A new independent immigration index suggests Canada’s current permanent resident intake targets may be significantly higher than what current economic and housing conditions can comfortably absorb.

Immigration News Canada announced the launch of its new Canada Permanent Resident Absorption Index this week, an independent model designed to estimate how many permanent residents Canada and individual provinces may be able to absorb under current labour, housing and service conditions.

According to the model, Canada’s current “stabilizing” threshold is estimated at approximately 239,700 permanent residents annually. That compares with the federal government’s 2026 immigration target of 380,000 permanent resident admissions.

The index says that creates what it describes as a national “pressure ratio” of roughly 1.59 times the estimated stabilizing threshold.

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Model examines housing, labour and service pressures

The organization says the index is not intended to serve as official government policy or immigration targets. Instead, it is designed to help researchers, employers, settlement organizations and policymakers better understand regional immigration absorption capacity.

The model incorporates factors including unemployment rates, job vacancies, housing supply, rental vacancy rates, affordability, population growth, health-care capacity and immigrant retention.

The index also distinguishes between new permanent residents arriving from outside Canada and temporary residents already living in the country who transition to permanent residency.

According to the index, Ontario currently has the highest estimated provincial absorption threshold at approximately 92,700 permanent residents annually, followed by Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia.

Calgary ranked among highest major cities

At the municipal level, Toronto was identified as having the country’s highest census metropolitan area stabilizing threshold, followed by Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa-Gatineau and Calgary.

Kamal Deep Singh, founder of Immigration News Canada and a regulated Canadian immigration consultant, said the project is intended to create a more transparent way of discussing immigration capacity.

“This index is our first public attempt to measure immigration absorption capacity in a transparent, benchmark-driven way,” Singh said in a release.

The organization says the index uses publicly available data from Statistics Canada, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Longitudinal Immigration Database.