Newcomers

A plain-language explainer · 8th-grade reading level · every figure below is sourced and checkable.

What’s wrong here

Toronto is doing a federal government’s job with a municipal government’s wallet.

In 2024, the city’s shelter system gave overnight shelter to more than 24,200 people, including more than 12,600 refugee claimants.¹ Deciding who gets to come to Canada, and how many, is a federal decision. But once someone arrives and needs a bed, it is the city that answers the door. In 2024, the city spent $796.4 million running its shelter system. A third of that — $261.87 million — came from a federal program built to cover refugee-claimant costs. Overall, 36% of all shelter spending that year went to refugee claimants specifically.² By 2024, the city had built 24 refugee-specific shelter programs, run through 11 community organizations.³ When even that wasn’t enough, the city leaned on the community itself: in 2024, it paid $4.3 million to churches and community groups that had opened their own doors to shelter refugee claimants during the worst of the pressure.⁴

That federal money is now shrinking just as the city’s obligations remain. Ottawa cut Toronto’s refugee-shelter funding formula, and by the city’s own accounting the gap runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.⁵ The city didn’t create this problem. It inherited it the moment someone needed a bed.

The city has also gotten this wrong before, and owned it. In 2022, city staff quietly stopped letting refugee claimants into regular shelter beds. Toronto’s own Ombudsman investigated and found the decision amounted to anti-Black racism. Council reversed the policy in 2023 and the Mayor apologized.⁶ That is worth knowing not to relitigate it, but because it shows the fix is possible when the city is honest about its own failure.

There’s a second, quieter problem: skill going to waste. Nationally, recent immigrants with a postsecondary credential are more likely to say they’re overqualified for their job than Canadian-born workers with the same education — 32.6% versus 19.1%.⁷ But the deciding factor isn’t where someone was born. It’s where they studied. Immigrants who studied in Canada are overqualified for their jobs at a rate of just 11.8% — actually lower than people born here. Immigrants who studied abroad face a rate more than twice as high, 25.8%.⁸ That single fact reframes the whole issue: this isn’t about a skills gap. It’s about whether Canada recognizes the skills people already have.

What’s been proven to work elsewhere

Germany used to have the same maze of licensing boards and unclear timelines. In 2012 it passed a federal law — the Anerkennungsgesetz — giving every foreign-trained worker a legal right to a decision on their credentials, from anywhere in the world, within a fixed clock: one month to confirm the paperwork is complete, three months to decide.⁹ It isn’t perfect — some professions are still handled state-by-state, similar to how Ontario licenses profession by profession — but it proves a government can put a deadline on “we’ll get back to you.”

Closer to home, Ontario’s own 2025 reform, Bill 2, put a real clock on licensing too: 10 business days to acknowledge an application, 30 days to decide.¹⁰ The catch is who it covers. It only applies to workers already certified in another Canadian province. Someone who trained as a nurse or engineer outside Canada — the exact person the overqualification numbers above are about — isn’t covered by it at all.¹¹ Ontario proved the tool works. It just pointed it at the wrong door.

What we could choose together

This is a category where naming who’s actually in charge matters more than almost anywhere else. Immigration levels, refugee law, and settlement funding are federal. Professional licensing is provincial. The city holds neither pen — it holds the phone that rings when the system upstream falls short.

The city can still act inside its own lane. It runs shelter and diversion programs for refugee claimants, and it can keep building the kind that gets people into stable housing and work faster, not just a bed for the night. It runs one credential-matching program, Profession to Profession, pairing newcomers with a mentor in their own field for four to six months — small, but it’s a real lever the city already holds and could fund at greater scale.¹² The city could also use its own hiring and contracts to stop requiring “Canadian experience” — a bar its own province’s Human Rights Commission has said, in a real case, can amount to discrimination.¹³

Only the province licenses doctors, engineers, teachers, and the dozens of other regulated professions — and only the province can extend Bill 2’s fast clock to internationally trained applicants, not just other Canadians. Only the province can also restore Bridge Training funding, the courses that walk a foreign-trained professional the rest of the way to a Canadian licence.

Only the federal government sets how many refugee claimants and immigrants arrive, and only the federal government can fix the funding formula so the city isn’t absorbing a bill it didn’t write. The city itself has asked for exactly that: a funding formula that doesn’t punish it for saying yes to people who need shelter.¹⁴

And there’s a question no level of government owns alone: newcomers are one of the groups least likely to knock on a candidate’s door or show up at a council meeting. Nobody has to wait for permission to fix that — any candidate can decide, tonight, to go find out what newcomers in their ward actually need.

Sources & receipts

1. 2024: more than 24,200 unique individuals sheltered, including more than 12,600 refugee claimants — City of Toronto 2024 Toronto Shelter & Support Services Annual Report.
2. 2024: $796.40 million total shelter operating funds; 33% ($261.87 million) from the federal Interim Housing Assistance Program; 36% of total spending to Refugee Claimant Response — City of Toronto 2024 Toronto Shelter & Support Services Annual Report.
3. By end of 2024: 24 refugee-specific shelter programs run through 11 community service providers — City of Toronto 2024 Toronto Shelter & Support Services Annual Report.
4. 2024: $4.3 million in Council-approved compensation to community organizations and churches that sheltered refugee claimants — City of Toronto 2024 Toronto Shelter & Support Services Annual Report.
5. 2025–2027 federal funding directive cuts the refugee-shelter cost-share; city-stated shortfall in the hundreds of millions of dollars — City of Toronto budget and Mayor's public statements, September 2025.
6. 2022 exclusion of refugee claimants from regular shelter beds; Ombudsman Toronto investigation found the decision amounted to anti-Black racism; Council reversed the policy July 2023 and the Mayor apologized — Ombudsman Toronto report, December 2024.
7. National overqualification rate: 32.6% of recent immigrants with a postsecondary credential versus 19.1% of Canadian-born workers with the same education — Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey.
8. Location-of-study effect: immigrants who studied in Canada, 11.8% overqualified; immigrants who studied abroad, 25.8% — Statistics Canada, “The Daily,” November 30, 2022.
9. Germany’s Anerkennungsgesetz (2012): statutory right to a credential decision, filed from anywhere in the world, one month to confirm a complete application and three months to decide — German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) federal recognition portal.
10. Ontario Bill 2 / O. Reg. 199/25 (2025–2026): 10-business-day acknowledgment and 30-day decision on licensing applications, scoped only to applicants already certified in another Canadian province — Ontario provincial regulation.
11. Bill 2’s licensing clock excludes internationally trained applicants — Ontario provincial regulation, scope provisions.
12. City of Toronto’s Profession to Profession mentoring program: four-to-six-month, occupation-matched mentorship for newcomers — City of Toronto Newcomer Job Seekers program page.
13. Ontario Human Rights Commission: a strict “Canadian experience” requirement is prima facie discrimination, as applied in Clarke Institute of Psychiatry v. Ontario Nurses’ Association — Ontario Human Rights Commission policy.
14. City of Toronto’s formal request to the federal government for a fairer refugee-shelter funding formula — City of Toronto briefing materials to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

This explainer went through an independent verification pass before publication (fact-check against primary sources, claim by claim). The internal verification record has been removed from this public page; the sourced facts and figures above are unchanged by that removal.