Conservative MP and immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner said her party would oppose any efforts to increase immigration rates in Canada, after Prime Minister Mark Carney signalled that such a move could soon come.
“The Conservative Party of Canada will vigorously oppose any efforts by Prime Minister Carney and his Liberal government to increase immigration and continue their reckless mass migration policies,” Rempel Garner said during a Sept. 30 press conference.
Rempel Garner said the Conservatives would push for “major decreases of immigration levels,” as the government has continued “allowing too many people in too fast for housing, healthcare, and jobs to keep up.”
The Tory MP also said the prime minister has not presented a plan to clear the hundreds of thousands of asylum claims, many of which are “bogus,” nor has he announced a plan to remove the “millions of non-citizens who have no legal reason to be in Canada, including illegal migrants and foreign students whose visas have expired.”
“Immigration levels must go way down, not up. Mark Carney’s government must immediately stop catering to lobby groups who press for mass immigration that depresses wages and increases housing costs,” she said.
In an interview with The New York Times last week, Carney said there had previously been a “surge in demand” for immigrants to Canada post-COVID, but this put pressure on the country’s healthcare, education, and housing systems, which led to the government capping those numbers.
Canada’s population increased from 38 million in July 2020 to an estimated 41.9 million by September 2026, with Statistics Canada noting that the vast majority of the increase came from immigration.
Carney said that his government had attempted to get Canada’s immigration system “under control,” and had successfully reduced the number of international students by 60 percent, the number of temporary foreign workers by 50 percent, and the number of asylum seekers by around 33 percent.
“Now the question starts to become: When do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada. So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control,” Carney said.
The federal government set a goal of reducing the temporary resident population to 5 percent of the total population by the end of 2027. The most recent immigration levels plan had called for 385,000 permanent resident admissions in 2026, and 370,000 in both 2027 and 2028.
The government also introduced two temporary measures to bring in about 148,000 more permanent residents over the next two years, but these measures were not included in the broader immigration plan.
