Recent claims circulating on social media that Canada has implemented a three-year freeze on immigration are false. While Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has announced changes to immigration policy, these adjustments do not halt all new arrivals.
On November 27, 2024, a post on X (formerly Twitter) claimed that Trudeau had announced a “three-year freeze” on immigration. Similar claims were repeated across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where a video, viewed over 400,000 times, suggested that the changes would temporarily pause immigration.
However, these claims misinterpret the new policy.
In reality, Canada’s immigration strategy has been revised to reduce the number of immigrants allowed into the country each year. On October 24, 2024, the Liberal government unveiled new immigration caps, but these do not involve an outright ban.
“There is no freeze on immigration in Canada,” clarified Isabelle Dubois, a spokeswoman for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), in a statement on December 4, 2024.
Under the updated plan, Canada’s target for permanent residents will drop from an expected 500,000 applicants in 2025 and 2026 to 395,000 and 380,000, respectively. In 2027, the target will be further reduced to 365,000.
Additionally, Canada has announced a reduction in the number of permits for international students and temporary foreign workers, effective September 2024.
Trudeau addressed the changes in a video shared on November 17, 2024. In the video, he admitted that Canada had made mistakes in the past by accepting a high number of immigrants to address labor shortages following the pandemic. He explained that the government was now scaling back immigration to allow the economy to adjust to the country’s growing population.
These adjustments come amid growing public concerns about the strain on resources like food and housing, as population growth has accelerated in recent years. However, as Canada fine-tunes its immigration policies, it has not enacted a blanket freeze on new arrivals.
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