In the National Post, Tristin Hopper confirms that the Mark Carney government, having promised to cap temporary foreign worker visas at 82,000 for the year, have already brought in over 100,000 TFWs in the first six months:
Despite promises from the Liberal government that they would be curbing the sky-high immigration rates of the Trudeau era, new data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada shows that Canada is already on track to exceed its 2025 targets.
In the first seven months of 2025, Canada accepted 246,300 new permanent residents, according to data released last week by IRCC.
If this level of intake keeps up for the rest of the year, Canada is on track to bring in approximately 422,000 new permanent residents by year’s end.
[…]
And the missed targets are even more stark when it comes to categories of temporary migrants.
For the entirety of 2025, Canada was only supposed to approve 82,000 entries under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Nevertheless, Government of Canada data shows that 105,195 Temporary Foreign Worker permits were awarded in just the first six months of 2025.
Temporary migration has been disproportionately responsible for the record-breaking population growth witnessed in Canada over the last four years. Since 2021, Canada’s population has grown from 38 million to 41.7 million. This represents an average annual increase of 900,000, which puts Canada well beyond the population growth rates of any other G7 country.
In late 2024, Statistics Canada estimated that the country was home to an unprecedented three million “non-permanent residents,” be they international students or temporary foreign workers.
Temporary migration is also the category on which Ottawa has promised to crack down hardest. Late in 2024, when then prime minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to “turn off the taps” on immigration, temporary migrants represented seven per cent of the overall Canadian population.
