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There is a sentence buried in the testimony of Canada’s Deputy Immigration Minister Ted Gallivan before the House of Commons immigration committee on May 4, 2026, that deserves to be read slowly.
“IRCC didn’t have a game plan or even an intention to manage the departure of people at the expiration of their visa. We’ve not taken responsibility for managing that in collaboration with the CBSA.”
This was not an opposition MP making a political argument. This was the most senior unelected official in Canada’s immigration department, under oath, confirming what critics and economists had been saying for years: Canada had been running one of the world’s most active immigration systems, issuing millions of temporary permits, absorbing students and workers from virtually every country on earth, without any reliable mechanism for knowing whether the people it let in had left when they were supposed to.
Most countries that take immigration seriously consider entry-exit tracking to be baseline infrastructure. The United States tracks it. The United Kingdom tracks it. Australia tracks it. Canada, which more than doubled its temporary resident population after COVID-19, peaking at over three million temporary residents at one point in 2024, was, until very recently, essentially presuming people left and hoping the presumption was accurate.
It was not always accurate. And now the government is, cautiously and somewhat belatedly, trying to figure out exactly how inaccurate it was.
The story of Canada’s temporary resident accountability gap came into clearest focus in March 2026, when Auditor General Karen Hogan tabled a report on international student compliance that was, in the polite language of federal audit reports, damning.
The AG’s office had examined how IRCC monitored international students, a population that had grown explosively under the post-pandemic permit surge, and found the monitoring system to be fundamentally inadequate. The auditor’s report showed that of 153,000 cases of suspected non-compliance with visa conditions, only 4,000 were being investigated. Of 39,500 people with expired visas, only 16,000 were confirmed as having left the country. And in 800 cases where visas had been obtained with fraudulent or misrepresented information, nothing was done at all.
That last finding is the one that should produce the most discomfort. This was not a situation where the department identified fraud, assessed the cases, and concluded enforcement was not warranted. The department had discretion to pursue enforcement in those cases, the AG 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.
People who obtained immigration documents through fraud were, in most cases, being approved for further immigration status. Not because anyone made a considered decision that their fraud was minor or their subsequent conduct was clean, but because the fraud was known within the department and simply not flagged for the officers making those subsequent decisions.
More than half of those 800 cases saw people get additional immigration documents approved and 105 received permanent residency.
When Immigration Minister Lena Diab appeared before the immigration committee following the AG’s report, Ontario Conservative MP Costas Menegakis asked her directly why the government had not been tracking who was entering and leaving, particularly after the temporary resident population had grown so dramatically.
“That’s a good question, I wondered the same thing but that’s how Canada has been throughout its history. That’s nothing new,” Diab replied. “The issue now, and I agree with you, we should have it and we are working towards it.”
That answer, “that’s how Canada has been throughout its history”, is both accurate and extraordinary. It is accurate because Canada genuinely has not had comprehensive entry-exit tracking for temporary residents as a historical matter. It is extraordinary because it was offered as though historical practice is a satisfying explanation for why the system was not fixed during a period when temporary resident numbers were growing faster than at any point in Canadian history.
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. Those warnings were available to the department. The department chose not to act on them until an Auditor General’s report and a parliamentary committee forced the issue into public view.
To be clear about what is actually being proposed: Canada is not implementing a comprehensive, real-time exit tracking system. What the government announced is a pilot, a test, a trial, something to evaluate before committing to it permanently.
Immigration Minister Lena Diab told the House of Commons immigration committee that 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. She said she expects the program to be fully implemented by the end of the year.
Deputy Immigration Minister Gallivan told the committee that the department is working toward having an indicator on visa holder profiles that states whether they’re still in the country. That is a meaningful step, moving from case-by-case manual checks to a systematic flag on each person’s immigration profile. But it is notably different from a real-time exit tracking system, and the technical challenges involved are not trivial.
IRCC has acknowledged that exit data cannot be readily aggregated or analyzed without significant manual reconciliation across multiple datasets. CBSA’s own 2025 evaluation reached a similar conclusion, noting that while an IBM system was built to reconcile and store entry-exit records, many CBSA operational systems are not linked to those matched records. The same evaluation noted that case-by-case searches are still used to identify potential overstays.
In other words: a government can technically possess millions of data points and still struggle to act on them in real time. The infrastructure question is not just whether data is collected but whether it can be used, quickly enough, accurately enough, systematically enough, to actually inform enforcement decisions.
This brings us to the more fundamental problem, which the pilot program does not address: knowing someone has overstayed their permit and doing something about it are two entirely separate government functions.
The Auditor General’s report documented not just a data gap but a decision gap. In the 800 identified fraud cases, the department had the information it needed to act. It chose not to act. Both Saskatchewan Conservative MP Brad Redekopp and Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Deschênes asked Diab about the 800 cases outlined in the auditor report where fraud was discovered, but nothing was done. The minister’s response was that these cases would now be investigated and some would see their status cancelled and face removal.
That is an appropriate response. The question is why it required a public parliamentary committee hearing and an Auditor General’s report to produce it. Risk-assessment units within IRCC identified these cases. The fraud was documented. The departmental discretion to act was clearly available. The choice not to act, and not to flag the fraud for future processing officers, was made at some level of the department, presumably reflecting either a resource constraint, a policy preference, or an organizational culture that prioritized processing volume over compliance integrity.
CBSA’s own 2025 evaluation said entry-exit data is generally contributing as intended to support national security, law enforcement, immigration, and social and income security mandates. The data infrastructure, such as it is, was working for its intended purposes. The missing element was the organizational will to use compliance data as the basis for enforcement action, rather than as an internal record that informed no consequential decisions.
The timing of the announcements surrounding this issue is worth noting carefully.
The same week that the committee hearing aired the department’s acknowledgment of its monitoring failures, the week of May 4, 2026, the government separately announced that it was fast-tracking permanent residence for up to 33,000 temporary foreign workers. The one-time initiative to transition temporary workers to permanent residents was first announced in Budget 2025 and is part of the government’s broader effort to reduce the temporary resident population to less than five per cent of Canada’s total population by the end of 2027.
These two things are happening simultaneously: the government is acknowledging that it does not know with certainty who among its temporary resident population is still in the country, while also fast-tracking permanent residence for a large subset of that population. The initiative appears to be well-designed in its targeting, focused on workers in in-demand sectors, particularly in rural areas, with a clear policy rationale. But the optics of accelerating permanent residence decisions while simultaneously confessing that the department lacks reliable data on who is actually here is, at minimum, difficult to explain coherently.
The concern is not that the workers being fast-tracked to PR are undeserving of it. Many have been in Canada for years, contributing economically, building community roots, waiting patiently for a system that was slower than it promised to be. The concern is systemic: if the department did not flag fraud on immigration files, if 92 per cent of people with documented fraudulent permits were approved for further status, if the department does not know who among the temporary resident population has actually left, then what exactly is the quality-assurance mechanism for the fast-track process?
For people navigating Canada’s immigration system honestly, the vast majority of temporary residents, who comply with their conditions, who leave when required, who report accurately, who work within their permit constraints, the system’s monitoring failures create a specific kind of injustice that rarely gets discussed.
Compliance-conscious applicants face the full weight of the system’s scrutiny. A spousal sponsorship is subjected to detailed questioning about the genuineness of the relationship. A worker who changes employers without updating their permit faces potential loss of status. An international student who exceeds their weekly work hours even modestly generates a compliance record that can affect future applications. The system treats those who are trying to follow the rules as though they might not be, while apparently not following up on those it has identified as having broken them.
This is not an argument for less scrutiny of compliant applicants. It is an argument for more coherent and consistent enforcement across the entire population. A system that is strict with some and indifferent to others is not a compliance system, it is a compliance performance, and it does not serve the people it is ostensibly designed to protect.
For temporary residents, the practical takeaway is that compliance monitoring will become more automated over time. Temporary residents must assume that exit compliance will become easier for authorities to verify. Overstaying, inconsistent records, or misuse of status may carry greater consequences once digital tracking is implemented.
That shift is both appropriate and overdue. But the transition from a system that largely presumed compliance to one that actually monitors it will have consequences for people who have been operating under the old, permissive de facto standard. Anyone who is currently in Canada in a grey area of compliance should seek professional advice now, while options for regularizing status still exist, rather than waiting for the new monitoring infrastructure to close those options.
There is a version of this story that ends optimistically: Canada identifies a gap, runs a pilot, builds the infrastructure, closes the monitoring deficit, and emerges with an immigration system that is both welcoming and well-governed. That outcome is possible and worth hoping for.
But the more difficult question the pilot program does not address is whether the cultural and organizational problems that produced the monitoring failure in the first place have actually changed. The AG’s report documented not just a data gap but a series of deliberate decisions not to act on data the department already had. A better tracking system will produce more data. It will not, by itself, produce better decisions about what to do with it.
Deputy Immigration Minister Gallivan told the committee that all of the 800 fraud cases will be investigated and some will see their status in Canada cancelled and they will be removed. That is the right answer. The test of whether it is a genuine commitment rather than a committee-room assurance is what happens to those cases over the next twelve to eighteen months, whether the investigations are completed, whether the enforcement actions follow, and whether the results are reported transparently to the public and to Parliament.
Canada has built an immigration system that is, in its design and its stated values, among the most generous and well-structured in the world. The gap between that system’s design and its operational reality is not inevitable. It is the product of choices, about resources, about priorities, about what the department treats as consequential. Closing that gap requires more than a pilot program. It requires an organizational decision, at every level of the department, that compliance is not a bureaucratic courtesy but a condition of the system’s integrity.
The pilot program is a start. The counting matters. But counting was never really the problem, the question was always what Canada intended to do with the numbers once it had them.
Authorised Representative
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