Canada Admitted Nearly 500,000 Permanent Residents Last Year and Built Less Than Half the Housing They Need

In 2024, Canada admitted 483,640 people as permanent residents¹ — the highest annual intake since comparable records began in 1972. The year before that, the number was 471,808.² Two consecutive years. Nearly a million permanent residents in twenty-four months, on top of a temporary resident population that, at its peak, exceeded six percent of the country's entire headcount.³

In that same 2024 calendar year, Canada completed 245,120 new housing starts — a two percent increase over 2023,⁴ described by CMHC's own chief economist as falling "significantly short of the level needed to address Canada's housing affordability challenges."⁵

Household formation in Canada hit a historical record of 482,000 net new households (defined as the creation of the need for a household when people start living separately or due to other factors; often creating demand for homes that exceeds the number of new units built) in 2024.⁶ Canada built 245,120 new homes. The country needed roughly twice what it built, and admitted more new permanent residents than it built houses to put them in. This is not a coincidence or a natural disaster. It is the foreseeable result of decisions made deliberately, in writing, who held federal cabinet positions and faced no meaningful political consequence for the outcome.

The primary architect of those decisions was Marc Miller.

What Marc Miller Said, and When He Said It

Miller became Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship in July 2023.⁷ His first significant act was to announce the 2024–2026 Immigration Levels Plan: 485,000 permanent residents in 2024 and 500,000 in both 2025 and 2026.⁸ Half a million people per year. In a country that, at the time, was already widely understood to be experiencing a severe housing affordability crisis in its two largest cities.

In August of that same year, when asked whether he would consider reducing immigration targets in response to a Bank of Canada report documenting the pressure new arrivals were placing on housing demand, Miller's answer was categorical. "Without those skilled workers coming from outside Canada, we absolutely cannot build the homes and meet the demand that exists currently today," he said.⁹ He was not considering reductions.

Fourteen months later, on October 24, 2024, Miller stood before cameras and announced he was cutting those same targets by twenty percent.¹⁰ The 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan reduced permanent resident targets to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026.¹¹ The justification was that "pressures on housing and social services require a more sustainable approach."¹²

The same pressures that had existed in August 2023 when he said cuts were not feasible. The same housing market that had been tightening since 2015. The same affordability crisis that Statistics Canada, CMHC, and the Bank of Canada had been documenting in quarterly reports throughout his entire tenure.

Miller did not resign. He was not asked to resign. He was shuffled to a different cabinet position, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture,¹³ where he promptly earned a rebuke from Quebec Premier François Legault, who described him as a "disgrace to all Quebecers"¹⁴ over comments on the French language file. The man who oversaw the most aggressive immigration expansion in Canadian history, presiding over two consecutive years of near-500,000 permanent resident intake while the national housing gap widened, is now in charge of Canadian identity.

That is where the file sits.

The Actual Scale of the Problem

CMHC projects Canada needs an additional 3.5 million housing units on top of what is already being built to restore affordability by 2030.¹⁵ Approximately two-thirds of that gap is concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia.¹⁶

To put a finer point on that figure: housing starts (defined as when construction officially begins on a new residential building) must nearly double to around 430,000 to 480,000 units per year until 2035 to meet projected demand.¹⁷ Canada built 245,120 in 2024. Toronto specifically needs a 70 percent increase in housing starts over the next decade to return to pre-pandemic affordability levels.¹⁸ Toronto, where the Liberal Party of Canada holds numerous federal seats and where the housing file has been a source of voter frustration for years, needs to nearly double its construction output just to stop falling further behind — and it is currently moving in the opposite direction.

Condominium apartment starts in Toronto declined sharply in the first half of 2025,¹⁹ driven by a pullback in investor demand, leading to project cancellations and delays. Builder confidence, as measured by the Canadian Home Builders' Housing Market Index, remained near historic lows in the second quarter of 2025, with confidence especially weak in Ontario and British Columbia.²⁰

The government's own Parliamentary Budget Officer assessed Miller's October 2024 cuts and found that the revised immigration targets would only reduce the housing gap by 534,000 units by 2030²¹ — significantly below the 658,000 units the government had publicly claimed.²²

The Argument the Government Made — and Why It Doesn't Hold

The standard Liberal defence on this file runs as follows: immigration is necessary for economic growth, Canada needs workers to build the homes it lacks, and reducing immigration would make the housing crisis worse by removing the construction labour required to address it.

Miller made precisely this argument in August 2023. "The federal government is making housing more affordable and bringing in the skilled workers required to build more homes," he said.²³

There are two problems with that argument. The first is empirical: 99.3 percent of Canada's population growth in the first quarter of 2024 was attributable to international migration.²⁴ The homes being demanded were demanded primarily by the same immigration intake that was supposed to build them. The pipeline of construction workers was simultaneously the pipeline of housing demand. Whether the net effect was positive, negative, or neutral is a genuine policy debate; but the government presented it as self-evidently positive and did so while the affordability numbers moved consistently in one direction.

The second problem is accountability. If you are the Minister of Immigration and you argue that the housing crisis cannot be solved without immigration, and the housing crisis visibly worsens under the largest immigration intake in fifty years while you hold that portfolio, you owe Canadians a direct explanation of what went wrong. Marc Miller has not provided one. Neither has Justin Trudeau, who set the trajectory of escalating immigration targets beginning in 2015 and accelerated them through every subsequent mandate. Neither has Mark Carney, who has been Prime Minister since March 2025²⁵ and has made no significant move to revisit the structural relationship between immigration intake, housing construction capacity, and the gap between the two.

What Conservative Voters Are Owed

Pierre Poilievre has made housing and immigration central to the Conservative platform, and the polling reflects that these issues register with Canadians. By 2024, over half of surveyed Canadians believed there were too many immigrants coming to the country²⁶ — a figure that would have been politically inconceivable a decade ago and reflects, not hostility to newcomers, but a reasonable assessment that the system had outrun its own capacity to absorb and house people.

The Conservative position, that immigration levels should be tied to demonstrated infrastructure capacity, including housing, is not radical (which is what the NDP, Leftists, and Liberals would like us to believe). It is the position that a responsible government should have adopted years before the crisis became undeniable. The fact that the Liberals eventually moved in that direction in October 2024, after spending a year arguing it was impossible and unnecessary, is not evidence that the system worked. It is evidence that the political cost of inaction finally exceeded the political cost of admitting the problem.

Canadians who have watched their rent double, their mortgage renewal become unaffordable, and their children priced out of the cities they grew up in deserve a direct answer to a direct question: who decided to admit nearly a million permanent residents over two years into a country that was building half the homes it needed, and what are the consequences for having gotten that calculation so spectacularly wrong?

Marc Miller has a new title. The housing gap has not gotten smaller.

That is the complete state of the file. It is time for the Liberals and MPs in Ottawa to stand up for Canadians — stop admitting so many permanent residents, and start focusing on creating more homes for Canadians, and making those homes affordable.

That is the current state of Canada’s immigration file.

Key statistics sourced from: Government of Canada 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration (canada.ca); Statistics Canada Demographic Estimates Q1 and Q4 2024 (statcan.gc.ca); CMHC Housing Supply Shortages reports 2022–2025 (cmhc-schl.gc.ca); Parliamentary Budget Officer Household Formation and Housing Stock report, August 2025 (pbo-dpb.ca); Global News, CBC News, and official ministerial speaking notes on record. See citations for more information.

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