Key Issues on the Levels Plan – Permanent Residence Admissions Levels

Key Issues 

Two weeks ago, AAISA released a summary of the key changes made in the 2025 – 27 Levels Plan. Now, we explore the implications of the plan further through an in-depth analysis. Beginning today, AAISA is releasing several Insights articles about: 

• Permanent residence admissions numbers 
• Temporary residence admissions numbers 
• Refugees, refugee claimants, and family reunification 
• Racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric 

As this article series concludes, AAISA members will receive these articles in a report format, to share with colleagues within and outside the sector. We encourage members who have responses to this analysis, corrections, or additions, to contact mcunningham@aaisa.ca. 

Permanent residence levels  

IRCC’s new Levels Plan, released October 24, 2024, reverses the trend of past years by reducing the target for permanent resident admissions expected in 2025, 2026, and 2027.  

Prior to 2017, the immigration targets were communicated for only a single year ahead—targets in 2015 for 2016, targets in 2016 for 2017, and so on. But since multi-year Levels Plans have been in place—there have been seven so far—IRCC has typically upped the levels of overall permanent residency admissions every year. In fact, in many of these years, each Levels Plan actually amended the prior plan upward. As an example, take a look at how the targets shift for these three years: 

The shifts were fairly small until the Levels Plan 2021 – 23, released in October 2020, when, probably in response to the COVID pandemic, the government changed course. This may have been a response to economic growth concerns during the pandemic.

Check out the year 2022. In 2019, the government targeted 351,000 permanent resident admissions for the year 2022. But in 2020, they made a big change to the levels that they predicted in 2019. Rather than admitting the 2019 target of 361,000 permanent residents, they shot for 411,000 permanent residents, an increase of about 14%. Then, in 2021, they amended the target upward once again to 431,645, an increase of almost 20% from the original number.

This type of movement was going on for the three years 2020, 2021, and 2022. In 2023, however, the government reined in its ambitions by returning to the prior paradigm under which they would fulfill only the targets they set the year prior. So, the goals set for 2024 and 2025 were 485,000 and 500,000, respectively, which reflected the 2022 plan.

Then, in 2023 (the 2024 -26 Levels Plan), the number stopped increasing at all—for the first time, the government aimed to hold permanent resident admissions steady at 500,000 in both 2025 and 2026.

This is the pattern that leads us to the current moment, in which the government has abruptly announced not only a steep decrease to admissions targets for 2025, but further decreasing admissions targets for 2026 and 2027.

It’s worth noting that the lowest proposed admissions target—365,000 in 2027–is still higher than the highest pre-Covid admissions target, which was 361,000. Still, this represents a significant pivot in the government’s public communication about its immigration strategy, and has been widely taken as a response to anti-immigrant sentiment rising in the Canadian discourse, notable even to international venues like Reuters.

Rather than awarding 500,000 new people PR status in 2025, the government now plans to award only 395,000. According to the government, 40% of those 395,000 people will be current temporary residents, through new TR-to-PR pathways. That leaves 237,000 new people gaining PR status through means like family reunification.

How do the proportions of different PR categories in the new Levels Plan match up with those in past years?

We looked at how the targets set in 2022, 2023, and 2024 for next year differ for various categories of Permanent Resident status. The targets set in 2022 and 2023 were very similar, because in both these years, the overall target was 500,000 people to be awarded Permanent Resident status.

The following table shows the 2023 and 2024 key PR categories split side-by-side, along with what percentage the numbers make up of the year’s total target. We have highlighted rows to indicate particularly large changes in percentage of target.

First, although the numbers are small, it is a promising signal that two new public policies for TR-to-PR pathways and regularization are being put into place. We encourage the government to continue to grow numbers in these two categories.  As planned, admissions through the In-Canada Focus pathway will decrease in 2026 and 2027 in concert with other numbers, while admissions through the regularization pathway will increase.

Even though the numbers for the regularization public policy category in particular are very small, and few details have become available, putting such a category in place is the first procedural step toward meaningful regularization policies. We hope to see government leaders take full advantage of this opportunity in the future.

To make more room for these TR-to-PR transitions, percentages have been dropped from the Federal High Skilled equivalent category and the Provincial Nominee Program category. The “Federal Economic Priorities” category will target specific labour market needs, which in 2025 will be health care occupations, trade occupations, and French language proficiency. The Provincial Nominee Program cuts are the other most significant portion of the overall decrease in numbers. Formal negotiations on new agreements with provinces have not yet started. Some provincial governments have objected to the cuts out of concern for the impact that lower immigration levels will have on addressing local labour market needs, while others, like Alberta’s, have objected to the cuts on the basis that they do not go far enough and more reductions should be made.

The only two categories for which numbers of admission were held constant or increased were in the Government-Assisted Refugees category and the Humanitarian category. However, admissions under the Humanitarian category will be decreased in 2026 and 2027, from 10,000 to 6,900 and then only 4,300 admissions. An article considering the case of refugees, protected persons, refugee claimants, and other newcomers under a humanitarian program will be forthcoming in this article series.

With anti-immigration sentiment rising, and an election on the horizon, the Levels Plan, which in prior years has been a somewhat staid annual strategic document, has become a centre of political attention. Even if the government planned to eventually return to pre-pandemic growth rates, they might have chosen a more gradual decrease or an increase from a lower level, as was the pattern pre-2020. The precipitous drop in permanent resident admissions has stoked fears of an anti-immigrant turn in government policy.

What does this mean for settlement agencies?

The suddenness of this reversal is alarming, as are the other troubling signals of a sea change on immigration policy that the government has transmitted over the past months. The government’s rhetoric has promoted a false narrative that decreasing immigration levels is the “magic bullet” to address housing shortages, while many housing experts disagree. However, the bare numbers of the Levels Plan continue to acknowledge the extent to which the Canadian economy relies on immigrants.

The number of people being awarded Permanent Residence status each year is being reduced in 2025 to pre-COVID levels. Further reductions out to 2027 still keep the number above the earliest predictions in 2018. Whether the government decreases the number any further, or returns to the normal pre-COVID growth rate, will depend on many future political factors.

These changes may impact permanent residents who are already in Canada mainly in the area of family reunification. It isn’t clear right now whether the cuts to family reunification will be made by delaying reunification for permanent residents already in Canada, or whether the expectation is that the lower number of newly awarded Permanent Resident statuses will naturally lead to a lower number of reunification applications.

A new IRCC budget will not be tabled until the new year, so assessment of the fiscal implications can only be preliminary. From this vantage point, it’s difficult to say how the decrease in permanent residency admissions will directly affect the experience of settlement agencies on the ground two or three years out.  In determining the coming budget allocation, it is essential that the government continue to keep in mind the levels of previous years, since Permanent Residents continue to access services for the first few years after their arrival. This has increasingly become the case due to long waitlists for services such as language classes.

As the government has indicated in their levels plan announcement, part of their purpose in reducing the number of newcomers arriving is to allow for other systems to catch up to population growth. It is paramount that funding through this period continues to support the settlement expertise that will strengthen those very systems.

Next article

IRCC has proposed to reduce temporary residence levels until temporary residents make up only 5% of the Canadian population. How does the government plan to enact this policy? In our next article, AAISA’s Insights series will move on to what the new Levels Plan tells us about IRCC’s strategy for admitting and governing people on temporary study and work permits in 2025, 2026, and 2027.

* Visual data representation provided by Celine Truong