From small businesses to infrastructure projects, employers say lower admissions could deepen skilled labour gaps even as governments argue the cuts are needed to restore balance.
When Glenn Cormier talks about immigration, he does not begin with policy.
He begins with his kitchen.
Cormier, owner of Bowen Island Pub on Bowen Island, B.C., near Vancouver, has spent years trying to keep a growing hospitality business staffed in a small island community where the pool of younger workers is limited and many leave for larger cities. Servers and bartenders are easier to find. Cooks are not.
“The culinary side is all but impossible sometimes to staff,” he says.
For Cormier, this is not just a summer problem. Bowen Island draws tourists, but his pub also depends on a loyal local customer base, which means he needs workers year-round. The challenge is not only finding people. It is finding people who can stay.
He has relied on temporary foreign workers to help keep his kitchens running. As Canada’s immigration rules shift, the consequences now feel deeply personal — not only for him, but also for the workers whose lives have become tied to his business and community.
“If I’m unable to staff my kitchens to keep up with the growth of the business, then I’m unable to continue to employ Canadians,” he says.
Most of his roughly 60 employees are Canadians, many of them in service roles. But without enough kitchen staff, the whole operation is affected. In his view, foreign workers are not replacing Canadian jobs. They are helping support them.
That is the part of the immigration debate he wishes more people understood.
Across Canada, the conversation has become increasingly dominated by numbers — how many people are arriving, how much pressure population growth is putting on housing, health care and infrastructure, and whether the country needs to slow things down.
The federal government has made clear that it wants to do exactly that. But for employers trying to fill jobs and workers trying to build lives, the picture is often far more complicated.
When temporary workers hold up local businesses
For small businesses, especially outside major urban centres, immigration is not just a question of how many people Canada brings in. It is also about whether the right people can get to the places that need them, whether they can stay long enough to put down roots, and whether businesses can plan at all when the rules keep changing.
Cormier says that uncertainty has become one of the hardest parts of the job. He currently has 12 foreign workers on payroll across his two locations and says at least half of them may be forced to leave because their permits may not be renewed. Some have been in Canada for years, built lives in the community and, in some cases, arrived believing they were on a path to permanent residency.
Now, he says, that path feels less certain.
His concerns are echoed in other rural communities.
John Henderson, mayor of Sechelt, B.C., says the national debate often overlooks the fact that labour shortages do not look the same everywhere. Sechelt sits relatively close to Metro Vancouver on a map, he says, but in practice it functions very differently. There is no road access. Reaching Vancouver means driving to a ferry, taking the ferry and driving again — a trip that makes daily commuting unrealistic for full-time work.
In a September 2025 letter to federal ministers, Henderson said the Sunshine Coast had only about 200 people looking for work out of a population of 32,000 and that Sechelt’s median age was more than 57, compared with about 43 for B.C. overall.
“One size does not fit all,” he says.
For Henderson, that phrase captures what rural communities have been trying to tell Ottawa: immigration policy may be federal, but its consequences are intensely local.
He says the shortages are not confined to restaurants. His community needs workers in elder care, hospitals, child care, retail, construction, banking and transportation. In letters sent to federal and provincial leaders, Henderson warns that losing temporary foreign workers and their families could mean daycare closures, longer bank lineups, restaurants and retailers shutting several days a week, ferry staffing problems, and overnight services — including health care — being reduced.
Some of that strain is already visible, he says. Businesses have cut hours and dropped services, while owners and family members are stepping in themselves to keep operations going.
“What does happen overnight is we lose a business, because the employees have to leave,” he says.
Henderson has also been pressing for more than short-term stopgaps. Through a local campaign called Keep Families Together Sunshine Coast, he and others are calling for longer automatic work-permit extensions, inclusion of spouses and children, faster processing, and a long-term rural immigration plan that creates real pathways to permanent residency and citizenship.
That emphasis on families is not accidental. Henderson argues that letting only the worker stay while spouses and children are forced out is neither humane nor practical. Rural communities, he says, do not just need workers. They need people who can put down roots.
A labour shortage that doesn’t show up in national averages
The concerns raised by local leaders are reflected in what small-business advocates are hearing across the country.
Canadian Federation of Independent Business says the immigration debate cannot be reduced to a simple question of numbers.
“There are different issues and different layers of complexity to the immigration levels discussion,” says Juliette Nicolay.
For many small firms, especially outside major cities, the issue is whether they can still find workers with the specific skills they need — and whether they can keep operating if those workers can no longer stay.
Nicolay says some employers have warned they would have to reduce operations or close if they lost access to temporary foreign workers they cannot replace locally. She points in particular to hospitality and manufacturing, where shortages in specialized roles can affect not only output but also the Canadian jobs around them.
That matters for another reason: newcomers are not only workers. They are also future business owners.
The CFIB has been warning about what it calls an “entrepreneurial drought,” with more businesses closing than opening for six consecutive quarters.
How the immigration conversation changed
Researchers studying immigration and public opinion say Canada’s conversation around immigration has changed dramatically in recent years.
A forthcoming study summarized by researcher Simon Blanchette found that Canadian media increasingly linked immigration to housing shortages and affordability pressures between 2020 and 2024. According to the research, discussions about system “capacity” and “overload” began to replace earlier narratives focused on immigration’s economic benefits.
Related research from the Diversity Institute argues that immigration is often blamed for housing pressures in ways that oversimplify more complex issues, including housing supply, labour-market design and long-term policy choices.
The shift is understandable. Housing costs have risen, health-care systems are strained and infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with population growth.
But critics of the current debate argue that the discussion has become too simplistic. Research from the Diversity Institute and Environics found that concerns about immigration levels are driven largely by housing and accommodation pressures. At the same time, temporary residents and international students are increasingly being portrayed as the cause of these challenges, even when underlying issues stem from policy, planning and supply constraints.
Cuts, capacity and the bigger economic contradiction
Canada’s labour needs, meanwhile, have not disappeared.
Statistics Canada reported that 19.5 per cent of Canadians were 65 or older as of July 1, 2025. The Canadian Institute for Health Information says 5.7 million adults in Canada did not have a regular health-care provider in 2024. And BuildForce Canada projects the construction industry will need to replace 268,900 retiring workers and meet a total hiring requirement of 380,500 workers by 2034.
That tension is especially visible in construction.
BuildForce Canada says employment in the sector is expected to continue growing through 2034, with demand driven by housing, health-care facilities, schools, transit projects and other major infrastructure investments. Nationally, the industry is projected to need 111,600 additional workers over the decade, even after recruiting younger workers. Ontario alone is projected to require 154,100 workers by 2034.
In other words, even as governments try to slow immigration, many parts of the economy are still counting on newcomers to fill critical labour gaps.
That contradiction sits at the heart of Canada’s current challenge.
The country is trying to ease pressure without choking off growth. It is trying to respond to public frustration while still meeting labour needs. It is trying to reassure communities feeling stretched while also telling immigrants and temporary residents that they are welcome — but perhaps not as welcome, or not for as long, as they once believed.
For employers such as Cormier, those tensions are not theoretical.
They shape whether his pub can open at full capacity, whether he can maintain stable hours, and whether the people who have helped his business survive and grow will still be here in a few months.
In national debates, immigration often gets reduced to a headline or a target.
On Bowen Island, and in places such as Sechelt, it looks different.
It looks like a cook trying to renew a permit. A business owner trying to keep a kitchen staffed. A mayor trying to keep local services and employers afloat. A family trying not to be split apart. A small community trying to hold on to the people it needs.
And it looks like a country still struggling to decide whether immigrants are part of the pressure it feels — or part of the solution it still needs.