Canada boosts transparency on permanent resident admissions
Canada’s immigration department has made clear that its top-line targets for annual permanent residence (PR) admissions don’t tell the whole story.
On a government web page that went live on July 21, 2026, the department confirms that the levels plan targets for 2026 and 2027 do not count PR admissions under two “one-time initiatives.”
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The levels plan target for "overall" permanent residence admissions for both 2026 and 2027 is set at 380,000 per year.
But those figures exclude PR admissions of up to 115,000 protected persons and 33,000 in-Canada workers over the same two years.
The cumulative total of the government’s planned PR admissions for the period 2026–2027 amounts to 908,000, averaging out to 454,000 annually.
The newly launched web page, “Understanding permanent residence numbers in Canada,” presents a bar chart displaying monthly numbers of PR admissions from Jan 2026–May 2026, breaking out the levels plan PR admissions versus the one-time initiative PR admissions into two separate bars.
Of the 128,000 PRs already admitted to Canada in 2026 as of May 2026, those admitted through the one-time initiatives make up about 14.4%.
As of May 2026, the numbers of PRs admitted through one-time initiatives sit at 46% (9,100) of the annual target of 20,000 for in-Canada workers, and 20% (9,300) of the annual target of 46,000 for in-Canada protected persons.
The launch of the new web page comes on the heels of an update to the government’s backlog page, which as of July 21 began to present a breakdown of PR applications slated for processing this year versus those waitlisted for following years to conform with the levels plan annual admissions targets.
On July 15, the federal government shut the door to sponsoring parents and grandparents for PR, reporting 50,900 Parents and Grandparents Program (PGP) PR applications in inventory, with PGP PR admissions set to 15,000 per year for the years 2026–2028 under the levels plan.
The new web page on PR admissions follows a similar format to the “Understanding student and temporary worker numbers in Canada” page, which the government took live in August 2025.
Two figures for government spending
The two sets of PR admissions numbers were first released in Budget 2025 last November.
In Budget 2025, the Canadian government also presented, for the first time, two categories for planned federal spending: a breakdown of “day-to-day operating spending” versus “capital investments.” Under this framework, the budget projected that 100% of the deficit would be directed toward capital investments by fiscal year 2028–2029.
According to economist Jim Stanford, budget 2025’s definition of capital spending “is utterly arbitrary” for it “is not in fact equivalent to capital spending conventionally understood (in either accounting or economic terms).”
Budget 2025’s definition of capital spending includes depreciation of existing assets, in addition to spending on incentives for private sector R&D.
The government presented the new capital framework in support of Budget 2025's “generational investment strategy” “to build at a speed, scope, and scale not seen in generations.”
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