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Canada’s immigration reset is entering a harder phase. After Ottawa sharply reduced planned arrivals of international students and temporary workers, the head of a prominent immigration-policy council is arguing the country should go further. Parisa Mahboubi, who chairs the CD Howe Institute’s Immigration Targets Council, says the federal goal of bringing non-permanent residents below 5% of the population should be treated as a ceiling, with a longer-term aim closer to 3% to 4%. The argument lands as housing affordability, health care capacity, job competition and strained local services remain politically sensitive. Yet the latest data show that temporary-resident numbers are already falling quickly, setting up a more complicated question for Ottawa: how much further can Canada cut without creating new labour shortages or weakening institutions that depend on newcomers?
Trendonomist reports that the immediate dispute is no longer about whether temporary immigration should fall. Ottawa has already accepted that premise. The 2026-2028 Immigration Levers Plan commits the federal government to reducing non-permanent residents to less than 5% of Canada’s population by the end of 2027. Mahboubi is pushing the debate further, arguing that 5% should represent an upper boundary rather than the level Canada settles at. She has suggested a range of roughly 3% to 4% closer to the smaller temporary-resident footprint Canada carried before the recent surge.
That distinction matters because it would reshape the scale of the adjustment still ahead. The Parliamentary Budget Officer projects that existing federal policies can bring the non-permanent-resident share to just under 5% by the end of 2027. In other words, Ottawa might be on course to meet its announced target without adopting the deeper reduction Mahboubi is discussing. The next policy fight is therefore likely to be over the destination after 2027: whether Canada stabilizes near 5%, continues downward, or allows the share to rise again when economic conditions improve.
The direction of travel has already changed sharply. Statistics Canada estimated 2,558,562 non-permanent residents in the country on April 1, 2026, down 4.4% in a single quarter. With Canada’s total population estimated at just over 41.4 million, that put the non-permanent-resident share at roughly 6.2%. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has traced the reversal back to a peak of 7.6% in October 2024, when the temporary population had climbed to about 3.1 million.
New arrivals have fallen even faster than the total stock. Immigration data cited by The Canadian Press show only about 22,400 new international students arrived from January through June 2026, compared with nearly 125,000 over the same period in 2024. Temporary-worker arrivals over those six months were about 98,000, down from almost 245,000 two years earlier. Those numbers help explain why the population is shrinking, but they also show why the adjustment takes time: reducing new entries does not instantly remove the millions of people already living in Canada with valid permits, pending claims or other temporary status.
