Best Of: Is Canada's Immigration System Broken?

Free Lunch by The Peak

This episode originally aired in July 2023.

Canada's population is growing quickly. Really quickly. Last month, we surpassed the 40 million mark, and we're growing faster than any other G7 country. Between 2016 and 2021, Canada has grown twice as quickly as the US.

And the reason for that growth is simple: Immigration.

Of the growth we saw in 2022, immigration accounted for around 95% of it. And this is by design. By 2025, the federal government wants to add 500,000 new permanent residents to Canada every year.

So how our immigration system works matters quite a bit.

But a growing number of economists and experts are warning that it might not be working so well anymore. One of those people is Mikal Skuterud, a professor in the economics department at the University of Waterloo and the Director of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum.

Mikal has argued that the economic case for immigration policy has begun to break down as Canada has tried to scale up the number of people coming here. On this episode, he joins us to explain exactly how our immigration system works and why, in his view, it has started to fail.

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