Justin Trudeau's Liberal government is opening Canada's doors even wider, announcing it will accept more immigrants than usual this year, and more refugees — but at the expense of people with professional qualifications.

The government's 2016 immigration plan, which usually comes out in November but was delayed by the election, puts the target number of new permanent residents in Canada at 300,000 for the year — 7.4 percent higher than planned admissions laid out by the previous Conservative government in 2015.

This new target is the highest it's been in decades.

While the majority of new Canadians, approximately 160,000, will be economic migrants — skilled workers or professionals with experience that Canada covets — the overall numbers in that class have gone down to make more room for refugees and migrants who are families.

"It outlines a significant shift in immigration policy towards reuniting more families, building our economy and upholding Canada's humanitarian traditions to resettle refugees and offer protection to those in need," said Immigration Minister John McCallum at a news conference in Brampton, Ont.

While under the previous government, the economic stream was almost always higher than 60 percent of the total, and the humanitarian and refugee target hovered just below 10 percent, economic migrants will now make up 53 percent of the 2016 admission targets, while refugees and the humanitarian class will make up about 20 percent of new arrivals.

The government is putting more of a focus on family reunification, planning to welcome 75,000 to 82,000 immigrants from the family class — 60,000 will be spouses, partners and children, while 20,000 will be parents and grandparents.

The 25,000 Syrian refugees the Liberals have managed to bring over since they were elected in November are included in the goal of 55,800 new refugees and protected persons in 2016.

Of those, almost 25,000 will be government-sponsored refugees, which means it's the government that supports them financially for a year.

"These increases will also allow the Government to complete its commitment to resettle Syrian refugees to Canada in 2016 and enable Canada to welcome higher numbers of refugees from other parts of the world with refugee populations such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, and Eritrea, as set through various existing multi-year refugee resettlement commitments," said a backgrounder on the plan.

By comparison, in 2013 the United States — a country with nearly 10 times the population of Canada — gave permanent residence status to 990,553 people.