It’s been about a year since Immigration Minister Marc Miller took up his post at Canada’s gates with promises to bring the flow of newcomers down to manageable levels, and the situation has only gotten worse.

In 2023 alone, 1.3 million people came to the country, growing the population by 3.2 per cent — that’s more than three times as seen in the United States. It’s a rate that would have been hard to fathom years ago: temporary foreign workers are up sevenfold since 2000, as is the international student population. Once on a gentle rise, the numbers took off in 2015, and became especially steep after the COVID pandemic.