- Stolen-vehicle export — stolen vehicles leaving the country through Canadian ports.
- Money laundering — Canada's exposure to illicit financial flows.
Most people who come to Canada come legally, through permanent-residence admissions and, increasingly, temporary study and work permits. The integrity question is whether the state controls the scale of that inflow and can account for who is still here. The temporary-resident population grew faster than at any time on record before the government moved to rein it in. Canada, unlike the United States, does not publish how many temporary residents overstay, even though it has collected exit data since 2019.
Temporary residents (students, workers, and their families) rose from 3.6% of the population in 2021 to a record 7.6% by late 2024. That is more than double in three years, against a share that had never once topped 3% in any year before 2020. In 2024, with no ceiling previously in place, the government set one: a plan to force the share back below 5%. It is working. The share has fallen in three of the last four quarters, to 6.2% at 1 April 2026, though it remains above both the 5% target and the pre-2020 norm. Statistics Canada flags its two most recent quarters as preliminary and likely to be revised upward, so the size of the recent drop may soften. 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.
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.
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. The silence is itself the finding.
Enforcement is climbing sharply. CBSA removed 23,160 people with no legal right to remain in 2025 on its published count, up from 17,397 in 2024 and 15,231 in 2023, and had already enforced 12,491 removals in the first seven months of 2026. 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). That is more than double, and far above a share that had never topped 3% before 2020. The cap has since bitten: the share was 6.2% at 1 April 2026, still above the 5% target. 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 cut the annual target to 395,000, and 2025 admissions landed near 393,500, below the target as well as the record. The 2026–2028 Levels Plan, tabled 4 November 2025, sets 380,000 a year and commits to bringing temporary residents below 5% of the population by the end of 2027. Both the expansion and the pullback were policy decisions.
Canada has held exit records since 2019–2020 and can calculate overstays. It publishes no rate or count, while the US publishes a detailed one yearly (~482,954 suspected overstays, a 1.15% rate, in FY2024). 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 23,160 in 2025, a record on CBSA's published series. The Auditor General found ~50,000 enforceable cases in 2019 with 34,700 people unlocated. Enforcement is rising, but against a large, partly untraceable backlog.
The temporary-resident share has fallen from a 7.6% peak to 6.2% since the cap, but it remains roughly double the pre-2020 norm, and Canada publishes no overstay figure.
- Compared with
- Canada's own pre-2020 temporary-resident share, which never exceeded 3% of the population. The US overstay report is shown only as a transparency benchmark.
- Where Canada sits
- Temporary residents were 6.2% of the population at 1 April 2026 (2.56M). That is above the government's 5% target and roughly double the pre-2020 norm, which never exceeded 3%.
- Which way it is moving
- Down. The share has fallen in three of the last four quarters as the cap took effect, an improvement. Removals are also rising, to 23,160 in 2025 from 17,397 in 2024.
- What the verdict follows
- Level against Canada's own baseline, weighed with direction. The share is still well above the norm but falling, which the own-record test reads as Watch.
- Data basis
- Statistics Canada non-permanent-resident estimates (Table 17-10-0121), IRCC Immigration Levels Plans, CBSA immigration removal statistics, and the Auditor General of Canada (2020). Data current to the 1 April 2026 Statistics Canada non-permanent-resident estimate and CBSA removals through 31 July 2026. Page last reviewed September 2026.
Primary sources
- Statistics Canada — Estimates of non-permanent residents by type, quarterly (Table 17-10-0121), with population estimates — temporary-resident counts and population share.
- IRCC — Immigration Levels Plan (2025–2027 and 2026–2028) and annual reports — permanent-resident admissions and targets; the temporary-resident reduction goal.
- CBSA — Entry/Exit Program and immigration removal statistics — exit-data collection and removals.
- Auditor General of Canada (2020) — Immigration Removals — ~50,000 enforceable cases and 34,700 whereabouts unknown (April 2019).
- US DHS — Entry/Exit Overstay Report (FY2024) — shown only as a transparency benchmark for what an overstay rate looks like.
Methodology notes
- What this measures. System control and transparency over admissions and departures, for an immigration flow that is overwhelmingly lawful. The metric is built to be read as a capacity-and-accountability indicator.
- Stock vs flow. Temporary-resident counts are a stock (people present at a point in time); permanent-resident admissions and removals are annual flows; the 2019 removals backlog is a one-time stock. These are labelled and never summed. The removals chart juxtaposes a flow and a stock only to convey scale.
- Share, not count. The inflow chart uses temporary residents as a share of population so the trend is not an artefact of a growing country; the share roughly doubled in three years and crossed the government's own 5% target.
- Reference dates. Temporary-resident shares are July 1 for 2021–2023, the 1 October 2024 record peak, 1 January 2025, and 1 April 2026 (preliminary); they are point-in-time estimates, not annual averages.
- Overstays. Canada has exit data (2019 land, 2020 air) but publishes no general overstay rate; the gap is evidenced through removals and the Auditor General's backlog, and the non-publication is treated as a finding. One partial exception has since appeared: the Auditor General's March 2026 audit of International Student Program reforms found that of roughly 549,000 study permits expiring in 2024, about 39,500 holders had no other legal basis to remain, and CBSA could confirm departure for only about 16,000 of them. That is a real, official, overstay-adjacent figure. It covers one cohort in one year rather than the temporary-resident population, and no general rate or count is published. US figures are a transparency benchmark, not a like-for-like comparison.
- Companion workbook. The editable series live in Securing_Border-Integrity_Data.xlsx: the temporary-resident share series, PR admissions and removals, and the overstay-transparency comparison.
