TORONTO — Canada will sharply lower the number of immigrants it allows into the country for the first time in years, marking a notable shift in policy for the government as it tries to remain in power.

Canada will bring in 395,000 new permanent residents in 2025, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027, down from 485,000 in 2024, according to a government source.

The number of temporary residents, meanwhile, will decrease by about 30,000 to around 300,000 in 2025, the source said.

The new targets were first reported by The National Post.

Canada has long prided itself on welcoming newcomers, but in recent years, the national debate around immigrants has shifted in part due to rising housing prices.

Many Canadians have been priced out of the housing market since interest rates started rising two years ago. At the same time, a huge influx of immigrants has pushed Canada’s population to record levels, further boosting housing demand and prices.

The issue has become one of the most contentious in Canadian politics, with a federal election due no later than October 2025. Polls show a growing share of the population thinks Canada has too many immigrants.

There has been a backlash against newcomers and more reported hate crimes against visible minorities, advocates and community members say.

Migrant advocates slammed the change.

“We are witnessing one of the most egregious rollbacks of migrant rights in Canadian history,” Syed Hussan, spokesperson for the Migrant Rights Network Secretariat, said in a statement.

“Cutting permanent resident numbers is a direct assault on migrants who will be forced to remain temporary or become undocumented, pushed further into exploitative jobs.”

The office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was not immediately available to comment.

The new immigration targets also mark a shift from the pandemic era when the government loosened rules on temporary residents to help fill labor shortages. Last year, Canada had planned to bring in 500,000 new permanent residents in 2025 and the same amount in 2026. As of the second quarter of 2024, there were 2.8 million temporary residents, including workers and students, in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.

In an August interview, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told Reuters “Canadians want a(n immigration) system that is not out of control.”

Canada’s Liberal government, trailing in the polls as some legislators seek to oust their leader, has been trying to regulate immigration.

Under Mr. Trudeau, Canadian immigration officials have approved fewer visas this year and border officials turned growing numbers of visa-holders away, data obtained by Reuters showed.

The government promises to reduce temporary residents’ share of the population to 5% over three years; it was 6.8% in April.

It also capped the number of international students Canada will bring in and tightened the rules on temporary foreign workers under a program that brings non-Canadians to the country to work on a temporary basis. The program has come under fire for suppressing wages and leaving workers vulnerable to abuse. — Reuters

TOKYO — Taisei Hikage is fighting a losing battle at his Tokyo ramen shop — not to attract customers, but to keep a lid on the price he charges for Japan’s national comfort food in the face of an incessant rise in ingredient and fuel costs.

Since opening his shop in the west of the capital a year and a half ago, Hikage, 26, has raised menu prices three times but still struggles with rising costs. His top-selling “Special Ramen” is up 47%, selling for 1,250 yen ($8).

“Traditionally ramen shops were supposed to offer something cheap and tasty,” Mr. Hikage said between stirring big pots of broth and blanching noodles. “It’s no longer cheap food for the masses.”

The problems facing ramen vendors — a record number of shop operators are set to go bankrupt this year — reflect a cost-of-living crunch that has become a top issue for voters in Japan’s general election on Sunday.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, a self-described ramen fanatic, and opposition parties have pledged various measures to offset rising costs for businesses and households.

Those efforts to control rising prices, in a land emerging from decades of deflation, could tip an election where opinion polls show the LDP -— which has ruled Japan for almost all of the post-war era — might lose its parliamentary majority.

Mr. Hikage, who said he will be too busy working in his restaurant to vote, hopes the victors will consider introducing subsidies to offset rising costs.

His award-winning noodles remain in demand despite the repeated price hikes, with long queues in front of his shop day and night.

Some of his competitors are not faring so well: 49 ramen shop operators with debts of at least 10 million yen filed for bankruptcy in the first seven months of the year, on track to exceed the 2020 record of 54 bankruptcies, according to credit research firm Teikoku Databank.

‘WEEDED OUT’
Mr. Hikage prides himself on using mostly domestic ingredients, but many ramen restaurants rely heavily on imported materials like the flour to make noodles.

Japan’s import costs have risen as the yen has sunk. The currency hit a 34-year low against the dollar this year and has struggled to regain ground. Also boosting costs for ramen shops are higher energy and grain prices, triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as rising labour costs.

The plight of Japan’s ramen shops illustrates a larger trend, as companies that fail to adjust to the era of inflation go under.

Nationwide bankruptcies in the six months to September jumped 18.6% from the same period last year to 4,990 cases, with a record number caused by inflation, said Teikoku Databank.

“Just like ramen shops, companies offering goods and services that are in demand are transferring costs to product prices and seeing their sales grow. Those struggling to pass on higher costs are being weeded out,” said Dai-ichi Life Research Institute’s executive chief economist Toshihiro Nagahama.

But Mr. Nagahama said politicians’ tendency to dish out support measures to win votes may be counterproductive in the long term.

“If too many ‘zombie’ firms, or companies that cannot raise productivity or wages, are kept alive, they could be a drag on the Japanese economy,” he said.

For now, Mr. Hikage said he will focus on serving quality dishes and hope the election can bring some kind of positive change.

“Our task now is to endure this and focus on offering something delicious, with our heads bowed to customers,” he said. — Reuters

MOSCOW — The idea of the BRICS group ever challenging the US dollar is for the fairies as long as China and India remain so divided and refuse to cooperate on trade, the former Goldman Sachs economist who came up with the BRIC acronym told Reuters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is using the summit of BRICS leaders to show that Western attempts to isolate Russia over the Ukraine war have failed and that Russia is building ties with the rising powers of Asia.

Then-Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill introduced the term BRIC in 2001 in a research paper that underlined the massive growth potential of Brazil, Russia, India and China — and the need to reform global governance to include them.

“The idea that the BRICS can be some genuine global economic club, it’s obviously a bit out there with the fairies in the same way that the G7 can be, and it’s very disturbing that they see themselves as some kind of alternative global thing, because it’s obviously not feasible,” Mr. O’Neill told Reuters.

“It seems to me basically to be a symbolic annual gathering where important emerging countries, particularly noisy ones like Russia, but also China, can basically get together and highlight how good it is to be part of something that doesn’t involve the US and that global governance isn’t good enough.”

Mr. O’Neill, who admitted he would “have Mr. BRICS stamped on my forehead forever,” said the BRICS as a group had achieved very little over the past 15 years.

He added that it was not possible to solve truly global issues without the United States and Europe — just as it was not possible for the West to solve truly global issues without China, India and, to a lesser extent, Russia and Brazil.

The BRICS group grew out of meetings between Russia, India and China which then began to meet more formally, eventually adding Brazil, then South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has yet to formally join.

The group now accounts for 45% of the world’s population and 35% of its economy, based on purchasing power parity, though China accounts for more than half of its economic might.

Mr. Putin opened the summit on Wednesday by saying that more than 30 states had expressed interest in joining the group but that it was important to strike a balance in any expansion.

Bringing in more members into BRICS would make achieving anything even harder, Mr. O’Neill said.

DOLLAR CHALLENGE?
Russia is seeking to convince BRICS countries to build an alternative platform for international payments that would be immune to Western sanctions.

Mr. O’Neill, 67, said people had been talking about alternatives to the dollar since he started out in finance but that none of the countries with the potential to challenge the dollar had done anything to seriously do so.

Any BRICS currency, he said, would be heavily dependent on China while Russia and Brazil would not be significant parts of it, he said.

“If they wanted to be really serious about economic matters, why don’t they genuinely pursue less tariff-based trade between each other?” Mr. O’Neill said.

“I will take the BRICS group seriously when I see signs that the two countries that really matter — China and India — are actually really trying to agree on things, rather than effectively trying to confront each other all the time.”

India has tried to curb Chinese investments in the country since a decades old border dispute erupted into a clash between border guards in 2020. The two countries pledged to enhance cooperation on Wednesday in their first formal talks in five years.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told Putin the international situation was gripped by chaos but that Beijing’s strategic partnership with Moscow was a force for stability amid the most significant changes seen in a century.

Mr. O’Neill said the G20 had failed to become a sinew of truly global governance because the United States and China had both turned inwards since the middle of the last decade.

BRICS, he said, lacked clear objectives and should take on major issues for humanity – such as finding vaccines or drugs against infectious diseases, or fighting climate change. — Reuters