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OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney says that with Canada’s immigration system back under control, the question now is when to begin a “controlled increase” of the country’s population.
Carney made the remark in a recent interview with the New York Times, just over a month before the government is required by law to release its immigration levels plan for the next three years.
“Now the question starts to become, when do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada?” Carney told the New York Times.
“So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control.”
Carney said in July the government had “taken back control” of the immigration system after rapid population growth under the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner said now is not the time to plan for more immigration.
“Immigration levels need to go down, not up,” she said on social media.
The government had planned to increase the number of permanent residents being admitted to Canada annually to 500,000. It changed course with the 2024/25 immigration plan and started reducing the intake.
The government also began capping the number of temporary workers and students being admitted to Canada after it said major increases in those populations had contributed to strains on the housing and job markets, health care and other services.
The government has set a goal of reducing the temporary resident population to five per cent of the total population by the end of next year.
The most recent immigration levels plan called for 385,000 permanent resident admissions this year and 370,000 in both 2027 and 2028.
The government did introduce two temporary measures to welcome about 148,000 more permanent residents over the next two years that are not counted in the broader plan.
The C.D. Howe Institute’s immigration targets council recommends the government continue to reduce the number of arrivals over the next three years. The council recommends admitting 380,000 permanent residents next year, 350,000 in 2028 and 340,000 in 2029.
The council includes several top academics who study immigration policy, a Trudeau-era deputy minister and former Alberta premier Jason Kenney.
Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo and C.D. Howe panel member, said the panel is still recommending historically high immigration rates at around 0.9 per cent of the population.
Carney told the New York Times Canada’s GDP is shrinking due to limited population growth. Statistics Canada estimated 0.5 per cent population growth year-over year as of July 1.
Skuterud cautioned Carney against listening too closely to “the business lobby” and said his government shouldn’t address a “tight labour market” with immigration.
“Businesses have to compete for scarce labour. And how do they compete? Well, they’ve got to offer higher wages to compete, or more attractive jobs more generally,” he said.
“I worry that Mark Carney, because the business lobby is going to pressure him … that the lobbying from them is going to cause him to make the same mistakes the previous governments have done, that he’s going to see immigration as a solution for businesses. And that’s a problem.”
The council also says it “strongly recommends” the government track all permanent resident admissions through a single target number to clearly indicate how many people it plans to admit in a given year.
It also recommends the government treat the five per cent target for the temporary resident population as a ceiling. It says the goal should be to reduce the number of temporary residents to three per cent of the population.
Statistics Canada estimates non-permanent residents accounted for 6.7 per cent of the population as of July 1.
Skuterud said this suggests the government is going to have a hard time meeting its goal of shrinking that population to five per cent of the total population by the end of next year.
The council says Ottawa must do a better job of tracking work and study permit renewals and outflows of temporary residents.
The Immigration Department released its levels plan with the federal budget last fall.
The Canadian Press has reached out to Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s office to ask whether she is considering permanent residency increases in the upcoming levels plan, but has not yet received a response.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29, 2026.
David Baxter, The Canadian Press
