Business immigration has the potential to advance the Government of Canada policy priorities outlined in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s May 2025 mandate letter.
In 2025, the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association (CILA) launched its Catalyst Canada initiative. The purpose of Catalyst Canada is to explore how Canada can fully harness business immigration to promote economic growth and job creation. This CILA report summarizes the findings of Catalyst Canada.
- Click here to read the report.
- Media are invited to contact CILA at: research@cila.co
“Business immigration can support Canada’s economy in various ways,” says Siavash Shekarian, Chair of CILA’s Catalyst Canada initiative. “These include promoting productivity and GDP per capita growth, supporting affordability and the health care system, as well as strengthening foreign direct investment, international trade, and Canada’s fiscal standing.”
Business immigration once comprised up to one-quarter of Canada’s economic class admissions (30,000 business immigrants annually). Under its Immigration Levels Plan 2026-2028, the federal government is now seeking to welcome 500 business immigrants per year. The federal government has stepped back from business immigration due to challenges such as backlogs and the belief that the economic benefits have been limited.
The federal government’s main goal should be to develop a framework that enables it to test and iterate various business immigration programs until desirable policy outcomes are achieved. Employing an iterative approach will enable evidence-based policymaking and also avoid previous shortcomings of launching new programs and then abruptly shutting them down when policy objectives are not met.
CILA recommends the formation of a federal Canadian Business Immigration Council (“CBIC”) comprised of key government stakeholders and other experts to advise the government on business immigration program design and evaluate performance to ensure the programs can advance national economic development and prosperity objectives.
This report argues that fixing business immigration requires fundamental paradigm shifts, not incremental change. These shifts are from volume to value, from processing to governance, from intuition to evidence, from one-off consultations to continuous feedback, and from centralized control to shared stewardship. These shifts collectively point to a simple truth: Canada does not need perfect policy. It needs a system capable of becoming better, faster.
A shift of this scale is only possible through collaborative policymaking. Government cannot, and should not, attempt to design and steward complex economic programs alone. The private sector, civil society, academia, and immigrant communities each hold pieces of the broader truth. Effective governance requires weaving those perspectives together into a single, coherent system.
CBIC embodies this shift. It is not a traditional advisory committee. It is an institutional mechanism designed to collect real-time market intelligence, track outcomes that matter, identify risk early, and recommend adjustments before systemic problems take root. CBIC operationalizes the humility that good policy demands: the recognition that no model is flawless at launch, and therefore the system itself must be built to evolve.
“This is the core message of Catalyst Canada: success lies not in perfect policy, but in policy architecture designed for continuous improvement,” says Shekarian.
“Programs will require tuning. Criteria will require adjustment. Market behaviour will reveal blind spots. But a trusted, adaptive governance engine allows those insights to translate into action quickly, transparently, and responsibly.”
