada’s economy and to the immigrants themselves. But it isn’t the only such sign, as I have argued in a study on immigration which I prepared for the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy entitled “Repairing the Fray: Improving immigration and citizenship policy in Canada.” I argue that the problem of retention covers not only those whom we don’t or can’t retain, but also those whom we do retain.

To put it bluntly, many of the immigrants that we attract and keep shouldn’t be here. The first problem is the seemingly endless churn of temporary, low-wage workers exploited by businesses. The second is the growing influx of foreigners who profess to hate our country and our allies, and who refuse to adopt our customs and respect our norms.

Low-wage immigration

This problem can be looked at from two perspectives. The first is that of foreigners who gain easy access to the lower end of our labour market. The second is that of employers who are effectively subsidized by the government through limitless access to cheap labour and biddable, vulnerable workers who lack protection and bargaining power. From either perspective, the result is the same: wages and prices are kept artificially low, and Canadians—usually young people—are priced out. The consequences are structural underemployment, stagnant wages, and a climate in which businesses are rewarded for failing to invest in hiring, training, and retaining a domestic workforce.

During the last Trudeau government, the overall number of immigrants began to rise steadily until it peaked at about 465,000 in 2023. So many newcomers, the government claimed, were needed to remedy labour shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But only half the number of immigrants could ostensibly have done so, since the proportion of skilled immigrants shrank to about 50 percent of the total. This was the origin of the huge rise in non-permanent immigration in the form of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP).^{1I am following Kelley, N. / Reitz, J. G. / Trebilcock, M. J., Reshaping the Mosaic: Canadian Immigration Policy in the Twenty-First Century, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2025 (forthcoming), p. 122–136. I am most grateful to the authors and to the University of Toronto Press for providing me with proofs before publication.}

The TFWP was designed to fill gaps in the labour market until Canadians could be found or trained to do the jobs. Those gaps were assessed through an analysis of the local labour market, now called a Labour-Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). Before 2002, about 50 percent of TFWP workers were high-skilled. But in that year, the low-wage part of the TFWP was expanded, opening the lower end of the Canadian labour market to practically anyone, even in the absence of a demonstrable labour shortage. Further expansion came in 2006, and recruitment of foreigners was fast-tracked in the resource-rich areas of Alberta and British Columbia—just in time for accelerating demand for Canadian commodities from the developing world.

Unsurprisingly, the program more than doubled in size between 2003 and 2013, to almost 340,000 workers; and from 2006 to 2014, it grew to about 500,000 workers, above and beyond the number of new permanent residents.

Surprisingly, it took a decade for a backlash to occur. Two scandals erupted in 2013. First, HD Mining International, a Chinese-owned mining company based in Vancouver, refused to hire some 200 Canadians for a new project, and instead sought to bring in an entire workforce of Chinese labourers. Second, the Royal Bank of Canada replaced 45 Canadian IT professionals with workers from India, and the outgoing employees were required to train their replacements. In both cases, Canadians were indeed available to do the jobs, but those companies refused to hire them because it would be cheaper to employ foreigners. The TFWP was suddenly making daily headlines, and outrage grew.

These scandals occasioned reforms, which I helped to design and implement as a policy advisor to the minister of citizenship and immigration, in 2014. The government’s solution was to phase the TFWP down over three years, eventually to cap low-skill TFWP workers at 10 percent of a firm’s employees, making foreign recruitment more expensive and more difficult. The programme was banned altogether in areas of high unemployment, enforcement measures were strengthened, and a public blacklist was established for naming and shaming delinquent employers. This worked, and the number of foreign workers immediately began to fall.

But after 2015, the Trudeau government began to undo those measures, and numbers began to rise again. The number of temporary foreign workers more than doubled between 2018 and 2023, from about 109,000 to 240,000. In 2022, the 10 percent TFWP worker cap in certain industries was raised to 30 percent, and the amount of time that the workers were allowed to remain in Canada was increased. The ministry of employment and social development, which oversees the LMIA process, furthermore instructed its workers to skip fraud-prevention steps when vetting applications for foreign workers in order to hasten the process.

But most of the growth of non-permanent immigration occurred in the International Mobility Program (IMP) created in 2014. This program includes such streams as international students, students with post-graduate work permits, youth exchanges, and intra-company transfers. The common element is that, unlike the TFWP, these streams do not require LMIAs. They do not, in other words, take into account local unemployment rates, nor the availability of Canadians, nor are the immigrants necessarily bound to one employer only.

The huge influx of international students in recent years accounts for most of the growth of the IMP. We know that the number is large and that it has grown, but we do not know exactly what it is. There were probably about 123,000 international students in Canada in 2000 and more than a million in 2023; we do not know for certain because international students are not reflected in public data on the IMP.^{2This problem is analysed in Kelley, N. / Reitz, J. G. / Trebilcock, M. J., Reshaping the Mosaic: Canadian Immigration Policy in the Twenty-First Century, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2025 (forthcoming), p. 133–134.}

Right now, there are about 3 million non-permanent residents in Canada—nearly 8 percent of the population. These huge numbers of immigrants are, in theory, meant to serve the economy and thereby raise the general level of prosperity. But this happens only in an extremely lopsided sense. The reason is that employers use temporary immigration as a business model.

The TFWP is not normally the last resort that it was intended to be. It is a business model. Companies can recruit eager foreign workers, pay them the minimum wage, and keep their prices low and profits high. This is especially true of the hospitality industry, where low-cost labour comes at a high cost to everyone but the businesses in question. Young Canadian workers, for instance, are priced out, as foreign workers are effectively paid below minimum wage: hours are unreasonably long, breaks are forbidden, and workers are forced to live in accommodation owned by their employers while rent is deducted from pay. This is tantamount to indentured servitude, and a recent report by the United Nations included the TFWP among modern examples of slavery.

Recruiting international students is also a business model. International students’ fees are higher, and, therefore, attracting them in large numbers is very profitable for post-secondary institutions. Some of these are well-respected universities and career colleges eager to attract high-paying top talent from abroad to train for the benefit of Canadian industry. But other institutions offer certificates that are altogether fake or of low value. Their courses are bogus or perfunctory. Their primary function is to collect high foreign fees while requiring students to work for minimum wage. Perhaps the worst part about this is that international students are permitted to work 24 hours a week without a work permit, and so they are easily exploited.

Recently, the Globe and Mail revealed that some 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were not studying at any Canadian university or college, but rather working and attempting to settle in Canada. Most are migrants from India, and some have been trying to cross the border illegally into the United States. The RCMP is now working with Indian law enforcement officials in investigating alleged links between dozens of bogus colleges in Canada and two “entities” in India accused of facilitating passage south of the border.

Cultural and moral problems

The sheer number of newcomers in recent years has raised doubts about integration, a common Canadian culture, and shared norms. Numbers have risen too high, too fast, to make integration of immigrants possible. And, as a matter of policy, the former Trudeau government gave up trying. That was the force of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s theory of Canada as a post-national state with “no mainstream” and “no core identity,” which he announced in 2015. This outlook held that Canada more properly belonged to immigrants, who chose to live here, than to those whose ancestors had long been established. In other words, there was, in Trudeau’s opinion, nothing to which to assimilate, nor any unifying Canadian culture or norms.

Polling data show that Canadians largely reject that vision of a post-national state. More than half the Canadian population now believes that immigration harms the country. Nearly 60 percent of Canadians of all backgrounds now claim that too many newcomers do not share Canadian values and that they fail to integrate themselves within Canadian society. A majority are now skeptical of multiculturalism: 51 percent expect government institutions to do more to integrate newcomers, and 55 percent believe that immigrants must adopt “broad mainstream values and traditions and leave behind elements of their cultural identity that may be incompatible with that.” And the theory that “diversity is our strength” is accepted without qualification by only 24 percent of the population: most Canadians now see diversity as a source of some benefits but also of conflict.

Such skepticism has been reinforced by foreign interference in our domestic politics. This interference may be direct or indirect. Direct interference has been seen in the cases of China, India, and Russia attempting to affect certain electoral outcomes through the manipulation of diaspora communities. An especially troubling example arose in the last election when a Liberal candidate urged constituents to seize his Conservative rival, who had been born in British Hong Kong, and hand him over to the Chinese embassy in exchange for a bounty.

In contrast, indirect interference takes the form of importing foreign conflicts. This problem came to the fore in the late 1990s when many organizers and perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide were revealed to have found asylum in Canada immediately after the killings. It proved extremely difficult to remove malefactors such as Léon Mugesera, who was successfully extradited to Rwanda only in 2012. A more recent example is the violent clashes between pro-Khalistan Sikhs and members of a Hindu congregation in Brampton.

Another is the increasingly violent pro-Hamas demonstrations occasioned by the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. Denunciations of Canada as an illegitimate, “settler-colonial” state have accompanied calls for the destruction of Israel, which have been directed at Jewish-owned businesses and predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods, not at embassies or consulates. Last year, anti-NATO, pro-Palestinian protests in Montreal turned violent as protesters hurled small explosive devices and smoke bombs at police, smashed shop windows, and burned cars. A coffee-shop franchisee was seen giving the Nazi salute and announcing an imminent “final solution” to a group of Jewish counter-protesters. Western intelligence services have been warning about Iranian and other foreign influences on such protests for some time.

Outrage at a foreign conflict is a smaller problem than the failure to respect prevailing norms governing public protest. But there are signs of a yet more serious problem. Police have foiled six terrorist plots in the last 12 months alone, and the RCMP report that terrorism charges have jumped 488 percent since last year. There is evidence of renewed interest in the so-called Islamic State, and plots disrupted by the RCMP included the planned bombing of a pro-Israel rally at Parliament Hill in 2023. And exhortations for the murder of Christians and Jews emanating from mosques and other venues are becoming alarmingly common and strident—so much so that the Global Imams Council has called upon Canadian Muslim leaders to do more to combat extremism.

What is to be done?

We can begin by phasing out and abolishing easy access to the low-wage portion of our labour market. The only exception to this approach would be in areas such as seasonal agricultural or fisheries work, where the TFWP has proven uncontroversial. This process would not be without pain, obviously, but gradually phasing out would alleviate much of it. Businesses that have become addicted to cheap foreign labour certainly would object and probably resist being forced to pay higher wages and invest in a domestic workforce. But the moral problem of continuing a form of indentured servitude and the pain of depriving young people of career-starting jobs would be worse in the long run.

We must also become more aggressive about deterring immigration from those who refuse to respect Canadian norms and from those unwilling to live alongside those whom they profess to dislike or oppose. Punishing and deporting foreign advocates of terrorism and those who perpetuate ethnic and religious hatreds here must also be pursued aggressively. Here, Canadian policy-framers, our governing classes, and our legal system have always struggled, and trouble looms.

An astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are set to expire this year. Some of these visas may be renewed, and some may be parlayed into post-graduate work permits, but most of those visa-holders will be expected to leave of their own accord. Problems have already arisen. Many international students are now lodging asylum claims. Though few of these are likely to succeed, the persons involved will be entitled to due process.

And as for those who refuse to leave, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) will be responsible for tracking them down and removing them. In either case, there may be heavy demand on administrative resources and personnel alike. At the end of 2024, there were an astounding 457,646 people set for deportation, and the CBSA has claimed to have lost track of 29,731 of them. This does not augur well.

Following previous legal judgements staying deportations, an activist legal community may be motivated to frustrate the CBSA’s efforts. High-profile cases in the past have included several perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide, as well as the notorious Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad, a convicted terrorist set to be deported in 1988, but who managed to remain until 2013 through a series of appeals; Arshad Muhammad, another terrorist to be deported in 1999, disappeared until being arrested in 2011, avoided deportation in 2013, was discharged from prison and may now be at large; and Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, a member of Al-Qaida who improperly received refugee status in Canada in 1996, was ordered removed in 2004, and who has been fighting deportation ever since. If similar high-profile cases appear in the media this year, they may enflame and divide public opinion further.

The Canadian public deserves a trustworthy immigration system that operates in the national interest. But Canadians no longer believe in the present system. The cause is that too many people have been admitted too rapidly and at too low a skill level. The economic argument for immigration collapsed amidst a general perception of scarcity, including stagnant wages, a shortage of housing, and youth unemployment. Likewise, cultural arguments revolving around diversity and multiculturalism have given way to doubts about integration and disrespect for domestic norms. Tinkering around the edges and mere adjustments of overall numbers aren’t the answer. We need a thorough overhaul, and the work must begin immediately.