Canada Welcomes Record Number of Immigrants, Seeks More

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Cana­da is tout­ing the arrival of a record num­ber of new per­ma­nent res­i­dents in 2022, con­sol­i­dat­ing its sta­tus as one of the most wel­com­ing coun­tries for fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als seek­ing to make a new life in a for­eign land.

That image is rein­forced by polling show­ing that, not only do Cana­di­ans strong­ly sup­port high lev­els of immi­gra­tion, but despite its rel­a­tive­ly harsh cli­mate, the coun­try ranks sec­ond only to the Unit­ed States as a desir­able des­ti­na­tion for would-be emigrants.

Cana­da admit­ted more than 437,000 new per­ma­nent res­i­dents in 2022, accord­ing to Immi­gra­tion, Refugees and Cit­i­zen­ship Cana­da, the respon­si­ble fed­er­al agency. That fig­ure rep­re­sents more than 1.1% of the country’s total population.

“This rep­re­sents the largest num­ber of peo­ple ever wel­comed in a year, in Cana­di­an his­to­ry,” the agency said in an emailed state­ment to VOA. “Pri­or to set­ting a new record for admis­sions in 2021, the last time Cana­da wel­comed such a large num­bers of new­com­ers was in 1913 with 400,870 per­ma­nent res­i­dent admissions.”

The U.S., by com­par­i­son, is esti­mat­ed to have admit­ted around 1 mil­lion new per­ma­nent res­i­dents last year despite hav­ing a pop­u­la­tion almost nine times larg­er than Canada’s.

The need for new workers

Canada’s eager­ness for new immi­grants is part­ly dri­ven by an acute labor short­age attrib­uted in part to a rapid­ly aging pop­u­la­tion. The state-fund­ed Cana­di­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion recent­ly described labor short­ages as “the new normal.” 

That has col­ored the think­ing of busi­ness own­ers and entre­pre­neurs like Mylene Despres, the founder of La Sta­tion Work­space, a hub for cre­atives and entre­pre­neurs in Monc­ton, New Brunswick.

“I’m very hap­py that Cana­da is wel­com­ing so many peo­ple,” Despres told VOA. “It’s what makes the coun­try vibrant and interesting.”

That view is wide­ly shared, accord­ing to Julie Ray, a senior con­sul­tant and man­ag­ing edi­tor for world news at the Gallup polling organization.

“Our stud­ies just a few years ago found that Cana­da led the rest of the world on our Migrant Accep­tance Index,” she said, not­ing that 95% of respon­dents told the orga­ni­za­tion they saw migrants liv­ing in their neigh­bor­hoods as a good thing.

What oppo­si­tion to immi­gra­tion exists is large­ly focused on frus­tra­tion over rapid­ly ris­ing real estate prices, which saw the cost of an aver­age home rise more than five times between 1996 and 2021 — from $148,613 (US $198,150) to $821,564 (US $1,095,419). 

Few politi­cians are will­ing­ly to pub­licly speak out against immi­gra­tion, but one for­mer politi­cian told VOA on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty that they hear con­cern from their old con­stituents that increased immi­gra­tion has dri­ven real estate prices too high.

Amid the strongest back­ers of increased immi­gra­tion is a non­prof­it called the Cen­tu­ry Ini­tia­tive, which is led by senior staffers in the Lib­er­al Par­ty of Prime Min­is­ter Justin Trudeau but also sup­port­ed by for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Bri­an Mul­roney, a stal­wart of the oppo­si­tion Con­ser­v­a­tive Party.

Among its pol­i­cy rec­om­men­da­tions, the Cen­tu­ry Ini­tia­tive has argued that the coun­try should aim to boost its pop­u­la­tion through immi­gra­tion from the cur­rent 38.25 mil­lion to 100 mil­lion by 2100. 

“Our pop­u­la­tion is aging, we’re hav­ing few­er chil­dren, and our work­force is shrink­ing. If we stay the course, Canada’s annu­al GDP growth will decline, along with our influ­ence on the world stage,” the orga­ni­za­tion says on its web­site. “Grow­ing our pop­u­la­tion to 100 mil­lion by 2100 would … mean more skilled work­ers, inno­va­tion, and dynamism in the Cana­di­an economy.”

That tar­get is not as far-fetched as it might seem, accord­ing to polling shared with VOA by Gallup. Ray cit­ed a glob­al sur­vey show­ing that 8% of indi­vid­u­als who are inter­est­ed in mov­ing to anoth­er coun­try would make Cana­da their first choice.

“While the 8% might not sound like much, that trans­lates into about 74 mil­lion peo­ple who would con­sid­er Cana­da as their next home,” Ray said. “Canada’s still the No. 2 most desired des­ti­na­tion in the world, after the Unit­ed States.”