The Canadian Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to increase immigration levels to 500,000 new arrivals per year by 2025 after announcing over 400,000 last year.
The Trudeau government announced this week that 2021 saw a total of 405,000 new immigrants to Canada despite the Chinese coronavirus pandemic and various travel restrictions associated with the Canadian federal government’s response to the pandemic.
According to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser, however, over 400,000 new immigrants to Canada are not enough to fill labour gaps and stated that there are around a million jobs that need to be filled, broadcaster CBC reports.
The government will look to further increase the rate of immigration to at least 500,000 per year by 2025, with immigrants allegedly being chosen based on their work experience or skills.
Of the over 400,000 migrants who arrived in Canada, just 62 per cent were economic class migrants, while 20 per cent were a result of chain migration or family unification and 15 per cent came as refugees and protected persons.
The surge of new arrivals in recent years to Canada has led to immigrants becoming nearly a quarter of the entire population of Canada according to the 2021 national census and statistics Canada projects that by 2041 over a third of all Canadians will be born abroad.
Around 8.3 million people living in Canada permanently are immigrants, the largest share of any country in the G7 and between 2016 and 2021 immigrants accounted for 71.1 per cent of Canada’s population growth.
The origin of immigrants has also largely changed as Europeans now make up just over 10 per cent of new immigrants while Asians make up 62 per cent, with Indian immigrants being nearly a fifth of all immigrants from 2016 to 2021.
“The last time that such a high proportion of immigrants came from a single place of birth was during the 1971 census, when 20.9 per cent of all recent immigrants came from the United Kingdom,” Statistics Canada stated last month.
The surge of immigration matches the goals of the Canadian NGO, the Century Initiative, which has set a goal for the government to import more and more migrants in order to see Canada achieve the goal of 100 million residents by the year 2100.
The NGO, which tracks the population at 39 million people currently, argues, “Our population is ageing, we’re having fewer children, and our workforce is shrinking. If we stay the course, Canada’s annual GDP growth will decline, along with our influence on the world stage.”
In 2016, Century Initiative Chair of the Board of Directors Mark Wiseman, a former senior managing director for the investment behemoth BlackRock, along with the group’s co-founder Dominic Barton, sat on the Canadian Minister of Finance’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, advising former Trudeau minister Bill Morneau.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.
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