Canada Planned for Millions of Immigrants Who Aren’t Coming. Now What?

During the Justin Trudeau years, when immigration was booming, services across Canada ballooned to accommodate a rapidly growing population. We expanded childcare and built more housing, school boards took on staff to teach swaths of incoming students, and colleges and universities built new residences to house them. Many of these changes were part of long-term planning meant to adapt to what looked, at the time, like Canada’s new reality.

Since birth rates declined at the end of the baby boom, immigration has been Canada’s main source of population growth. But the Liberals’ policies were something else. In 2023, we had the highest year-over-year population increase in Canadian history. We grew by a million people in just one year, hitting the 40-million mark, and 41 million just six months after that. To many, there was no end in sight. 

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But by late 2024, the Liberals’ immigration policies had fallen out of favour with many Canadians, and newcomers were blamed for all kinds of issues, whether or not they had anything to do with population. In response, newly minted Prime Minister Mark Carney took an axe to Trudeau’s policies, slashing permanent resident targets by 120,000. The number of temporary resident permits dropped 43 per cent and international students were capped. The fallout was swift. Last year, Canada’s population declined for the first time since Confederation. This year, it’s expected to remain entirely stagnant, or even decline further.

Now, all the services that expanded for the population boom are being forced to suddenly reverse course. While our country was stretched to its limits during the Trudeau years, Carney’s reversal will saddle Canada with an entirely new set of challenges.

Look at our schools. Just three years ago, Canadian public schools were reporting the largest enrolment increase in recorded history—a whopping 125,200 new students between 2023 and 2024. But now, the Toronto District School Board has announced it will be laying off well over 500 staff, as it expects its enrolment to shrink by around 5,000 students. Across all of Ontario last year, there were nearly a third fewer Grade 1s than Grade 12s. At Western, where I teach, our administration started construction on a 790- bed residence in 2023, predicated on a continued rise in enrolment that may never come.

Colleges and universities have been some of the hardest hit. Over the years, many schools turned to international students to fill financial gaps. Now that study permits have been halved, postsecondary institutions are scrambling to restructure or shutting down altogether. In January, the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology permanently closed after losing 55 per cent of its international students. York University suspended admissions to 18 programs, and Ontario’s Fleming and St. Lawrence colleges are merging into one, a first in Ontario. Here at Western, our international student enrolment dropped from 15.2 per cent of the student population in 2020 to just 10.7 per cent in 2024, to 7.8 per cent in the current academic year.

Slowed population growth is also affecting housing. On the rental side, there are fewer new international students and temporary workers looking for apartments—at the exact moment a wave of rentals are coming on the market. Over three per cent of rentals in Canada were vacant in 2025, up from 2.2 per cent the year before. By April of this year, the average rent had fallen five per cent from 2024, too. It’s given renters some breathing room, but it’s also spooking builders. With fewer buyers, condo pre-sales are dropping dramatically. At one 600-unit condo in the Greater Toronto Area, the entire development was scrapped after only 10 per cent of units were sold before construction.

Predictable growth makes things easy for the governments and businesses that plan our services and communities. As a demographer, I have a front-row seat to this process. It’s our data that determines whether a new neighbourhood gets an elementary school, a long-term care home, a playground or a pickleball court. When the population changes suddenly, it throws these plans into chaos. It also makes investment more risky; when a company can’t ensure their workforce will exist in 10 years, they may not be keen to expand.

What comes next is anyone’s guess, but I have a few predictions. For one, the trickle-down effects of our aging population will only be exacerbated. The youngest baby boomers are in their sixties now and, by 2030, 92 per cent of them will likely be retired. In New Brunswick, where I lived for five years, this is palpable. In communities like Miramichi, residents over 65 now outnumber children under 15 by more than two to one. By the time I left the province in 2015, there were already discussions about converting elementary schools to retirement homes. The pandemic brought some population growth, but it appears to have been short-lived, as policymakers are once again talking about repurposing community infrastructure.

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The wave of old folks will put big strains on our health-care system. People use roughly 85 per cent of their health-care expenditures in the last 10 years of their life. And with fewer young people to staff our hospitals, the system will feel the pinch. To get a glimpse of this future, we can look to other countries with top-heavy population pyramids. Russia experimented with paying its citizens to have kids, to no avail. In France, they offered subsidized childcare and tax breaks to soften the financial blow of raising children. In Japan, they’ve been employing robots to fill caregiver gaps and building tech capable of lifting elderly people out of their beds.

The impacts won’t only be fiscal, either. Older people tend to lean more conservative, pushing Canada’s political makeup further to the right. I also think we’ll see attitudes toward immigration change. When quotas increased after COVID, approval numbers for Canadian immigration sank. Newcomers were blamed for economic woes and scapegoated for social issues, while politicians like Pierre Poilievre built their campaigns on promises to cap immigration. I think when people realize how indispensable newcomers are to our economy, the trend could very well reverse. 

Canadians have been told for the better part of a century that immigration leads to prosperity. Now, with recent reductions, we’re about to see how true this is.

Michael Haan is a professor of sociology at Western University and the director of the university’s Statistics Canada Research Data Centre.

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