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20-06-2026
TORONTO: When Diana Gallego listened to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s widely touted speech at the World Economic Forum at the start of this year, she couldn’t help but feel a disconnect.
Carney had made an impassioned plea to the world’s “middle powers” to break with a United States-led international order that he said was no longer working, and his words found receptive audiences around the world but for Gallego, co-executive director of FCJ Refugee Centre, an organization that supports refugees and asylum seekers in Canada’s largest city, the prime minister’s statements rang hollow amid his government’s hardening approach to immigration.
“We saw the [prime] minister going to Davos [with] this beautiful discourse, saying we should not copy our neighbors….but internally, the policies are telling us another story,” Gallego told media. “Canada is closing the doors now.”
Gallego is among more than a dozen experts from lawyers to professors, rights advocates and former government officials who told Al Jazeera that Canada is at a “troubling” crossroads in its policies towards migrants and refugees.
As Canadians have grappled with rising economic and social pressures in recent years, a decades-old consensus on the benefits of immigration has frayed.
Hostile rhetoric blaming newcomers for Canada’s ills has intensified, and Carney’s government has slashed temporary visas and restricted access to asylum. Experts say a “generational shift” is under way.
“The general rhetoric is, ‘We don’t want you here’,” said Gallego.
A settler-colonial state, Canada has encouraged successive waves of immigration throughout its history, from largely European settlement in the early to mid-1900s to specialized programs that brought refugees and high- and low-skilled workers to Canadian shores.
For decades, that influx of newcomers was widely viewed as a positive thing: immigration was fueling the country’s economy, staffing key job sectors and counteracting a rapidly ageing population but over the past few years, Canada has seen one of the most dramatic shifts in how the public views immigration and the government has tapped into increasingly negative sentiment to cut programs and pass new, restrictive laws.
The policy changes began under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal Party government had dramatically increased temporary immigration during the COVID-19 pandemic to fill labour market gaps.
The figures shot up rapidly and, by October 2024, there were nearly 3.15 million non-permanent residents in Canada, accounting for roughly 8 percent of the population, according to official figures.
At the same time, systemic issues from a shortage of affordable housing to high grocery costs and long hospital wait times were putting the squeeze on many Canadian households.
Public attitudes quickly hardened, and a 2024 poll (PDF) found a majority of Canadians saying for the first time in decades that there was “too much immigration”.
Since then, several incidents of xenophobic violence have been reported, including in some of Canada’s largest cities, where the influx of migrants has been among the most visible.
Under pressure as angry discourse soared, the Trudeau government promised in 2024 to get immigration back to “sustainable” levels, and the cuts began, including most notably to international student visas.
“The reality is that not everyone who wants to come to Canada will be able to, just like not everyone who wants to stay in Canada will be able to,” Marc Miller, Canada’s former immigration minister, said in September that year. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
