This article originally appeared in the Toronto Sun.
By Anthony De Luca-Baratta, September 12, 2025
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is contemplating its immigration targets for the next three years. It should heed the wishes of most Canadians and make drastic cuts.
In its first failure to take Canadians’ immigration concerns seriously, Carney’s government has already exceeded this year’s targets for temporary foreign workers. But another test rapidly approaches. Immigration Minister Lena Diab is expected to announce the government’s immigration targets for the next three years. Most Canadians — native-born and immigrant alike — want less immigration. The government needs to make a sharp U-turn now and heed the public’s wishes.
Canadians have long welcomed immigrants from all over the globe. We rightly believed — and many of us still do — that moderate immigration benefits our economy and enriches our culture. But the nation has reached a breaking point. The recent spike in immigration levels has strained our housing market and health-care system, threatened social cohesion and introduced new national security threats.
Immigration reached record levels during Justin Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister.
As the population grew from 35 million in 2015 to a high of 40 million in 2023, housing prices soared. From 2015 to 2025, the average home price rose from $300,000 to nearly $700,000 in Montreal, $700,000 to $1.2 million in Toronto and $1.4 million to $2 million in Vancouver.
A recent government study found that immigration explains roughly 11% of the increase in median home prices between 2006 and 2021.
Making matters worse, Canada’s housing stock has not kept up with demand for decades because of burdensome municipal regulations that make the construction of housing prohibitively expensive. Rapidly increasing the population through immigration has only worsened this shortage. To fix the long-term housing crisis for Canadians, the Carney government should withhold funds from cities until they cut red tape to increase housing construction. Even then, building more homes will take time. The government needs to reduce the number of newcomers now.
As housing prices spiked, wait times for medical treatment reached new highs across the country. Emergency room physicians blame rapid population growth — among other factors — for soaring emergency room wait times, with the average in Ontario reaching 22 hours in 2023.
A Fraser Institute study found that the average wait time between a general practitioner’s referral and receipt of treatment by a specialist reached 30 weeks in 2024, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993. Even in crucial fields like radiation oncology, in which cancer patients receive potentially life-saving treatment, the average wait time between specialist referral and receipt of treatment was two and a half weeks — longer than what physicians deem “clinically reasonable.”
Even the most dynamic health-care system in the world would struggle to keep up with a population boom like the one Canada has experienced over the last decade. Canada’s sclerotic, mostly government-run system never stood a chance.
Meanwhile, as a growing number of foreign nationals have come to Canada, foreign conflicts have increasingly migrated to Canadian streets.
In 2024, four alleged hitmen, all Indian nationals who had been in Canada for several years, shot and killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and prominent leader of the Khalistan movement that advocates for an independent Sikh state in India. The episode led to a diplomatic rift between Ottawa and New Delhi, jeopardizing Canada’s relationship with the world’s most populous country.
In the winter of 2024, anti-Israel rioters in Montreal broke windows, threw objects at police and set fire to cars. The incident came a few months after protesters barricaded themselves into a McGill University administration building and damaged property to protest the university’s alleged support for Israel. Harassment and intimidation of Jews in Canada are now commonplace.
Canada is now one of the Western world’s hot spots for Islamism and jihadism, as nefarious actors exploit lax immigration rules. A recent report by a D.C.-based non-profit that tracks international crime warned that Canada has become a “safe zone” for terrorist organizations. Iranian-backed terror networks are so embedded that the FBI recently warned a prominent Iranian-American critic of the regime in Tehran not to travel to Canada. At least nine recent Islamic terrorist plots have either been foiled on Canadian soil or involved Canadians abroad. Most recently, the RCMP arrested a Montreal teenager for allegedly planning a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS.
Unsurprisingly, Canadians’ perception of their country’s immigration system is in freefall as 62% of Canadians — including 57% of immigrants — believe too many immigrants are being allowed into their country, more than double the number who felt that way a mere six years ago.
The decades-long Canadian consensus on immigration is broken. Canadians understand that generosity has its limits. They understand that a country that is endlessly open will eventually deplete its own resources and expose itself to the world’s worst actors. If the government does not drastically reduce the flow of immigrants now, it is only a matter of time before Canada ceases to exist in the form that has made it such an attractive place to live in the first place.
Anthony De Luca-Baratta is a contributor to the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, a project of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
