FIRST READING: Immigration is higher than Ottawa has been telling us (and it's set to go back up) - National Post

According to the revised estimates, instead of going down by 102,000, the Canadian population in 2025 actually went up by 280,000. Photo by BRUNSWICK NEWS ARCHIVESArticle contentFirst Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

In the same week Ottawa revealed that immigration numbers weren’t contracting nearly as much as they’d said, Prime Minister Mark Carney mused about raising them back to never-before-seen highs.

Earlier this year, Government of Canada figures showed that, for the first time, Canada’s population had contracted over the course of a calendar year. In 2025, according to those estimates, the Canadian population had gone down by about 102,000.

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Then, earlier this month, Statistics Canada revised the figures and reported that Canada was actually still adding people by the hundreds of thousands.

According to the revised estimates, instead of going down by 102,000, the Canadian population in 2025 actually went up by 280,000.

Only a few days later, on Sept. 27, the New York Times published a lengthy interview with Carney in which he pledged to eventually “resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada.”

“So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control,” he said.

In the New York Times interview, Carney acknowledged the unprecedented migration surge that entered Canada in the years immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, saying it had put undue pressure on housing and the education system – and that the Canadian student visa program was being exploited by “degree factories.”

But he framed the problem as one of unanticipated “overshoots,” and anticipated being able to raise targets once immigration was “under control.”