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The federal government announced on Thursday that it would maintain the number of immigrants it admits to Canada over the next three years.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The federal government is introducing a one-time measure to grant permanent residency to 200,000 temporary residents already in Canada, in an effort to reduce the backlog of applications in the federal immigration system.
The measure was introduced as part of Thursday’s federal budget, which included Ottawa’s annual immigration-levels plan.
Two cohorts, each made up of 100,000 temporary residents, will be given priority for permanent residency. A workers’ cohort will consist of those who applied for permanent residency through special immigration pathways such as the Start-up Visa Program, Home Care Worker pilot programs, Atlantic Immigration Program and the Agri-Food Pilot.
A humanitarian cohort will process all remaining applications in the Ukraine family reunification pathway and the Hong Kong permanent residents pathway. It will also prioritize permanent residency for spouses and children already living in Canada.
Many of the immigration pathways mentioned were suspended by the government in late 2025 because of processing backlogs. Last year’s immigration-levels plan also introduced an initiative to transition 115,000 temporary residents already in Canada to permanent status as well.
Meanwhile, Ottawa announced that it would maintain the number of immigrants it admits to Canada over the next three years, a continuation of its policy goal to stabilize numbers which soared dramatically between 2021 and 2024.
Ottawa is aiming to keep its temporary resident intake target at 370,000 annually in 2027, 2028 and 2029. It will also maintain its permanent resident target, planning to admit 380,000 permanent residents annually over the same period.
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The 200,000 special permanent residency spots for those already in the country is in addition to the 380,000 target.
Canada’s population increased by three million people in the three years after the pandemic, mostly consisting of international students and temporary foreign workers. That prompted domestic backlash, with many people linking the increase in the number of immigrants to the high cost of housing and affordability issues. The government subsequently dialled back its immigration targets, dramatically reducing the international student population intake in 2025.
In an interview with The New York Times in September, Prime Minister Mark Carney hinted the government could resume “some controlled increase in the population,” sparking speculation the government was planning to raise immigration levels. But the budget emphasized the need to “balance” the labour needs of employers, while avoiding “undue pressure on housing, health care and social services.”
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Ottawa’s ultimate goal is to reduce the number of temporary residents to 5 per cent of the total population by the end of 2027, and one of the ways to do that would be to grant permanent residency to people already in Canada holding work permits.
Despite Ottawa imposing dramatic caps on the number of international students and foreign workers granted visas, the temporary resident population count has declined slowly over the past two years. As of July 1, temporary residents were 6.7 per cent of the population, a decrease from a peak of 7.2 per cent in October 2024, according to Statistics Canada data. The government now has just over a year to get that number down to 5 per cent.
The budget allocated roughly $152-million to Employment and Social Development Canada to reform the TFW program, a popular, but controversial immigration stream used by employers to fill labour needs when they are unable to find local workers. The budget document states only that proposed changes to the program will better align with “regional labour market needs” while “improving processing time” and “strengthening employer compliance.”
The TFW program has been dogged by reports of employer mistreatment of workers, prompting migrant rights groups and labour advocates to call for major structural reforms to the program. Specifically, advocates want to see changes to the closed-work permit nature of the program, which ties a worker to their employer, preventing them from seeking other employers.
Lobby groups, such as the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, with more than 103,000 members, and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 200,000 organizations, have long urged the Carney government to reconsider the cap it had placed on the percentage of temporary foreign workers a business can employ. Currently, employers in most sectors are limited to hiring a maximum of 10 per cent of workers through the low-wage stream of the program, in areas where the unemployment rate is 6 per cent or less.
Ottawa has also earmarked $98-million over the next five years to clear the backlog of asylum applications, and $82-million for non-profit groups that support migrant workers.