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TL;DR

Ottawa — Canada's immigration department will launch a pilot program in June to contact international students with expiring study permits, Deputy Immigration Minister Ted Gallivan told a House of Commons committee on May 4. The department also looks to add an internal indicator to visa-holder profiles by the end of this month showing whether a person is still in the country.

The moves follow a March 2026 Auditor General report that found IRCC had no reliable system to determine whether international students leave Canada after their permits expire, an issue the audit called an integrity problem for the study permit system.

Auditors reviewed 549,000 people whose study permits expired in 2024. About 93 percent were allowed to remain in Canada for various reasons, such as pending applications for other status. That left roughly 39,500 people who were expected to depart. Working with Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) data, auditors could confirm that only about 16,000 of those people had actually left, CBC News reported.

The audit also found that IRCC flagged more than 153,000 students as potentially non-compliant with study permit conditions in 2023 and 2024 but launched only 4,057 investigations over that period, with funding for roughly 2,000 investigations a year. About 40 percent of those investigations, more than 1,600 cases, were never resolved because students did not respond to the department's requests for information.

Immigration Minister Lena Diab told the same committee that IRCC had now reviewed all 153,000 flagged cases. She said 64 percent were found to be valid, 22 percent belonged to people who had either left Canada or overstayed their permits, and 14 percent belonged to people who had applied for asylum.

Diab described the audit as "a preliminary look" at a broader reform plan for the International Student Program that spans more than four years. "The early audit cannot offer a complete picture of these reforms. It can inform, though, what we do as a go-forward basis," she said, according to CBC's account of her remarks.

The Auditor General's report identified a separate group of 800 cases from 2018 to 2023 in which applicants for approved study permits had used fraudulent documentation or misrepresented information. IRCC did not follow up on those cases even though its own risk process had flagged them.

Auditor General Karen Hogan said, "There are clearly tools in their tool kit, things they can do when fraudulent documentation was used or if a student isn't following the conditions of their permit. We didn't see them consider that in these 800 cases," according to CBC.

Of those 800 visa holders, 92 percent later applied for another type of immigration status. A total of 351 had a study permit or other temporary permit extended, and 105 received permanent residency.

Gallivan's committee remarks focused on improving IRCC's data systems rather than announcing new enforcement rules. The department is working with CBSA to develop a broader system to track exits of all temporary visa holders by the end of 2026.

Some infrastructure already exists elsewhere in government. Statistics Canada acquired CBSA Entry/Exit data in 2024 for demographic estimates. The CBSA Entry/Exit program was established in 2021 to create more complete travel history records for people entering and leaving Canada, but IRCC had not been systematically using that information for compliance purposes.

The federal government's immigration plan for 2026 to 2028 calls for reducing temporary residents to less than 5 percent of the total population by the end of 2027. CBC has reported that millions of temporary residents will face expiring or expiring permits this year.

The public reporting does not specify how IRCC will contact students in the June pilot, whether the pilot will be national or limited to certain schools or provinces, whether the new indicator on visa-holder profiles will be visible to students or only to IRCC officials, or whether it will trigger compliance letters or enforcement referrals.

The audit credited IRCC with one successful reform: a tool to verify school acceptance letters that successfully verified 97 percent of more than 841,000 letters between December 2023 and September 2025.

If you're an international student with a study permit expiring in the coming months, you may start receiving direct contact from IRCC. The department has not said what form that contact will take, whether by email, letter, or through your online account.