OTTAWA — Canada's immigration minister has confirmed a pilot program is underway to determine whether temporary residents have left the country after their permits expire, with the first version expected to go live within weeks.
Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration on May 4, 2026, that IRCC is developing the tracking process with the Canada Border Services Agency. The move follows a March 2026 Auditor General's report that found IRCC could investigate only a fraction of suspected non-compliant students.
Scope of the Pilot
Diab told the committee the system covers all temporary residents — not just international students. Visitors and temporary foreign workers with expired authorizations are included.
Canada already collects entry and exit data at borders and airports, but those records have not been connected to permit-expiry files in a way that flags non-compliance automatically. The pilot is an attempt to close that gap.
The Auditor General's Findings
The March 23 audit put hard numbers to the problem. IRCC identified more than 153,000 students as potentially non-compliant between 2023 and 2024, yet had funding to investigate only 2,000 cases per year.
Of the 4,057 investigations launched in that period:
- Roughly 40 percent — more than 1,600 cases — were left open because students never responded to information requests
- Three separate investigations into 800 study permits issued between 2018 and 2023 found applicants had used fraudulent documents
- Most of those individuals later applied for other immigration permits while still in Canada
Parliament Presses for Answers
The Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration formally demanded follow-up in its Fifth Report, asking IRCC to:
- Investigate all alleged cases of student-permit fraud
- Report how many of the 153,324 flagged individuals were later issued further documents or remain in Canada
- Forward the identities of 110 asylum seekers from the audit — who allegedly entered on fraudulent study-permit documents — to the Immigration and Refugee Board
A written question filed March 11, 2026, and answered April 27, asked Ottawa for an estimate of the "exit gap" — the number of visa holders whose permits expired in 2024 and 2025 with no recorded departure. Ottawa could not produce a clear figure.
Enforcement Backdrop
The pilot is part of a broader effort to reduce temporary resident numbers. Canada's 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration set a target of bringing temporary residents below five percent of the population by end of 2027.
No mass-removal operations have been announced; the immediate goal is identifying who has left and who has not.
Temporary residents with valid permits are unaffected. Those with expired status should retain proof of departure or any pending application, as IRCC and CBSA move toward actively matching departure records against permit files.
