By Haris Ahmed
Conservative politician Michelle Rempel Garner says Canada’s immigration numbers must drop a lot after Prime Minister Mark Carney recently talked about possibly bringing in more people.
“The government keeps letting too many people move here too quickly for homes, hospitals, and jobs to match them,” Rempel Garner stated during a media briefing Wednesday.
The Conservative immigration speaker noted her group is asking the state to lower its intake goals even further than it had previously chosen. The team under former prime minister Justin Trudeau had started reducing immigration numbers after quickly raising goals during the worker shortage following the pandemic.
The newest immigration goals were written in last year’s financial plan, which holds strict limits on specific immigration streams — including a 43 per cent cut in the volume of temporary people Canada will accept this year. The levels strategy, which is routinely updated once a year, also fixed a goal of 380,000 new permanent residents per year from 2026 until 2028.
Rempel Garner did not give a precise immigration goal when questioned what amount would please her group. Instead she stated goals must match the country’s capacity to give public services, homes, and jobs.
“We would return order and honesty. We would deport people with no lawful grounds to stay in the land and we would return to the rules of mixing people into the Canadian job market,” she stated.
Carney recently hinted that his team is beginning to review when it could raise immigration goals again. During a talk with the New York Times, the prime minister stated his group is “bringing the network under management.”
“Now the query begins to turn into: When do we start some managed lift in the population, which is the character of Canada. So that will take place, and we just want to ensure that we’ve got it under management,” the prime minister stated, based on the talk record.
“To have the prime minister go to an outside news firm and declare a possible immigration rise soon without talking about homes, hospitals, and jobs — it’s simply careless,” Rempel Garner stated Wednesday.
Immigration numbers dropping: StatCan
In his talk with the New York Times, Carney did point to the “strain on homes” within the topic of Canada’s immigration levels. He also noted that Canada’s population expansion has been slowing down.
The newest calculations from Statistics Canada show that the population only expanded by half a percent when comparing July 2025 to July 2026.
The data agency stated part of the slowing expansion is because the volume of new permanent and temporary people that Canada has accepted dropped in that identical time frame. For temporary people alone, StatsCan calculates there was a drop of around 154,000 from July last year to July this year — the biggest drop in temporary people since the early 1970s, the agency noted.
U.S. President Donald Trump spoke angrily against Canadian immigration plans last week, stating the land is “ruining itself” by permitting “millions” of people into the land without correct safety checks. Those remarks brought push back from federal ministers who stated the president’s points are poorly informed and completely wrong.
Carney was questioned in the New York Times talk if Trump changed Canada’s immigration setup, which the prime minister said was not true.
