Immigration minister wants department to track exits of temporary residents

OTTAWA — Immigration Minister Lena Diab says she wants her department to acquire the ability to track the number of people with temporary visas who are exiting the country.

The immigration department confirms almost 1.9 million temporary visas, including work and study permits, are expiring this year. More than 2.1 million expired last year.

Diab said the Canada Border Services Agency and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada are able to track some information about specific people and groups, but there’s no simple way to track how many temporary residents are leaving Canada.

Diab said she’d like to change that with the help of digital tools.

“There’s a number countries around the world that do track those. And I believe we need to also be doing that,” Diab said in a phone interview with The Canadian Press.

“Did we have the capabilities to do that before? No. Should we? I think yes, and that is something that you will see us working toward.”

Aaron McCrorie, CBSA vice president of intelligence and enforcement, told a House of Commons committee hearing on Oct. 21 that the agency can track who is leaving Canada, their method of transportation, their date of birth and the travel documents they use.

He said CBSA doesn’t currently have the ability to determine if someone is leaving because of an expired visa. McCrorie told the committee it can manually check that on a case-by-case basis, a process he described as “very labour-intensive.”

People with temporary visas contributed to a major increase in asylum claims in 2024.

A response to a written question from Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner on asylum claims shows more than 112,000 people on temporary resident visas and nearly 22,000 people with study permits applied for asylum in 2024.

Canada only approved 14 per cent of those claims from people on temporary resident visas, and 20 per cent of the claims from people with student visas.

About 6,600 temporary residents and 1,100 people with study permits made asylum claims in 2020. Most of these claims were approved.

Diab said the government’s border security bill C-12, now before the Senate, is intended to deter people from making asylum claims to extend their time in Canada.

The legislation says asylum claims won’t be forwarded to the Immigration and Refugee Board if the applicant has been in the country for more than one year as of June 24, 2020.

“Many people in the last couple years were probably advised that is your last option, just claim asylum. If people don’t know, they’re going to take the best advice they have, right? And so I recognize that,” Diab said.

“We’ve started to be clear and transparent and to tell people exactly what we expect of them, and what Canada’s immigration system can handle and what it cannot handle.”

Critics have accused the federal government of curbing the right to claim asylum. Diab has said that people who have been in Canada for more than a year can still apply for a pre-removal risk assessment.

The minister said this all is part of Ottawa’s efforts to restore public confidence in the immigration system following a sharp increase in the number of permanent and temporary residents being admitted annually. That number peaked at an admissions target of 485,000 permanent residents in 2024.

Diab said the government’s efforts to curb immigrant admission rates in the 2025 levels plan have allowed it to meet all of its targets for last year. The government says 393,500 permanent residents were admitted last year; the target for the year was 395,000.

Publicly available IRCC data on temporary resident arrivals says a combined 305,000 workers and students arrived between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30, 2025. The 2025 target was about 673,000 temporary residents.

“We are restoring control back to our immigration system. And we are returning us back to sustainability,” Diab said.

Diab told The Canadian Press that the department is piloting some new online immigration services — one offering a limited number of passport renewals and another offering some international travellers digital visas.

“We need to modernize our system because it is old … It is a huge undertaking. It will take a bit of time, but it has started and we don’t want to move too quickly on it because if it goes wrong, it’s a big problem for immigration,” Diab said.

The online passport renewal pilot began in December 2024 and is now open to up to 1,000 applications daily.

The digital visa pilot began on Nov. 27, 2025 and is open to what Diab’s department calls “a small group” of Moroccan travellers who were offered a digital version of their travel document in addition to a physical one.

IRCC says it is currently looking at how well digital visas work for travellers and airlines.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 31, 2026.

David Baxter, The Canadian Press