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#WelcomeToCanada—if you can get here: The federal government is significantly upping the number of new permanent residents it’s looking to allow into Canada, following a sharp pandemic-induced slowdown in arrivals. 

Ottawa’s new plan targets 401,000 admissions in 2021, up from the 351,000 in last year’s projection. Much of the increase has been allocated to economic-class immigrants––those admitted primarily on the basis of their skills and job-market potential—with the aim of bringing in up to 208,500 under various federal and provincial programs.

But COVID-19 will also make those targets more challenging to meet. A majority of new economic-class permanent residents each year are now drawn from the ranks of former temporary foreign workers, a July Statistics Canada study showed. The pandemic has severely curtailed the arrival of temporary residents; between March and June, the federal immigration department received 535,782 such applications, its data shows; in the same four-month span last year, it got over 1.4 million. Applications for new study permits from international students—another major source of future permanent residents, like this correspondent—dropped by more than three-quarters.  

Some didn’t come because they couldn’t, with actual physical admission into Canada restricted for many categories of travellers until recently, and direct flights from major origin countries like India and China only recently starting to resume. Processing delays are also hampering arrivals. Bloomberg reported Friday that some Canadian tech firms are waiting months for approvals for highly skilled workers under the Global Skills Strategy (GSS), a fast-track program launched in June 2017 with the promise of two-week processing for most applicants. Those candidates often have other options; before the GSS was introduced, hiring managers cited protracted immigration-paperwork periods as one reason why foreign competitors were beating them to talent. The number of admissions under the program is down 49 per cent through August. 

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino acknowledged the pandemic has disrupted his department’s operations. The government is “putting in the additional resources” and “leveraging technology” to produce “a faster, more expeditious outcome for people who want to come to Canada,” he told reporters in Ottawa Friday in response to a question from The Logic, specifically citing workers in food, health care and tech. Mendicino said he’s “optimistic and confident” about hitting the new targets, despite the drop in temporary-resident admissions, again citing increased processing resources. But his report nods to the all-consuming uncertainty of the pandemic—its low-end projection for 2021 is 300,000, or around three-quarters of the annual target. That’s twice as large as the difference in last year’s report.