Non-Permanent Residents (NPR) in Canada – Achieving a reduction with the Comprehensive Ranking System

Canada has in recent years witnessed an unprecedented and unsustainable surge in its non-permanent resident (NPR) population. In response, Minister of Immigration Marc Miller recently announced a target to cut the NPR population to five percent of the overall population in three years. While the government has multiple policy levers at its disposal to achieve this target, they have complex tradeoffs. It is critical that the benefits and drawbacks of each approach are weighed to ensure that policy benefits the economy and does not exacerbate what the Bank of Canada has called Canada’s “productivity emergency.”

Between January 1 of 2022 and 2024, Canada’s NPR population roughly doubled from 1,356,622 to 2,661,784. This astonishing growth means that NPRs accounted for 6.5 percent of the Canadian population on January 1, 2024, up from 3.5 percent two years earlier.

We calculate that the government’s 5 percent target requires that the NPR population be reduced by 22 percent over the next three years or by 7.4 percent per year (see Figure and online Appendix). Including growth apart from temporary immigration, this implies annual population growth rates of 0.74 percent over the 2024-2027 period, which is dramatically lower than the 3.2 percent rate in 2023.

How to achieve this reduction in the NPR population?

The best option is to simplify the economic immigration system by offering a single pathway to economic-class immigrants that uses the CRS to select candidates who are expected to have the highest future earnings in Canada. In addition, we recommend enhancing the set of human capital characteristics used in the CRS to include information on fields of study, names of postsecondary institutions where postsecondary credentials were obtained (quality matters to eventual outcomes), and previous earnings levels. This will improve effectiveness of the CRS in screening candidates and potentially enable the government to simultaneously increase immigration intakes and the average quality of new immigrants.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @  Skuterud, Mahboubi – Shrinking Canada’s NPR Population: How Best to Do It | C.D. Howe Institute | Canada Economy News | Canadian Government Policy