Changes in Canadian Immigration Levels Plan 2025

Overview

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has released its new Immigration Levels Plan (2026–2028), the first under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s administration and a marked change in the approach to newcomer settlement.

The federal narrative continues to emphasize stability and system sustainability, with the newly introduced plan institutionalizing the contraction of both permanent and temporary resident volumes that first began in the 2025-2027 plan. This reflects Canada’s first sustained effort to moderate immigration growth following an expansionary approach introduced by the Honourable Sean Fraser’s 2023-2025 plan.

From a sectoral perspective, this recalibration shapes the newcomer-serving environment in Alberta and Canada. Downstream effects include shifts in labour-market demand, institutional planning, and community capacity. Particular restrictions to international student admissions also introduces long-term structural consequences for Canada’s talent pipeline.

This paper represents a brief analysis on Canada’s 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan that situates IRCC’s policy approach compared across successive immigration plans since 2023. The aim is to trace how federal immigration policy has evolved, and how shifts reflect broader political, economic, and fiscal contexts. We draw from IRCC Annual Reports to Parliament, open-data admissions tables, previous immigration plans to contextualize the shifting approaches and its overall implications for Alberta’s and Canada’s newcomer serving sector.

Changes: From expansion to reduction

The past four Levels Plans show the federal immigration strategy has transitioned through four distinct policy phases of expansion, stabilization, recalibration, and now institutionalization.

Actual admissions began to peak with 471 550 arrivals in 2023, consistent with the expansionary tone of Fraser’s tenure. By 2024, admissions plateaued near 485 000, before the 2025 plan introduced a deliberate taper to 395 000. This change in policy direction marks a pivot from immigration optimism to pragmatism, reflecting a broader realignment towards immigration that mirrored political and socio-economic shifts at the time. 

This current sees Minister Lena Metlege Diab’s messaging marks a continuation of this shift, emphasizing predictability, stability and restraint, flattening planned arrivals at 380 000 per year. Subtly and beyond the numbers, the actual policy trajectory represents a greater shift showing deliberate moderation to bring temporary residents to roughly 5 per cent of Canada’s total population by 2027.  

Diving into the Numbers 

The progression of permanent resident (PR) targets across successive Immigration Levels Plans since 2023 demonstrates a clear change from expansion to stabilization. Between the 2024–2026 and 2025–2027 plans, Canada implemented the sharpest planned reduction in PR admissions in over a decade. The 2025–2027 plan reduced the 2025 target from 500,000 to 395,000 (a 21 percent contraction) and the 2026 target from 500,000 to 380,000 (a 24 percent decline). These decreases mark the first deliberate federal effort to temper population inflows after the post-pandemic expansion cycle, reflecting a policy shift toward what IRCC described as “sustainable growth and system integrity.” 

The 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan builds on this recalibration but does not introduce further reductions. Instead, it maintains the 2026 target at 380,000, increases the 2027 target from 365,000 to 380,000, and sets a new 2028 target of 380,000. This represents a shift from contraction to stabilization, consolidating the earlier adjustments made in the 2025–2027 plan. That earlier plan also projected that over 40 per cent of new PRs would come from individuals already in Canada on temporary status; a principle that remains central in the current approach. 

This stabilization approach towards permanent resident targets reflects a federal effort to embed immigration management as a component of national economic planning rather than a distinct population-growth mechanism. In practical terms, permanent residency is now treated as a broader consideration in labour planning, housing capacity, and public service infrastructure. 

The introduction of explicit temporary-resident (TR) targets in the 2025–2027 plan marks a major inflection point in IRCC’s approach to Canadian migration. For the first time, Canada’s temporary migration flows are subject to ceilings, rather than left to fluctuate in response to labour market needs or post-secondary enrolement patterns.  

This plan had established a ceiling of TR arrivals at 673,650 in 2025, followed by a planned reduction to 516,600 in 2026. This is a 24 per cent contraction in a single year before a minor increase to 543,600 in 2027. This corresponds directly with the government’s stated commitment to reduce the total stock of temporary residents to 5 per cent of Canada’s population by the end of 2026. 

The current 2026-2028 plan reinforces and embeds this regulatory approach, by reducing the 2026 TR target further to 385,000 and the 2027 target to 370,000 before holding steady at 370,000 in 2028. These downard adjsutments demonstrate a structural commitment to sustaining lower levels of temporary migration over multiple planning cycles rather than treating the 2025-2027 caps a sa temporary correction. The stabilization of targets at 370,000 through 2027 and 2028 reflects an emerging federal equilibrium model seeking to freeze temporary resident volumes into alignment with anticipated capacity 

From a sectoral standpoint, this recalibration introduces new complexity. Settlement agencies and community organizations will likely see reduced client volumes in initial orientation services but rising demand in status-transition navigation, as more temporary residents shift to permanent streams. At the same time, the increasing emphasis on transitions from temporary to permanent status will reorient community and institutional planning toward retention and long-term integration rather than supporting new arrivals and intake management. 

Taken together, the TR caps implemented across the 2025–2027 and 2026–2028 plans represent the beginning of an equilibrium-based migration, where migration is treated as economic levers rather than response. 

The 2025–2027 plan introduces new ceilings on work-permit issuance for both the International Mobility Program (IMP) and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). New total arrivals are set at 367,750 in 2025, dropping to 210,700 in 2026, with a partial recovery to 237,700 in 2027. This describes a 43 per cent planned reduction within two years, which is the steepest intervention in employer-driven labour mobility since 2014 the TFWP reforms of 2014. This policy shift first introduced temporary work as open supply for labour market needs to a tool for national workforce planning. The stated policy stance by IRCC is to ensure “balance” and “sustainable volumes,” yet this adjustment reflects a structural approach of transforming existing and temporary labour demand into higher-skilled permanent pathways. At the same time, Canada will dampen reliance on low-wage or recurrent short-term employment streams. 

The 2026-2028 plan reinforces the previous plan’s structural shifts by modestly revising the 2026 target to 230,000 and by setting the 2027 and 2028 worker targets at 220,000. This progression indicates the 2025-2027 plan was not a temporary corrective measure, but part of a longer approach stabilizing lower worker volumes. The maintenance of targets through 2027-2028 signals an era where temporary worker admissions continue to be a component of national workforce planning rather than employer need. 

The economic and sectoral lens remains uncertain. Alberta may face short-term labour tightening across sectors historically dependent on temporary workers where domestic labour supply remains limited, like caregiving, logistics, hospitality, and food services. This may have critical impacts on already tightly resourced labour areas. Likewise, this shift would result in settlement and community organizations pivoting from intake to retention support, as fewer new workers arrive but more existing temporary residents seek transition assistance. 

Overall, this represents a move away from attracting new labour mobility toward systemic transformation of labour-market needs.

The 2025–2027 introduces first time ceilings on study-permit issuance by fixing annual arrivals at 305,900 from 2025 through 2027. This approach tracks the introduction of a national cap and institutional attestation on study permit applications in January 2024, effectively layering constraints onto international education. 

The scale of reduction is substantial. In 2024, approximately 437,000 study permits were issued, meaning the new ceiling represents a 30 per cent reduction in intake relative to the previous year. IRCC describes this as part of a broader effort to restore “sustainable volumes,” but in practice, it introduces a three-year freeze on international student growth. The policy’s underlying rationale embeds the recent approach to student-permit reforms into the broader agenda by arguing to align the program with community capacity and labour-market conditions. 

Like other streams, the 2026-2028 institutionalizes this shift by reducing the 2026 student target from 305,900 to 155,000 and further reducing the 2027 target to 150,000, before stabilizing at 150,000 in 2028. These reductions represent a planned 50 per cent contraction compared to the ceilings in the 2025-2027 plan. Introducing step reductions over consecutive planning cycles reflect the end of Canada’s open model of international education. 

The downstream impacts will be significant. Postsecondary institutions, particularly provinces without large domestic student pools, face revenue reduction, program consolidation, and recruitment constraints. For the newcomer-serving sector, fewer incoming students will reduce demand for initial settlement supports, while increasing the proportion of students who are already in Canada and seeking transitions to permanent residency. This will place greater emphasis on advising, career services, and long-term integration supports rather than high-volume intake services. Taken together, the student targets across the 2025–2027 and 2026–2028 plans reflect the formal end of Canada’s open model of international education. 

Taken Together 

Across the three domains of temporary residents, workers, and students, the 2025–2027 plan reflects a coherent change in national immigration policy towards an approach rooted in volume regulation, internal conversion, and system alignment. Particular to note in this iteration is introduction of explicit numerical governance across streams. This is a marked change from previous plans where arrival strategy and numbers reflected existing contextual factors at that time. 

Considered simply, the overarching logic is clear: 

1. Reduce new inflows through strict targets and limits. 
2. Prioritize domestic transitions. 
3. Integrate labour, education, and immigration planning into a single regulatory stream. 

Public facing policy statements show a pragmatic approach to infrastructure and service capacity pressures, yet it also introduces long-term strategic trade-offs, including reduced global attraction capacity, slower demographic renewal, and heightened regional inequity in labour distribution and institutional opportunity. In policy terms, the 2025–2027 plan be understood as Canada’s first fully articulated “migration management” framework, one that defines immigration not as a growth driver but as a mechanism of national equilibrium. 

As IRCC continues to articulate immigration levels in relation to housing, infrastructure, and service-capacity constraints, these statements implicitly reinforce a principle of reciprocal policy alignment. If immigration planning is being shaped by national and regional infrastructure limitations, then future infrastructure and capacity discussions will need to explicitly account for projected immigration flows. This is not a matter of prioritizing immigration over other considerations, but rather of ensuring that Canada’s infrastructure, housing systems, and public services are designed using accurate demographic and mobility assumptions. Integrating immigration into broader infrastructure planning would support more coherent governance and reduce the cyclical pressures that have driven recent recalibrations.