Lawyers tell Canadian Lawyer that new limits and backlogs risk starving our economy of key talent, writes Tim Wilbur
Immigration is rarely talked about in the same breath as highways, power grids or housing starts. But if infrastructure is the backbone of Canada’s resilience, immigration is the circulatory system that keeps it alive. Ottawa has spent the past year promising faster project approvals and a “whole-of-government” push on housing and infrastructure. Too often, though, it has treated the people needed to build and run those projects – immigrants – as a security or social policy file, rather than as core economic infrastructure.
Our recent focus on immigration has traced how that disconnect emerged – and why the federal government’s latest immigration “reset” suggests it is finally listening, albeit only halfway.
When the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association makes the economic case for rebuilding business immigration, it does so in the language of productivity and growth. CILA noted that Canada once welcomed roughly 30,000 business immigrants a year; under the current levels plan, that number has fallen to just 500. Through its Catalyst Canada initiative, CILA frames business immigration as an “engine of growth,” tied to GDP per capita, investment, trade and job creation. Its proposal for a Canadian Business Immigration Council is not merely another advisory committee. It is an attempt to build governance infrastructure: a standing mechanism to test programs, gather real-time market intelligence and adjust course before problems harden into crises.
The cost of lacking that kind of architecture is laid bare when CILA warns that Canada’s immigration system is reaching a breaking point. Board member Rick Lamanna points to decade-long wait times in some streams, sudden cancellations of the start-up visa and self-employed programs, and a 2026–28 immigration plan that cuts both permanent and temporary resident levels even as Statistics Canada records population decline driven by fewer non-permanent residents. His argument is that this is not simply about high volumes or pandemic hangovers; it is what you get when you try to run a national immigration system without a coherent strategy.
If immigration is infrastructure, our economic “pipes” are also badly misaligned. In our reporting that Francophone priorities and a glut of foreign students are straining the business immigration system, Vancouver lawyer Steven Meurrens and Toronto lawyer Evan Green describe how category-based Express Entry draws and steadily rising Francophone targets have been “pigeonholed into economic immigration,” crowding out employers’ ability to retain needed workers. For some employers, the practical takeaway is perverse: a French-speaking bar manager can have a clearer pathway to permanent residence than a non-French-speaking CEO.
International students, meanwhile, have been treated as a revenue source, a demographic tool and a soft-power asset – until they weren’t. Institutions marketed Canadian education with the implicit promise of permanent residence after a period of skilled work in Canada on a post-graduation work permit. That model collapses when more than half a million students arrive each year, and pathways are not scaled accordingly. Many graduates now face expiring post-graduation work permits with no realistic route to stay; at least one multimillion-dollar startup built in Canada has already decamped to the US, citing our rules as a factor.
Operationally, the system often looks less like infrastructure and more like a series of bottlenecks. Lamanna highlights work-permit extensions and renewals as a prime example. These are workers already here, already vetted, already paying taxes – yet they face long delays that upend employers’ workforce planning and push workers toward precarious status. At the same time, sudden caps on international students have thrown universities and colleges, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, into projected deficits, threatening the research and innovation capacity that underpins Canada’s ambitions in areas like artificial intelligence.
Taken together, these stories show immigration infrastructure – governance, economic pathways and service delivery – under serious strain, even as immigration now accounts for nearly all of Canada’s labourforce growth.
The federal government’s most recent moves suggest the message is beginning to land. In its “Supplementary information for the 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan”, Ottawa for the first time spells out numerical targets for temporary resident arrivals and ties them explicitly to “sustainable” immigration and system capacity.
These are not cosmetic tweaks. They mark a shift toward thinking about immigration volumes and pathways as questions of national capacity and planning, not just border control. They are, in that sense, signs that Ottawa has heard at least part of what immigration lawyers, employers and institutions have been saying.
But they are still fundamentally reactive and control-first. Caps and new categories can slow or redirect the flow; they do not build the pipes. Without something like the business immigration council CILA has proposed, Canada still lacks a permanent mechanism to co-design programs with the people who use them and to iterate based on evidence. Without revisiting the near-closure of entrepreneur and executive pathways, or bringing student policy back into line with realistic post-study options, we will continue to lose talent to countries that offer clearer, faster routes.
If we are serious about resilience, the question is no longer whether Canada can build enough housing, energy projects or transit lines. It is whether we will finally build immigration infrastructure to match.
