Law360 Canada (September 11, 2026, 1:51 PM EDT) --

Sergio R. Karas

RBC’s new report, “A Smarter Immigration Strategy: Five Questions That Could Help Shape Canada’s Future,” arrives at an opportune moment. Published Sept. 1, it draws on consultations with more than 60 economists, demographers, policymakers and other experts.

RBC argues that Ottawa should stabilize population growth at approximately one per cent, restore the primacy of Express Entry scores, reduce federal category-based selection, give provinces greater responsibility for occupation-specific immigration, rebuild the temporary-to-permanent “two-step” model around higher-skilled entrants and improve immigration data. Its diagnosis of volatility and declining public confidence is persuasive. Its legal prescriptions are less complete.

The central difficulty is that Canadian immigration law is not simply an economic-selection algorithm. Section 3 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) requires the system to pursue social, cultural and economic benefits; support minority official-language communities; reunite families; share immigration’s benefits across regions; protect system integrity; and comply with the Charter and international human-rights instruments. The IRPA separately authorizes selection through family, economic and refugee classes. Earnings matter, but Parliament has never made maximum earnings the statute’s singular organizing principle.

That legal architecture matters because RBC sometimes treats the Immigration Levels Plan, Express Entry, provincial nominations and temporary migration as components of one policy dial. They are not. They operate through different statutory provisions, regulations, ministerial instructions, intergovernmental agreements and program-delivery rules, as illustrated below.

RBC’s strongest criticism concerns category-based Express Entry draws. It says targeted categories allow lower-scoring candidates to “leapfrog” candidates with higher Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) scores. That is descriptively true across different invitation rounds, but legally incomplete. Parliament amended the IRPA in 2022 to authorize the minister to establish categories and separate groupings of eligible candidates. The minister must identify the economic goal supporting a category, and the statutory scheme provides for consultation and reporting. Within a category-based round, candidates must first qualify for an Express Entry program and are then ranked by CRS score against other eligible members of that category; the highest-ranked candidates in that grouping receive invitations.

Category selection therefore does not suspend the points system. It changes the comparison group pursuant to express statutory authority. The legitimate policy question is whether Parliament gave the executive too much latitude to define those groups, whether the evidentiary basis is sufficiently transparent, and whether occupation lists change too frequently. Describing targeted candidates merely as lower scorers moving ahead in line risks obscuring that statutory design. It also overlooks Parliament’s deliberate choice to balance human-capital ranking with specific economic and linguistic objectives.

Before RBC published its report, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) had completed consultations on potentially merging the three federal high-skilled classes into one class and recalibrating CRS points. The government’s discussion paper contemplated preserving core factors such as language, education, age and Canadian work experience, while potentially rewarding employment in high-wage occupations and recognizing Canadian professional licences. IRCC’s Forward Regulatory Plan confirms that implementing a single federal high-skilled class would require amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (IRPR), not merely a change in messaging or an annual levels announcement.

RBC is right to demand predictability, but its proposed one per cent population growth target would not translate neatly into an immigration law ceiling. The 2026-2028 Levels Plan establishes permanent resident targets and targets for certain new temporary-worker and student arrivals. It expressly excludes visitors, permit extensions, in-Canada study and work applications and asylum claimants from its temporary-arrival targets, while separately accounting for those populations in the methodology supporting the government’s goal of reducing temporary residents below five per cent of Canada’s population. Population growth also depends on births, deaths and departures — matters the immigration minister does not control through the IRPA.

The legal status of the Levels Plan is equally significant. IRPA s. 94 requires an annual report to Parliament containing immigration projections and information about ministerial instructions, category-based selection and provincial measures. It does not transform the plan itself into a regulation governing individual eligibility. RBC’s suggestion that policy changes and ministerial instructions be confined to the annual plan could improve notice and coordination, but it is not a legal substitute for amending regulations or issuing instructions under the powers Parliament has enacted.

Indeed, ministerial instructions perform functions the Levels Plan cannot. Under IRPA s. 10.3, they govern Express Entry rankings, categories, eligibility for invitations and invitation numbers. Under s. 87.3, they may control the order, conditions and volume of application processing — including, where expressly provided, pending applications. Restricting every instruction to one annual window could reduce volatility, but it could also impede responses to fraud, court decisions, sudden humanitarian pressures or operational failure. The stronger reform would be disciplined use of instructions: advance notice where feasible, published evidence, transition rules and clear protection against retroactive unfairness.

RBC’s recommendation to place most occupation-based selection with provinces is also more complicated than it appears. The IRPA permits federal-provincial immigration agreements, while IRPR s. 87 requires provincial nominees to be selected under an agreement and approved provincial criteria, based on their ability to become economically established and their intention to reside in the nominating province. Provinces evaluate those two elements, but nomination does not displace federal admissibility requirements or the federal decision on permanent residence.

Provincial control may improve regional labour-market matching, but it cannot guarantee retention. The legal test is an applicant’s intention at the relevant time, not an enforceable promise to remain indefinitely in one province. Nor would transferring categories automatically simplify the system: each province operates under its own agreement, legislation, labour-market priorities and allocation.

The report’s treatment of two-step immigration deserves even greater legal caution. A study or work permit is temporary status, not the first instalment of permanent residence. The IRPA recognizes “dual intent”: an applicant may hope to become a permanent resident, but an officer must still be satisfied that the person will leave Canada when temporary status expires if permanent residence is not obtained. The regulations impose that departure requirement on both work- and study-permit applicants.

Nor is Canadian experience interchangeable across programs. The Canadian Experience Class generally requires at least one year of authorized Canadian work in the National Occupational Classification-specified TEER levels within the preceding three years. Work performed during full-time study, unauthorized work and most self-employment do not count. The Post-Graduation Work Permit Program (PGWP) is not itself established as a permanent residence pathway in the IRPA or IRPR; the Federal Court has characterized it as a ministerial program whose published eligibility requirements are applied strictly. Recent PGWP rule changes also condition eligibility for some graduates on completing an approved field of study connected to identified labour shortages. The real debate is not whether Canadian experience should count, but which experience should count, how heavily and whether people were given sufficiently stable rules when deciding to study or work in Canada.

RBC is on firmer ground in calling for better data and transparency. The auditor general’s 2026 examination of the International Student Program found that IRCC reduced permit issuance but did not understand why approval rates fell more sharply than forecast. It also identified over 153,000 students as potentially non-compliant in 2023 and 2024, while only 4,057 investigations were launched. Better exit, compliance and outcomes data would support more defensible ministerial instructions and more credible public reporting. Also, a further significant reduction of international students to a more manageable level that can be properly screened for security and fraud seems to be a sensible policy course of action.

However, using temporary earnings or the earnings associated with particular colleges as a selection factor would raise its own legal policy questions. Earnings may reflect licensing barriers, geography, employer practices or labour-market discrimination rather than an applicant’s long-term potential. IRCC itself has proposed using occupational wage levels rather than individual income partly to mitigate gender and regional disparities. Any redesigned scoring model should publish its methodology, validate discriminatory effects, provide meaningful transition rules and remain consistent with the IRPA’s direction that immigration decisions respect Charter equality and freedom from discrimination.

RBC has made a valuable contribution by insisting that Canada needs stability, transparency and a more coherent connection between immigration selection and successful outcomes. But a “smarter strategy” cannot be achieved merely by reducing categories or elevating earnings. It requires Parliament and the executive to distinguish planning targets from legal authority, temporary admission from permanent selection, provincial nomination from federal responsibility, and economic forecasting from the multiple objectives Parliament embedded in the IRPA. The report identifies the right governance problem. The legal solution must be more precise than the economic diagnosis.

Sergio R. Karas, principal of Karas Immigration Law Professional Corporation, is a certified specialist in Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Law by the Law Society of Ontario, division chair of the ABA International Law Section, past chair of the Ontario Bar Association Citizenship and Immigration Section, past chair of the International Bar Association Immigration and Nationality Committee, and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

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