After it became impossible to deny the negative impact of mass immigration on the housing crisis, the feds decided to moderate their ambitions to bring in millions of new Canadians.

Today, there are more than 2.5 million temporary residents in the country, making up 6.2% of the population.

The government says it intends to reduce this number by 5%, or 2 million, “to reach an adequate number that Canada is ready to accept.”

For the first time in recent memory, Immigration Minister Mark Miller spoke about the need to reduce the flow of new arrivals by 20% within three years. But given the Trudeau Liberals' plans to bring in 1.5 million immigrants in the same period, simple arithmetic shows that reducing that flow by just 300,000 is essentially a populist measure aimed at pacifying voters. Miller says the new quotas will also help control the number of temporary immigrants, foreign workers, students and asylum seekers, which is growing rapidly. Previous governments have targeted only permanent residents, limiting their numbers to less than half a million annually.

Anastasia Chupina