A record, set to be regularly beaten in the coming years: in 2022, Canada welcomed 431,645 new permanent residents, according to official data from the federal immigration service published on Tuesday 3 January. This is 30,000 more than the previous year and we have to go back to 1913 to find an influx of similar importance.
Justin Trudeau’s government intends to increase this migratory windfall in the years to come. In the federal plan for immigration adopted in November 2022, it pledged to open its doors to 1,450,000 new immigrants within three years, with a peak of 500,000 arrivals in 2025. On the horizon of Over the next decade, Ottawa projects that people from foreign countries will represent 30% of the Canadian population (38 million people), up from one in five in 2011.
With this unique migration policy within the G7 countries, the Canadian authorities are pursuing two objectives. The first is to compensate for the aging of the population – 5 million Canadians will retire by the end of the decade –, the second is to deal with a glaring labor shortage. Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen recently mentioned the figure “ one million job vacancies ” Across the country.
Selection at the entrance to the territory
The majority of new residents in 2022 have also been received under economic immigration; either the new workers have specific job skills that are lacking locally, or they have demonstrated the ability to set up businesses in Canada. This selection at the entrance to the territory, added to an active integration policy, produces an atypical portrait of this population: 36% of doctors, 41% of engineers and one out of three business leaders in Canada come from the immigration.
But, in 2022, despite the government’s efforts to try to attract newcomers to its depopulated territories, the large metropolises remained the most attractive: just over a quarter of them intended to settle in the greater Toronto area, the country’s largest city, followed by Vancouver (British Columbia) and Montreal (Quebec). Asian immigration – India, China and Pakistan – alone represents a third of new arrivals.
Canada also continues to welcome asylum seekers and refugees. In 2015, the country opened its doors to 25,000 Syrian refugees in less than 100 days. After the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in August 2021, the government undertook to welcome 40,000 Afghans, and half of them have already been able to settle in Canadian territory.
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