“Look, folks, it’s simple to me. Canada needs more people,” Sean Fraser, Canada’s minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, told a news conference Tuesday. The government is looking to boost a labor market that left nearly a million job vacancies in the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
The new immigration plan aims to take in 465,000 people in 2023, rising to 500,000 in 2025. The Canadian immigration department says it admitted 405,000 newcomers last year, which was “the most we’ve ever welcomed in a single year.”