Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre spoke at the year-end press conference held on Parliament December 30, 2022 (screent shot).
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has called the latest data released by the federal immigration department “disastrous,” as he says the numbers indicate Canada will surpass some of its 2025 immigration targets.
“A Canada First immigration and refugee system should only invite the right people in the right numbers so our jobs, healthcare and housing can catch up,” says an Aug. 25 statement released by Poilievre and shadow immigration minister Michelle Rempel Garner.
The Tories said while Prime Minister Mark Carney promised to fix immigration, the results show things have gotten worse, adding that the Liberal government’s “open-borders policies broke Canada’s immigration system.”
The new data released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) indicates the federal government will surpass some of its immigration targets set out for the year, including the targets for temporary foreign workers, the International Mobility Program (IMP), permanent residents, and asylum claim backlogs. Under the IMP, Canadian employers can hire foreign workers without needing a labour market impact assessment for certain positions.
While the IRCC’s target for new temporary foreign workers in 2025 is 82,000, the federal government has already issued 105,195 in the first half of the year. Additionally, while Canada’s cap on its International Mobility Program is 285,750 for this year, the government admitted 302,280 people in the first two quarters.
“These breaking numbers blow through the government’s own targets midway through the year, with some on course to be the highest on record,” Poilievre and Rempel Garner said.
If the data continues on its current trend, Canada would also surpass its targets for permanent residents this year. In the first two quarters of 2025, the federal government admitted 207,650 permanent residents into the country. While there is a cap of 395,000, maintaining the current trend would put the total number of permanent residents this year at 415,300.
The top five nationalities of new permanent residents in the first two quarters were Indian at 59,260 new residents, Chinese at 11,480, Filipino at 13,925, Cameroonian at 10,355, and Nigerian at 8,920 new permanent residents.
The Epoch Times reached out to the IRCC for comment but didn’t hear back before publication.
Carney has said Canada needs to cap immigration levels to allow more capacity to be built before more people are let in the country. The prime minister said in his mandate letter to cabinet ministers in May that they should work to attract “the best talent in the world to help build our economy, while returning our overall immigration rates to sustainable levels.”
“Canada’s immigration system has long been a source of pride for Canadians and of dynamism for the economy. The Government is dedicated to rebuilding the trust of Canadians in immigration by restoring balance to the system,” the Carney government’s throne speech in May said.
“The Government will cap the total number of temporary foreign workers and international students to less than five percent of Canada’s population by 2027. By doing this, the Government will attract the best talent in the world to build our economy, while sending a clear message to Canadians working abroad that there is no better time to come home.”
Changing How Data Is Made Public
The IRCC released its data for the second quarter of 2025 nearly three weeks after being criticized by the Tories for not publishing its latest immigration datasets.
Rempel Garner had accused the Liberal government of “purposefully censoring” immigration data with the intention of replacing it with “heavily edited” information.
“How many illegal border crossings have we had?” Rempel Garner said in an Aug. 6 statement. “How many more asylum claims have piled on to an already backlogged waitlist? How many more permits have the Liberals handed out that continue to overwhelm our housing, healthcare system and job market?”
Meanwhile, the department said it was changing how immigration data was made public, which was why the monthly datasets had not yet been made public at the time.
“While monthly data is still available upon request, we are in the process of updating how we share immigration data with Canadians and improving how information is presented online,” IRCC spokesperson Remi Lariviere told The Epoch Times on Aug. 8.
Lariviere said the department was updating its web content to make content more “accessible and meaningful” as part of its commitment to transparency, accountability, and client service. He said the recent IRCC statistics would be published soon.
“As previously mentioned, we were in the process of updating how we share immigration data with Canadians and improving how information is presented online in order to provide clearer explanations of trends and greater context to help Canadians better understand data about key IRCC programs,” the department told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 22 email update on the newly published data.