Federal Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Sean Fraser is set to unveil new immigration targets for 2023, 2024 and 2025. And there is every indication that the announcement that Mr. Fraser will do next Tuesday will forecast a further increase in the number of permanent residents compared to the last targets, those announced barely a year ago. While Quebec promises to cap its immigration thresholds at around 50,000 new permanent residents per year, the rest of Canada is preparing to soon welcome more than eight times that number. You don’t need to be an economist or a demographer to anticipate the short and long-term consequences of these discordant positions.
Already, Quebec is seeing its share of immigrants dwindle year after year. Destination of 19.2% of immigrants who arrived in Canada between 2006 and 2011, Quebec only received 15.3% of immigrants who entered the country between 2016 and 2021. Data from the latest census published this week by Statistics Canada show of the enormous demographic transformation that English Canada is experiencing, even outside of its largest cities.
In Hamilton and Winnipeg, two cities with a population similar to that of Quebec, the proportion of immigrants now stands at over 25%; in the Old Capital, barely 6.7% of residents were born outside of Canada. In the city of Saguenay, a starving proportion of the population is of immigrant origin, i.e. 1.3%, while in Red Deer and Lethbridge, Alberta cities of similar sizes, the proportions are 16.9%. and 14.4%, respectively.
The figures strike the imagination even more when we take into account the children of immigrants. In the Greater Toronto Area, for example, almost 80% of residents are first or second generation immigrants, according to an analysis of census data by demographer Doug Norris of Toronto-based Environics. In Montreal, approximately 46% of residents are immigrants or children of immigrants. Although this is a fairly high proportion, it is lower than in Vancouver (73%), Calgary (55%) or Edmonton (50%).
According to the results of a poll published this week by Environics, and carried out on behalf of the Initiative of the Century, Canadians are more favorable than ever to immigration. This is not surprising; more than 40% of Canadians are immigrants or children of immigrants. We can expect these people to have a bias in favor of immigration.
But the Canadian consensus on immigration extends far beyond the country’s cultural communities. “Even as the country welcomes more than 400,000 newcomers a year, seven in ten Canadians support the current immigration thresholds — the strongest majority in 45 years of Environics polling,” noted Lisa Lalande, President of L’Initiative of the Century, an organization that advocates an immigration policy aimed at increasing the Canadian population to 100 million people by the year 2100. Despite the heavy rhetoric on immigration during the provincial election campaign, Quebecers support everything welcoming immigrants and refugees as well as Canadians elsewhere in the country. »
However, the Environics survey was conducted in September, when the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) promised to maintain the immigration threshold at 50,000 in the province. So the expression “current immigration thresholds” does not have the same meaning here as it does elsewhere in Canada. In Quebec, these thresholds are rather modest; in the rest of Canada, they are very high.
The 50,000 permanent residents that Québec undertakes to welcome each year are equivalent to approximately 0.6% of the population, and this proportion is set to decrease as the population increases. Immigration thresholds elsewhere in Canada are around 1.2% of the population per year, while this population is growing at a much faster rate than in Quebec. Instead of 400,000 newcomers per year, the rest of Canada could soon welcome nearly 500,000 immigrants. And voices are being raised for Ottawa to show even more ambition in terms of immigration.
“While the absolute numbers seem high, they actually have to be higher because of Canada’s demographic challenges,” insisted former Liberal innovation minister Navdeep Bains and his former chief of staff, Elder Marques, in an article published last week in the National Post. At the beginning of the XXe century, a much smaller Canada welcomed as many immigrants as Canada does today… A bigger, richer and more equipped Canada awaits us if we are ready to take the leap. »