Border integrity here means control over two things: who is admitted, and whether departures are accounted for. On the first, Canada's temporary-resident population more than doubled as a share of the country in three years — to the point the government capped it. On the second, Canada built the data to track who leaves but publishes no measure of who overstays, and the Auditor General found tens of thousands of people under removal orders whose whereabouts were unknown. This is a measure of system control and transparency, not a judgement on immigration itself — which is overwhelmingly legal.
Most of the people who come to Canada come legally — through permanent-residence admissions and, increasingly, temporary study and work permits. The integrity question is not whether the inflow is lawful but whether the state controls its scale and can account for who is still here. Two facts frame the answer: the temporary-resident population grew faster than at any time on record before the government moved to rein it in, and Canada — unlike the United States — does not publish how many temporary residents overstay, even though it has collected exit data since 2019.
The clearest sign that the inflow outran control is that Ottawa imposed a limit on it. Temporary residents — students, workers, and their families — rose from 3.6% of the population in 2021 to a record 7.6% by late 2024, more than double the level the share had never previously crossed (it stayed under 3% for the entire period before 2020). The increase blew past the government's own 5% target, which is why, in 2024, it announced a plan to force the share back below 5%. Measured as a share rather than a raw count, the rise can't be explained away by a growing country: the share itself roughly doubled in three years.
This is the part that should trouble Canadians most. Since 2019 on land and 2020 in the air, the Canada Border Services Agency has collected exit records — it knows, traveller by traveller, who has actually left the country. That means the government can calculate how many temporary residents stay past their permits. It does not publish that number — not a rate, not a count, nothing. Overstays are checked only case by case, out of public view. The United States, working from the same kind of exit data, publishes a detailed overstay report every single year.
The implication is hard to avoid. A government that holds the data but releases no figure leaves the public — and Parliament — unable to judge whether overstaying is a minor problem or a serious one, and unable to hold anyone to account for it. When the measurement plainly exists but the result is withheld, the obvious question is what that result would show, and why a government confident the news was good would choose to keep it from voters. Publishing the number would settle the matter either way; withholding it does not make the problem smaller — only less visible. The silence is itself the finding.
Where the system does act — removing people with no legal right to remain — throughput is climbing: 18,969 removals in 2025, the most since records began in 1993, and the government is funding a push toward 20,000 a year. But that annual flow is modest against the accumulated gap the Auditor General documented in 2020: roughly 50,000 enforceable removal cases as of 2019, of which CBSA could not locate 34,700 people. The chart sets the recent annual removals (a flow) beside that 2019 backlog (a one-time stock) purely to show the scale mismatch — they are different measures and are not added together.
Temporary residents rose from 3.6% of the population (2021) to a record 7.6% (2024) — more than double, and far above a share that had never topped 3% before 2020. The strongest evidence that the pace was unsustainable is that the government itself moved to force it back below 5%.
Permanent-resident admissions reached a record 483,390 in 2024; the 2025–2027 Levels Plan cuts the annual target to 395,000. The inflow was deliberately expanded, then deliberately pulled back — both by policy, not by drift.
Canada has held exit records since 2019–2020 and can calculate overstays — yet publishes no rate or count, while the US publishes a detailed one yearly (500,000+ suspected overstays in FY2023). Holding the measurement but withholding the result invites the obvious question of what it would show; the size of Canada's overstay population is, by the government's own choice, officially unknown.
Removals reached 18,969 in 2025 (most since 1993), but the Auditor General found ~50,000 enforceable cases in 2019 with 34,700 people unlocated. Rising enforcement against a large, partly untraceable backlog is why the verdict is Weak.