Canada is a land of immigrants.
Everyone who lives here, even the First Nations people, either come from somewhere else or are descendants of those who came from somewhere else.
Canada wouldn’t exist without immigrants.
The first European settlers, if we don’t count the Vikings, came from France, followed by the British and then a wide variety of places over the centuries.
Many of Canada’s most recent immigrants have come from places like Syria, Ukraine, the Philippines and India.
These new Canadians have changed the face of Canada and have provided a much-needed boost to the labour force and society as a whole.
However, we are now seeing a public backlash against immigration, which can be largely blamed on a policy failure on the part of government, particularly the feds.
The large number of immigrants welcomed to the country in the last 10 years was not matched by an increase in infrastructure needed to accommodate all the newcomers.
Read Also
As a result, it’s often easy to blame social problems such as the housing crisis, the extreme pressure on our health care system and a struggling education system on these valuable newcomers.
One must also wonder if the anti-immigration sentiment running rampant in the United States these days, reflected by the draconian measures instituted by U.S. Donald Trump’s administration, might also be leaking north across the border.
Whatever the cause of the backlash, the response from Mark Carney’s Liberal government has been swift.
Ottawa recently announced the 2026-28 Immigration Levels Plan that sets permanent resident admission targets at 380,000 per year and reiterates the government’s commitment to reduce the non-permanent resident (NPR) population to less than five per cent of Canada’s total population by the end of 2027.
The Parliamentary Budget Office projects that the share of NPRs in the total population will fall from its 2024 peak of 7.6 per cent to slightly less than five per cent by the end of 2027, aligning with the government’s target.
As the NPR population continues to decline, the budgetary office expects that the country’s total population growth will remain flat in 2026 and pick up only modestly to 0.3 per cent in 2027.
Over the medium term, the office projects population growth to stabilize around 0.8 per cent annually, which is below the country’s historical average of 1.1 per cent per year.
A national debate is needed about the wisdom of this policy, but for the agriculture industry, the policy shift is having very real consequences.
In 2025, the federal government ended the Agri-Food Pilot, a program that helped temporary foreign workers at meat-packing plants, mushroom farms, livestock farms and greenhouses become permanent Canadian residents.
The death of that pilot project, combined with a federal crackdown on businesses that have over-used the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, has dragged agriculture into the public fight over foreign workers and immigration levels.
The federal government is now promoting that it is enforcing the rules around the TFWP.
“When it comes to jobs, Canadians are always first in line. To be clear: the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a last resort option for employers,” said a federal press release in July.
Many producers are frustrated that farming is caught up in the TFWP mess. Yes, they say, there are bad actors in the restaurant and hospitality sector who abused the program, but the restrictions are hurting agricultural businesses.
Feedlots are one sector that relies heavily on temporary foreign workers, and tightening up access to them has a real world impact.
This is why agriculture needs to step up its pressure on the government to separate agriculture from whatever other concerns there may be with temporary foreign workers.
Grain producers have a different problem.
Many of them report large numbers of applicants to a job ad, but few, if any are qualified.
The answer here may be to introduce more education programs that teach unskilled employees who are interested in working on a farm how to actually do the job.
Whatever the solution, the bottom line is clear — the ag labour shortage is deepening and the problem cannot be simply swept under the rug.