Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab told the House of Commons immigration committee Monday that the government is conducting a pilot program to track entries and exits by temporary residents.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Ottawa is for the first time to track which foreign students and other temporary foreign residents have left the country after their permits to remain in Canada expire, Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab told a committee of MPs on Monday.
Economists have been warning for years that Canada has been dramatically undercounting the number of temporary residents living here by presuming that international students and others leave the country after their permits and visas run out.
Ms. Diab said Monday the government is conducting a pilot program to track entries and exits by temporary residents, including international students, as part of an action plan to combat non-compliance.
From this month, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will record if they are in the country or have left, IRCC deputy minister Ted Gallivan told MPs. He said the department has been collaborating with the Canada Border Services Agency on collecting entry and exit data.
The initiative was disclosed at the Commons immigration committee, which was questioning the minister about a critique by Auditor-General Karen Hogan into the failure of Ms. Diab’s department to investigate suspected cases of study permit non-compliance and immigration fraud.
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The March report by Ms. Hogan into the international student program run by IRCC concluded there were “critical weaknesses” in its integrity controls.
The report found that IRCC did not effectively investigate international students identified as not complying with the terms of their study permits – for example, by not attending the college at which they were enrolled.
In 2023 and 2024, more than 153,000 cases of students thought to be breaching the terms of their study permits were flagged, but IRCC only had enough funding to investigate 4,000 of them.
Ms. Metlege Diab said cases that were identified in the report were being investigated.
She said 78 per cent of the 153,000 cases flagged by the audit were found by the department to be attending a college or university, or had applied to another migration stream. Twenty-two per cent were presumed to have left the country but may have stayed in Canada after their permits to remain had run out.
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Conservative MPs asked how many international students, identified as having fraudulent documents, had left the country.
The minister did not have the figures at hand but said work was in progress to check which international students were still here.
“There’s also a pilot that is in process, which will work toward looking at the entry and exit departures, not just of these students, but any temporary residents,” she said.
Mr. Gallivan said there had been detailed discussions with the Canada Border Services Agency about entries and departures.
He said that in the past, IRCC has not managed an entry-exit regime, but that is now part of an action plan the department is building.
“The initial system implementation is in May to have an indicator: in the country or not in the country,” he added.
Statistics Canada, in a study published last month, said that entry and exit data have the potential for refining the measurement of migration and demographic estimates.
Such data could also help determine the number of undocumented foreign nationals in Canada, who are not currently counted. The immigration department has previously estimated that they could exceed 500,000 people, some of whom have been living and working here without the required permits for decades.