The Liberals’ 2026 federal budget sets a target of 370,000 new temporary resident arrivals in 2027, excluding asylum seekers, while outlining permanent residency measures that could bring total admissions to as many as 662,000 by the end of next year, including people already living in Canada and new arrivals.
The Liberals’ Budget 2026, announced Thursday, reveals the government is sticking to its official immigration targets set out in the previous budget.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, however, is criticizing the budget’s immigration numbers as another example of the Liberals’ “cooking the books.”
“The only thing that is worse than the prime minister cooking the financial books is cooking the books on immigration. We know that he did that last year when he claimed that the population of Canada was 300,000 fewer people than it actually was,” Poilievre said in the House of Commons after the Budget was announced on Thursday.
