FIRST READING: Immigration is higher than Ottawa has been telling us (and it’s set to go back up)

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In the same week Ottawa revealed that immigration numbers weren’t contracting nearly as much as they’d said, Prime Minister Mark Carney mused about raising them back to never-before-seen highs.

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Earlier this year, Government of Canada figures showed that, for the first time, Canada’s population had contracted over the course of a calendar year. In 2025, according to those estimates, the Canadian population had gone down by about 102,000.

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Then, earlier this month, Statistics Canada revised the figures and reported that Canada was actually still adding people by the hundreds of thousands.

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According to the revised estimates, instead of going down by 102,000, the Canadian population in 2025 actually went up by 280,000.

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Only a few days later, on Sept. 27, the New York Times published a lengthy interview with Carney in which he pledged to eventually “resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada.”

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“So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control,” he said.

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In the New York Times interview, Carney acknowledged the unprecedented migration surge that entered Canada in the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, saying it had put undue pressure on housing and the education system – and that the Canadian student visa program was being exploited by “degree factories.”

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But he framed the problem as one of unanticipated “overshoots,” and anticipated being able to raise targets once immigration was “under control.”

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Even if 2025 had indeed been a year of population contraction, even that statistic would have only been possible because Canada was coming off the most dramatic migration surge in its history.

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In just three years between 2022 and 2025, the Canadian population surged from 38,559,788 to 41,435,888 – an increase of 2.8 million.

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Put another way, at the beginning of 2025, roughly one in every 16 people in Canada had arrived in the country within the last three years.

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If Canada’s meteoric population growth has tapered off, it’s largely due to new federal constraints on temporary migration streams, particularly student visas.

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In contrast to the record high 684,000 student permits handed out in 2023, in 2025 Ottawa set the target closer to 437,000.

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Nevertheless, as was revealed by Statistics Canada’s recent revision of its population numbers, it’s hard to know exactly how many people who entered Canada as students are still in the country.