uniteTOlove.ca

Newcomers

Published 2026-08-06 · part of the research library.

Toronto is doing a federal government’s job with a municipal government’s wallet. Deciding who gets to come to Canada is a federal decision, and licensing most professions is a provincial one — but once someone arrives and needs a bed, or needs their foreign credentials recognized to work, it is the city and its residents who answer first. This page lays out what’s currently known about newcomer settlement pressure and credential recognition in Toronto, who controls what, and where to go for the fuller evidence behind every fact here.

Where things stand

  1. In 2024, the city’s shelter system gave overnight shelter to more than 24,200 people, including more than 12,600 refugee claimants. The city spent $796.4 million running its shelter system that year. 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. When even that wasn’t enough, the city 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.
  3. 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. The city has formally asked the federal government for a funding formula that doesn’t punish it for saying yes to people who need shelter.
  4. 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.
  5. 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%. 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%.
  6. Germany used to have the same maze of licensing boards and unclear timelines Ontario has today. In 2012 it passed a federal law 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. 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 — but it only applies to workers already certified in another Canadian province, not to someone who trained outside Canada.

What the city controls vs. what needs the province vs. what needs the federal government

The city can act on directly: running shelter and diversion programs for refugee claimants, and building the kind that gets people into stable housing and work faster, not just a bed for the night; funding and expanding Profession to Profession, the city’s one credential-matching program, which pairs newcomers with a mentor in their own field for four to six months; using its own hiring and contracts to stop requiring “Canadian experience” — a bar Ontario’s Human Rights Commission has said, in an adjudicated case, can amount to discrimination.

Needs the province: licensing doctors, engineers, teachers, and the dozens of other regulated professions; extending Bill 2’s fast credential-review clock to internationally trained applicants, not just workers certified in another Canadian province; restoring Bridge Training funding, the courses that walk a foreign-trained professional the rest of the way to a Canadian licence.

Needs the federal government: setting how many refugee claimants and immigrants arrive, and fixing the shelter funding formula so the city isn’t absorbing a bill it didn’t write — something the city has already formally asked for.

Go deeper

How this connects to the election

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, as described above. A resident who wants to ask a candidate for city council or mayor what they would do about any of these levers can use the neutral, non-partisan candidate question bank for this category — every question there works identically for any candidate, any party. This page does not endorse, score, or rank any candidate or party, and does not direct a reader to any organization or campaign. Newcomers are also one of the groups least likely to reach a candidate’s door or a council chamber — a fact this category’s own sources name directly, not as a call to action but as context for why this page exists.

Sources & receipts

  1. Shelter-system scale and refugee-claimant funding figures — see the newcomer settlement backgrounder above (facts 1–3).
  2. The 2022 shelter-exclusion decision and Ombudsman finding — see the refugee-claimant exclusion backgrounder above (fact 4).
  3. National overqualification-by-place-of-study figures — Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey (fact 5).
  4. Germany’s credential-recognition clock and Ontario’s Bill 2 — see the credential-recognition backgrounder above (fact 6).