Law360 Canada (November 12, 2026, 1:15 PM EST) --
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| Sergio R. Karas |
Canada’s new immigration plan is a necessary correction. Yet without stronger integrity controls, transparent targets and accountable enforcement, it risks confusing lower intake with effective management.
Budget 2026 signals that Ottawa has finally accepted an uncomfortable reality: immigration policy cannot be divorced from housing, public services, labour-market conditions and administrative capacity. Its 2027-2029 Immigration Levels Plan holds permanent resident admissions at 380,000 annually and targets 370,000 new temporary resident arrivals each year — 220,000 workers and 150,000 students. Economic immigration would account for 64.4 per cent of permanent admissions.
That is a more disciplined starting point than the rapid expansion of recent years. But it is not yet a credible control system.
The headline targets are incomplete
Andrzej Rostek: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
The temporary resident targets cover new arrivals, not the full temporary population. They exclude permit extensions, in-Canada work and study applications, visitors, asylum claimants and certain seasonal workers. Post-graduation work permits are also excluded because Ottawa classifies them as extensions or changes of status rather than new arrivals.
That distinction may be administratively convenient, but it obscures the question that matters to provinces, municipalities and Canadians: how many people will be living in Canada, requiring housing and services, in each year?
Budget 2026 also creates additional space to transition up to 200,000 people already in Canada to permanent residence in 2027 — up to 100,000 workers and their families, and up to 100,000 people in a humanitarian cohort. Regularizing established workers or resolving long-pending humanitarian files may be politically expedient. But those admissions should be presented alongside, not outside, the headline permanent resident target. It is a shell game.
The alternative is straightforward. Parliament should require an annual consolidated migration account reporting new arrivals, extensions, asylum inflows, status transitions, departures and persons without valid status. Exceptional admissions should be shown in the same table as regular admissions. Quarterly results should then be reconciled against Statistics Canada’s population estimates. Canadians should not need to decode administrative classifications to understand the real size of the system.
Integrity receives funding, but not a measurable plan
Budget 2026 proposes approximately $98 million over three years for asylum processing, $90 million over five years to expand biometric capacity, $73 million over three years for immigration removals and $13 million over four years to confront migrant smuggling. It also provides $192.5 million over four years to stabilize and modernize critical border technology.
These expenditures are welcome. But funding announcements are not performance standards.
The Auditor General’s March 2026 examination of the International Student Program illustrates the problem. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) identified 153,324 students as potentially non-compliant in 2023 and 2024 yet launched only 4,057 investigations. It also failed to act on 800 permit holders identified through departmental investigations as having used fraudulent documents or misrepresentations; 92 per cent later applied for other immigration status.
A government genuinely committed to integrity should create a permanent, properly funded post-admission compliance and fraud unit. Confirmed fraud findings should generate immediate information alerts across IRCC and Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) systems, subject to procedural fairness and an opportunity to respond. High-risk cases should receive mandatory review before any extension or subsequent status is granted. Designated learning institutions that repeatedly fail to report enrolment or compliance information should face published and consistently applied sanctions.
Most importantly, the government should report results: referrals, investigations opened, files resolved, inadmissibility proceedings commenced, sanctions imposed and average completion times. Integrity cannot be measured by how much money is announced.
Asylum funding must be tied to inventory reduction
The asylum system has improved slightly, but the challenge remains substantial. Pending Refugee Protection Division claims declined from 299,855 in December 2025 to 252,387 in September 2026 as monthly finalizations exceeded intake. However, the number of cases finalized without a full hearing or full examination has increased substantially. Canada has one of the highest approval rates in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Budget 2026 should fund the Immigration and Refugee Board through a stable, demand-responsive formula rather than recurring temporary appropriations. Additional resources should be tied to transparent targets for inventory age, hearing readiness, postponements, finalizations and decision quality.
A better model would combine early identity and file-completeness screening with differentiated case management. Straightforward, well-documented claims could proceed through expedited streams; complex credibility, exclusion or security cases would continue to receive full hearings and appropriate preparation time.
Asylum efficiency does not require weakening refugee protection. It requires moving meritorious and non-meritorious cases to lawful decisions sooner, without sacrificing integrity.
Removal capacity needs more than a budget line
CBSA enforced 16,426 removals through Sept. 30, 2026. At the same date, it reported 52,457 cases in its “removal in progress” inventory and 34,319 individuals in its wanted inventory. Against that operational reality, $73 million over three years may assist, but it is not an enforcement strategy.
Ottawa should establish dedicated end-to-end removal teams responsible for cases from the final decision through departure. Priority should remain with national-security, serious-criminality, organized crime and human-rights-violation cases. For other enforceable orders, the government should expand supervised voluntary departure, strengthen electronic exit confirmation and negotiate practical travel-document arrangements with countries that routinely delay documentation.
CBSA should publish monthly aging data showing how long enforceable cases remain outstanding and why: unavailable travel documents, unresolved litigation, pre-removal risk assessments, inability to locate the person or other statutory impediments. Faster enforcement must remain consistent with stays, risk assessments and judicial supervision. Due process and effective removal are not competing principles.
Economic immigration must reward proven employers and workers
Budget 2026 provides $151.5 million over five years to improve Temporary Foreign Worker Program service delivery and $82 million over four years for the Migrant Worker Support Program. It also allows certain low-wage Labour Market Impact Assessments to remain valid for up to two years and proposes more regional flexibility beginning March 1, 2027.
The risk is that faster processing simply reproduces existing weaknesses and fails to prevent fraud.
Ottawa should replace broad employer access with a tiered trusted-employer model. Employers with verified payroll records, competitive wages, low turnover, no recruitment-fee violations and a strong compliance history should receive faster, multi-year processing. High-risk employers and recruiters should face more frequent inspections, security deposits or bonds, and escalating exclusion periods.
Economic selection should likewise be linked to demonstrable outcomes: persistent regional vacancies, wage levels, credential usability, retention, and whether the position complements rather than displaces the domestic workforce. Provincial nominations and the new in-Canada worker pathways should disclose the occupations selected, employers involved and regional retention outcomes.
Accountability is the missing reform
Budget 2026 includes no substantive policy reform. Its legislative annex proposes only an information-sharing amendment to the
Department of Citizenship and Immigration Act intended to help newcomers access government services. More broadly, the budget’s immigration measures remain largely a collection of targets and appropriations without a unified accountability framework.
Each major expenditure should have a public baseline, annual target and responsible deputy minister. Parliament should receive one quarterly immigration-system dashboard covering population flows, processing inventories, asylum decisions, security-screening delays, fraud investigations, employer inspections, removal inventories and client-service standards.
Budget 2026 marks a necessary retreat from unmanaged growth. But control is not achieved merely by lowering the number on the front door while ignoring extensions, fraud, backlogs and unenforced decisions elsewhere in the system.
Canada needs an immigration system that is selective, enforceable, economically useful and procedurally fair. Budget 2026 fails to accomplish that goal.
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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