Canada Is Consulting on Immigration Levels Again. Here's Who Actually Wins.
The number I keep returning to from last year’s immigration consultation is not 80 — though 80% of individual respondents telling IRCC that Canada’s temporary resident targets were “too many” is striking enough on its own. It is 60. Because 60% of organizations — employers, settlement agencies, academic institutions, chambers of commerce — said they wanted growth in permanent resident levels beyond 2027. Two consultations, run simultaneously, arriving at conclusions that cannot be reconciled. The government held both results, noted the split, and moved toward one. Understanding which one, and why, is the whole story of how Canada’s immigration system actually makes decisions.
The Numbers Don’t Lie. They Just Don’t Agree.
The 2025 consultation produced a structurally clean split. On temporary residents: more than 80% of individual respondents said current targets were too high; over half of organizations said those same targets were about right or too low. On permanent resident levels beyond 2027, the numbers inverted: 60% of organizations wanted growth; 75% of individuals preferred a decrease. These are not competing preferences at the margins. They are two coherent and incompatible visions of what immigration is for — one that reads it primarily as a labour market and demographic instrument, one that reads it primarily as a cultural and social threshold question.
What makes the split analytically predictable is who participates. Organizations submit responses that reflect operational need: unfilled positions, aging workforces, clients requiring settlement services. Individuals respond to what they experience in daily life: housing costs, healthcare waitlists, the felt pace of demographic change. Both sets of responses are internally rational. Neither is wrong. They are simply answering different questions, and the consultation instrument asks them both without any mechanism for resolution.
The Government Moved. Toward the Polls.
IRCC’s choices in the 2026–2028 Levels Plan tell us what the government heard — or, more precisely, what it chose to act on. Permanent resident admissions were cut from 395,000 to 380,000. New study permits for arriving students were reduced by roughly half. The temporary resident population is formally committed to fall below 5% of Canada’s total population by end of 2027. Almost none of that reflects what employers and settlement organizations were asking for. Most of it reflects where polling — not the consultation — was pointing.
This is not a criticism of the process. It is an accurate description of how the process functions. The immigration levels consultation is not designed to resolve the disagreement between public sentiment and institutional need. It is designed to document both, give the government a defensible evidentiary base for a decision it has largely already reached through other inputs, and produce a report that can be cited in either direction regardless of where the final plan lands. In my reading of these cycles, the consultation findings rarely determine the outcome. They legitimize it after the fact.
What the 2026 Round Is Actually For
The 2026 consultation opens May 12 and runs until June 14, into a system already in motion. The 380,000 PR target is running. The TR reduction strategy is underway. Express Entry has not run a general all-program draw since April 2024; the architecture has shifted decisively toward category-based selection, meaning IRCC is already exercising substantial discretion over who gets in and through which door. Against that backdrop, the consultation’s headline question — how many? — is somewhat beside the point. The real decisions are happening through category design, processing priority, and ministerial instruction, largely outside the consultation frame and largely out of public view.
I want to sit with that last observation, because it changes what participation actually means. The consultation will not determine the 2027–2029 Levels Plan in any mechanical sense. What it produces is a record. And records matter — not because IRCC tallies votes and follows the majority, but because they become part of the evidentiary foundation for future advocacy, litigation, and policy negotiation. Silence reads as absence of need. An organization that doesn’t submit is an organization that, for the purposes of this cycle, didn’t have a position.
My practical guidance for organizations participating in this round: respond, and respond precisely. Specific data about what particular communities, sectors, and regions require is more useful than general appeals for higher numbers. Aggregate claims get averaged. Operational evidence gets cited. For applicants watching from outside the process: the outcome will shape the 2027–2029 Levels Plan, tabled in November. Understanding it as a political exercise rather than a technical calculation is part of what it means to navigate this system with any clarity.
— Oded Oron, PhD