Poilievre Calls for Canada to Have ‘More People Leaving Than Coming’

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says Canada needs “very hard caps on immigration levels” going forward, citing limitations in areas such as housing and employment.

Speaking to media during a July 14 press conference, Poilievre said Canada needs “more people leaving than coming for the next couple of years” in order to relieve the strain on Canada’s employment numbers, housing, and health care.

“We’ve had population growth of roughly a million a year under the Liberals while we barely built 200,000 homes,” Poilievre said. “Our job market is stalled and yet we are adding more people to the workforce. Our young people are facing generational highs in unemployment because … multinational corporations are giving jobs to low-wage, temporary foreign workers.”

Poilievre also accused Carney of not taking proper action on the immigration file.

“Mr. Carney has so far kept the unsustainable immigration numbers that Justin Trudeau left behind, numbers that are overwhelming, housing, health care, and jobs that are dividing our country and breaking up any notion of integration,” Poilievre said.

The unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15–24 as of last month was 14.2 percent, up 0.7 percentage points year-over-year, according to Statistics Canada.

Canada’s population increased from about 38 million in 2020 to over 41.5 million in 2025. The Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reversed some of its immigration policies beginning in 2024, saying it would reduce the number of permanent residents admitted into the country over the next three years, as well as announcing a cap on the number of international students allowed in Canada.

During the party leaders’ French-language debate at the time of the election campaign in April, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada’s immigration system “isn’t working, especially after the pandemic,” and added that “our population has gone up, I think at about 3 percent per year because of immigration, and that’s why we need to have a cap for a certain period of time.”

At the same debate, Carney said that Canadians want to welcome more immigrants but it needs to be done in a judicious manner.

“Quebecers and all Canadians, they want to welcome immigrants,” Carney said. “There’s no problem with Canadians’ attitudes at all. It’s the responsibility of all of us to increase our capacity to welcome newcomers.”

In his mandate letter to his cabinet ministers issued in May, Carney said he wants Canada’s immigration rates to remain at “sustainable levels.”

As one of the priorities for the cabinet to focus on, he listed, “Attracting the best talent in the world to help build our economy, while returning our overall immigration rates to sustainable levels.”

A report released earlier this month by the Fraser Institute found that the total share of immigrants from 2000 to 2015 rose at a simple annual average rate of 4 percent but jumped to a simple annual average rate of 15 percent from 2016 to 2024.

The report references numbers from last year as a case-in-point, observing that in 2024, Canada admitted 485,600 new permanent residents, 518,200 international students, and issued temporary work permits to 912,900 individuals. Permanent immigrants represented a share of 42.1 percent of total immigrants to Canada between 2000 to 2015, dropping to 27.7 percent between 2016 to 2024, excluding 2020.

Before leaving office, Trudeau pledged to cap the number of temporary residents and workers admitted into Canada at 5 percent or less of Canada’s population by 2027, something Carney has also agreed to do.