What Happens to the almost Two-Million People Living in Canada This Year?
Across Canada, employers, settlement agencies, community leaders, and families are navigating mounting uncertainty as attention turns to the more than 1.8 million people currently living here on temporary resident status, many of whom will see their permits expire this year.
From my work with workers and employers in communities from the prairies to the Atlantic coast, I see how the public conversation often skips over the most practical questions. Not whether the number feels large, but what actually happens when status expires. What happens if people cannot renew, if pathways narrow, or if they are unable to transition to longer-term status? And what happens if they do not, or cannot, leave?
These are not abstract questions. They affect workplaces trying to plan staffing, families deciding whether to stay or return home, and local services already stretched by demographic and economic pressures.
Headlines sometimes imply a simple outcome: temporary status expires and people leave. In practice, immigration systems rarely work that way.
Temporary residents include workers in health care, logistics, caregiving, food production, and other essential sectors. They include international students who have invested years and thousands of dollars in their studies. When status expires without realistic pathways forward, the most common result is not immediate departure: it is uncertainty, delay, and limbo.
What Temporary Status Expiry Actually Means
Temporary status in Canada is tied to the expiry of a work permit, study permit, or other temporary document. Until recently, transitions to renewal or extension were relatively straightforward when eligibility criteria were met. If a person files a complete application before their permit expires, they can remain under maintained status while the application is processed. But when permits lapse without timely extensions, people lose their legal right to work, study, or, in some cases, access provincial health coverage.
This legal limbo is more than a bureaucratic technicality. It affects income, housing stability, family plans, and a person’s ability to participate fully in community life.
Scale, Trend, and Intent
Government data shows that Canada is intentionally reducing new temporary resident arrivals. Between January and October 2025, new international student and temporary worker arrivals were substantially lower than the same period in 2024 with roughly 53 percent fewer arrivals – reflecting deliberate policy changes to ease pressures on housing, infrastructure, and services.
Similarly, estimates from Statistics Canada show a decline in the number of non-permanent residents from a peak of 3,149,131 on October 1, 2024 to 2,847,737 on October 1, 2025. This drop was driven by record-high outflows, permits expiring exceeding new inflows.
The federal government has signaled its intent to reduce the share of temporary residents in the total population to less than 5 percent by the end of 2027 to promote sustainability.
The Risk of Informal Work
One consequence that receives little public attention is the risk of informal work becoming the default for people whose status expires without clear alternatives.
Unauthorized work carries legal consequences, including impacts on future admissibility. But when people lose legal work rights and must provide for their families, the incentive to work informally increases. Employers may also be tempted to fill gaps cheaply if legal pathways narrow and demand persists.
This dynamic does harm on multiple fronts:
- It creates vulnerabilities for workers without legal protections.
- It undermines wage and labour standards.
- It depresses tax contributions and reduces transparent labour market participation.
A system that produces large status cliffs without workable transitions increases the likelihood of informal participation rather than orderly compliance.
Enforcement Capacity and Reality
When policy discussion turns to removals as a solution, it tends to overlook practical and financial constraints.
Canada’s enforcement infrastructure is not designed to remove hundreds of thousands of people in short order. Historically, removals operate at a scale far smaller than the number of people whose status expires. Instead, the system has relied heavily on voluntary compliance, restoration mechanisms, and transitions where possible.
When processing delays and eligibility constraints limit these options, the gap between policy intention and operational reality widens.
Economic Impact and Labour Market Dependence
Temporary residents are integral to Canada’s labour force. As of October 31, 2025, there were roughly 1.49 million work permit holders and about 484,000 study permit holders in Canada.
These workers contribute to sectors facing labour shortages, including health care, agriculture, transport, hospitality, and caregiving. Many international students, once graduated, remain to work under post-graduation work permits and can become permanent residents, contributing long-term to local economies. The presence of temporary residents also feeds consumer demand, supports educational institutions, and underpins housing markets.
Expecting these labour demands to vanish if status expires is not economically realistic. Instead, workforce disruptions can lead to service gaps, reduced productivity, and increased costs for employers who must recruit and train new staff on short notice.
Small Communities
In smaller communities, the effects can be amplified. A handful of workers might be critical to operations of local services, farms, or small businesses. Sudden departures caused by expired status without transition pathways can destabilize both local economies and social cohesion.
Psychological and Social Costs
Beyond economics and compliance, there are human costs. The stress of uncertain status affects mental health, family planning, educational continuity, and community participation. When people live in limbo, the psychological toll resonates in every aspect of life, not just income and employment, but belonging itself.
Historical and Global Context
Canada’s immigration system has long featured two-step migration pathways allowing some temporary residents to transition to permanent status. These pathways helped align labour demand with long-term settlement over the past two decades.
What is different now is the pace and scale of policy shifts, with deliberate reductions in new permits and a tightening of some transition mechanisms. This introduces unpredictability that can affect Canada’s reputation in the global mobility market and influence future decisions by students, workers, and employers considering Canada relative to other destinations.
Conclusion
The question before Canada is not whether temporary resident numbers should be managed. It is how that management is done in a way that aligns enforcement, labour demand, community capacity, and human behaviour.
Large numbers of temporary statuses expiring at once is a test of system design, not a crisis of numbers.
Canada’s next chapter in immigration policy will be judged less by targets and more by whether it produces orderly transitions rather than widespread limbo.
This moment calls for clarity, coordination, and practical pathways, not just headlines.
