The Trudeau Liberals have begun to find words to describe how they broke Canada’s immigration system, which was once a model for the world. But they have yet to start fixing what they broke. Instead, the breaking continues. At breakneck speed.

Statistics Canada’s quarterly estimate of the country’s non-permanent population shows it rose to 2½ million this fall, from 1.7 million a year earlier. At this rate, the number of temporary residents could grow to around four million by the end of next year – roughly 10 per cent of the Canadian population.

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This is unprecedented. In 2000, Canada had 227,000 temporary residents.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.

What was so good about the old Canadian immigration system? It was a marriage of generosity and self-interest. It was about using the points system to choose immigrants according to the skills they brought to Canada. It was about recruiting future citizens, not minimum-wage guest workers.

And though Canada’s immigration rate in the three decades to 2015 was higher than most developed countries, Canada also had more stringent border control measures than most countries. We were very welcoming, and we were very selective.

Contradictory? No, complementary. It’s why Canadians – almost unique among Western countries – saw immigration as a net-positive. This carefully cultivated ecosystem was the result of a multigenerational consensus among Conservatives, Progressive Conservatives and Liberals.

The Trudeau government has flattened it with a bulldozer.

The government’s signature immigration policy is a sharp increase in traditional immigration, from around a quarter of a million in the years before 2015 to half a million a year by 2025. That doubling wasn’t justified by anything other than politics – but it’s not the big change the Liberals brought.

The most important change was the fostering of a huge and growing shadow immigration system.

The result, occupying a political sweet spot where progressive desires and business interests overlap, comes close to erasing the border for temporary residents. The number of temporary foreign workers that businesses can get approval to recruit appears to be almost unlimited. And the number of student visas Ottawa is willing to issue is unlimited.

The shadow and traditional immigration streams are linked, in that most people arriving through the first want to enter the second. In principle, that’s a good idea: Someone with a (high-quality) Canadian education and (well-paid) Canadian work experience is an ideal candidate for citizenship.

However, with unlimited numbers of student visas on offer, Ottawa created perverse incentives for universities, colleges and businesses. People outside Canada know they can buy the previously unattainable right to enter this country, to work, and maybe even get citizenship, simply by paying tuition to a Canadian school.

If Ontario’s colleges were mostly selling education (between 2000 and 2022, the number of foreign students rose almost tenfold, to 412,000), rather than a right to cross our border, work a menial job and be granted steps up the citizenship ladder, they’d be setting up campuses in India, instead of in Toronto strip malls.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller recognized this obvious reality when he recently admitted that a big part of our student visa system is “puppy mills that are just churning out diplomas.”

He found the words, and that’s something. But what’s he doing about it? Not much.

Ottawa several years ago began allowing foreign students to work up to 20 hours a week. During the pandemic, it incentivized puppy-mill recruitment by removing the cap. It was to be reinstated on Jan. 1, but Mr. Miller now says he’ll study the matter until at least April, and a future cap might be 30 hours.

He has also promised to offer citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people who declined to leave Canada when their visas expired, and are now living and working illegally. He seems blind to the obvious incentives that will be created by such a move.

Meanwhile, the continuing spike in arrivals is squeezing the bottom of the housing market. Inflation elsewhere is almost back to the 2-per-cent target; in rental housing, it was clocked at 8.2 per cent in October.

And Canadian GDP per capita has been falling, as the government performs another unprecedented feat: expanding population faster than the economy.

It’s time to get back to an immigration system that was the envy of the world.

• Only allow temporary foreign workers in high-wage jobs: Canada needs a program to recruit skilled workers – such as tens of thousands of family physicians. Do we need a program to suppress the wages of low-income Canadians by recruiting hundreds of thousands of minimum-wage workers? No.
• Substantially cut the number of student visas: We can raise GDP per capita by aiming for immigrants who are more educated and earn higher incomes than the average Canadian. We should only offer visas, and postgraduation work permits, to those in programs meeting that criteria. Yes to more visas for university degrees in engineering. No to more visas for college certificates in hospitality and food service.
• End the right of foreign students to work off campus while in school: Applications to diploma mills will plummet. Applications to better educational institutions will not.