Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Lena Metlege Diab waits to appear as a witness at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The federal government is going to try something new: counting.
Now mind you, this is a pilot project. We don’t want to commit to anything in case we run out of fingers and toes to count with, or if the results are embarrassing. But as confirmed by Immigration Minister Lena Diab during the House of Commons immigration committee meeting Monday, Canada’s government is going to start tracking when temporary residents enter and exit the country. The minister said she expects the program to be fully implemented by the end of the year. After that, Ottawa will decide if it’s something worth doing permanently.
It’s a novel concept in Canada, but most serious countries already employ measures to monitor when non-permanent residents enter and exit the country. Arguably, this sort of tracking is even more essential when a country, say, blows up its existing immigration regime and throws its doors wide open to foreign students and workers. Canada went on a visa-issuing spree after COVID-19, more than doubling the number of temporary residents in Canadian soil at one time, which peaked to more than 3.1 million in 2024. Since then, roughly 2.9 million temporary residents have seen, or will this year see, their visas expire, but Ottawa currently has no way of knowing if they actually leave the country.
Ottawa to start tracking which temporary foreign residents have left Canada after permits run out
Auditor General Karen Hogan laid out the scale of the problem as it relates specifically to international students in a March report. While she noted that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) had successfully implemented a verification system to check the authenticity of school acceptance letters (after conducting a manual audit that found that nearly 14 per cent of submitted documents were fraudulent or no longer valid), she reported that the department has basically no mechanism of accounting for the students who have not complied with the terms of their visa. Ms. Hogan wrote that while more than 153,000 students had been flagged as potentially non-compliant, the department only had enough funding to investigate 2,000 cases.
At the committee meeting last week, however, which was only about six weeks after Ms. Hogan tabled her report, Ms. Diab claimed that IRCC had managed to follow up or collect data for every one of those 153,000 potentially non-compliant cases. She said that 78 per cent were cleared; 64 per cent remained on valid visas, including by switching to a new institution or academic stream, and 14 per cent had made asylum claims (which is a whole different issue unto itself, since that means that more than 21,000 people who came to Canada are now claiming asylum, though Bill C-12 may make that more difficult). The remaining 22 per cent, according to Ms. Diab, “may have overstayed their permits,” but are “presumed” to have left the country. It’s only a presumption, however, because Canada still has no real way of knowing.
Ottawa to fast-track permanent residency for up to 33,000 temporary foreign workers
But even if the department starts comprehensively tracking the entrances and exits of non-permanent residents, Ms. Diab has outlined no strategy or plans for enforcement actions. In her report, the AG noted that risk-assessment units within the IRCC had identified roughly 800 approved study permits issued between 2018 and 2023 in which applicants either included fraudulent documents or misrepresented their information. The department had discretion to pursue enforcement in those cases, Ms. Hogan wrote, but it chose not to act. “This is a serious concern because there was no alert on these individuals’ immigration files for consideration by processing officers when making decisions on future applications.” And indeed, 92 per cent of those permit holders had either been approved or were waiting for approval on other immigration permits, including permanent residency.
In other words, not only has Ottawa not been tracking when non-permanent residents enter and exit the country, it is also not taking enforcement action in cases where fraud has clearly been identified, thus leaving applicants’ files unblemished and clear to apply for permanent residency.
But the department appears unperturbed. The same day as last week’s committee meeting, where Ms. Diab yielded to the gross inadequacies of Canada’s immigration monitoring systems, the minister announced that Ottawa is fast-tracking permanent residency for up to 33,000 temporary foreign workers.
It’s a mess, of course, with some changes coming by the end of the year, by which time the government would have fast-tracked permanent residency for tens of thousands, and issued hundreds of thousands of new temporary permits. But perhaps while IRCC is experimenting with its new counting pilot, it might want to run a beta on actual enforcement, so we don’t accidentally grant permanent residency to someone who entered the country fraudulently, or allow those who are not legally permitted to remain in the country to stay. It’s just a thought – something to test out to decide if Canada, a purportedly serious country, wants to maintain it permanently.