For years, immigration lawyers have been complaining of being shut out of IRCC’s online portal access for citizenship applications. Though unrepresented applicants can submit their applications online, lawyers are not permitted to use this particular portal. Instead, lawyers must courier citizenship applications to Sydney, Nova Scotia.  

Having to create paper copies for citizenship applications is particularly annoying because IRCC requires a colour photocopy of every page of each passport (current or expired) held in the last five years for each country of citizenship. This includes blank pages. So, if you are representing a client who holds citizenship in two countries and has an expired and a current passport for each of those countries, that’s four passports, and every single page of each of those four passports needs to be copied, even if the page is completely blank. That’s a lot of pages.  

Canada no longer routinely stamps passports for travellers entering Canada. Passports are scanned, and information is recorded electronically and entered into a database. Other countries do the same. Very few countries stamp passports for travellers leaving the country. We often see clients with extensive travel histories who don’t have a single stamp in their passports.    

When applying for citizenship, applicants must show that they have met the physical presence requirement: they must have been in Canada for 1,095 days in the previous five years, unless working abroad as a crown servant or accompanying a family member who is working abroad as a crown servant. However, it is possible that in the future, IRCC will no longer need to rely on passport stamps to verify physical presence in Canada. Digital entry/exit records will theoretically be available for a full five years by November 2027. 

IRCC’s Entry/Exit Program states that data collection for land entries between Canada and the USA began on July 11, 2019, with air mode starting on June 25, 2020. It took time to fully onboard all of the airlines, but this was expected to be completed by November 2022. Marine and train travel are also mentioned briefly, but no dates were given.  

It is my hope that once a full five years of data is available for all modes of travel, IRCC will do away with the requirement to provide all pages of a passport for citizenship applications. Similarly, for permanent residence applications, there are onerous requirements to provide proof of residency in Canada. I am hopeful that applicants will no longer have to provide copies of their rental agreements, bank statements, pay stubs, and club memberships to prove they have been living here, because the government of Canada’s own entry/exit records will be sufficient to demonstrate they have been in the country.   

The Entry/Exit Program was in the news recently, and got the Immigration Minister into some hot water. As stated on the IRCC website, at the link noted above, the program has many uses, in addition to verifying physical presence for citizenship and permanent residence renewal applications. ‘Overstay’ data is also available in GCMS notes (accessible to IRCC and CBSA officers), indicating when someone had stayed longer than permitted by their visitor, worker, or student status. The program also notes that once fully implemented, CBSA officers would be able to use the data to determine if someone already in the country has stayed longer than they were authorized (and should be deported).  

As reported in the Globe and Mail, a pilot program will be implemented to track the exits of some temporary residents, including international students. The pilot program comes on the heels of an Auditor-General report critical of the Immigration department’s failure to investigate cases of student permit non-compliance and fraud.   

However, as scathingly pointed out on X, the Entry/Exit program already made accessible information on overstays and gave the authority to investigate individuals potentially overstaying (who were still in Canada): 

April 2026

I have a client whom I will call John. Of course, his name is not John, because if his name were John, and not Vineet, Hassan, Abdul or any other name that wasn’t like John, I wouldn’t need to be writing about him.

John came to Canada as an international student when international students thought they could come to Canada, study hard, get their degree, get a post-graduation work permit, get a job, work hard at their job, apply for permanent residence, be approved, and a few years later, get a Canadian passport.

For John, a boy who grew up liking things that boys are not supposed to like, like other boys, and make-up and dancing and clothes that boys are definitely not supposed to wear, Canada was a place where he could be the kind of man who could like those things. But he could also visit his family on school breaks, leaving his heels and makeup in Canada, his family never knowing that he was an up-and-coming drag star and that he had a boyfriend he loved.

John eventually realized that, for him, like thousands of other international students, the welcome mat had been pulled out from under him and that he would not be able to gain permanent residence. Canada no longer wants as many immigrants, and John no longer qualifies based on the tightened criteria. Going back home would mean no boyfriend, no make-up, no heels, no drag, no freedom to love or live the life he needed to be himself.  Loving whom he wanted to love would mean losing his family, his freedom, and possibly even his life.

So John came to me, and I helped him claim asylum based on SOGIESC grounds – sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics.

Earlier this month, John received a letter which stated:

This is in response to your application for refugee protection in Canada. I have reviewed your application and, pursuant to section A104 and subsection 101(1)(b.1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), I have determined that your claim for refugee protection may be ineligible to be referred to the Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration Refugee Board of Canada (IRB).

Under subsections 101(1)(b.1) and 101(1.1) of the IRPA, a refugee claim is ineligible to be referred to the IRB if the claimant entered Canada after June 24, 2020 and made their claim more than one year after that entry; if the claimant entered Canada multiple times after that date, the one-year period is calculated from the day after their first entry.

According to our records, you entered Canada on X at Toronto Pearson International Airport. Our records also indicate that your refugee claim was submitted on X.

If you have additional information or evidence regarding the circumstances of your entry to Canada, as noted above, please submit it through the portal by X. Only information or evidence pertaining to the circumstances of your entry to Canada, as it relates to the applicability of subsection 101(1)(b.1) of the IRPA, will be considered.

If we do not receive your submission by this date, a decision will be made based on the information we have on file. If the decision is that your claim is ineligible for referral to the Refugee Protection Division, you will face removal from Canada.

This letter was issued because of Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, which became law on March 26, 2026. This law does many things, but as it pertains to John, it means he is no longer able to have his refugee claim heard by a decision-maker because he had been in Canada for more than a year before making his claim.

The new law applies to anyone who has even visited Canada at any time before June 25, 2020. That precise date is used because that is when Canada started tracking air and land entries and exits. You can come to Canada as a visitor, go home, have a triggering event that causes you to fear for your life, come back to Canada to seek refugee protection, and be barred from claiming protection because you had been to Canada more than a year previously and failed to claim protection. Not even the USA has a law that draconian.

The letter John received states that if no evidence is received disputing the date he arrived in Canada (which there is none), he will face removal from Canada. Absolutely nothing in this letter assures John that he will be entitled to a pre-removal risk assessment (PRRA) before being removed from Canada. The PRRA process is a far inferior process to the refugee claims process, with hearings conducted by independent members of the Immigration and Refugee Board, but it is an opportunity for John to provide a written statement of why he is afraid to go home and for me to provide written legal submissions and supporting country condition documents that support John’s attestation that he would be at risk of arrest, detention and possibly death if he were to live openly as a gay man and drag performer in his country. Why would the Canadian government, with its history of compassion towards asylum seekers, seek to scare people by sending out such misleading and openly hostile letters?

Groups I belong to, such as the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, and the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association, are gearing up towards Charter challenges against Bill C-12. It will be a years-long court battle, and a win may come too late for many individuals who will have already been deported.

March 2026

In the summer of 2025, my firm did intake for two couples, both of whom had tried several times to submit a spousal sponsorship application on their own. Each time, their application was rejected by the Immigration Department for missing information or documents. At their wits’ end, they reached out to us for assistance. We resubmitted the applications, and both are now well on their way to finalization.

Both couples were native English speakers, well-educated and tech-savvy. Why, then, did they have so much trouble submitting their applications?

The IRCC website states that applicants do not need a representative to apply, as all forms and information are available free of charge on the website. And yet, we were unsurprised when we recently came across statistics that showed that IRCC returned approximately 27% of Spouse or Common-Law Partner in Canada Class applications due to incompleteness during the first 10 months of 2025:

While we have not found comparable statistics for Family Class sponsorships, I suspect the data is comparable, as the same online portal and the same Document Checklist are used for both types of applications. Further, the couples who contacted us were both attempting to submit Family Class applications.

 

IRCC’s Permanent Resident Portal features several design elements that assist unrepresented clients throughout the sponsorship process. The portal itself links directly to the instruction guide and the main PDF forms for ease of access. The instructions are also available at the top of each page, including providing guidance on when to mark boxes as “not applicable”.

 

However, a sponsorship application has many moving parts. Even something as simple as marking the wrong box on the Document Checklist, so that the class of application doesn’t match the class you opened in the portal, can result in a returned application.

 

Other items that have IRCC sending back applications as incomplete are not items that unrepresented clients would ever know about or think to include. Not including a letter of explanation when the police certificate instruction page states that IRCC will provide a request letter at a later date is one example. Why would an unrepresented client think to remind the agent doing the completeness check of IRCC’s own internal policies?

 

Character limitations in the portal’s data boxes necessitate short forms, but a single missing mandatory data point can trigger a full return. Representatives often know when to submit an extra page, include an explanation in a letter of submission, or when nothing further is necessary. For example, a single family member’s missing postal code causes a full return, but writing “not applicable” for an email address is accepted.

 

For applicants, even knowing why their application was rejected is frustrating. On the permanent resident card side of the portal, you may not know the application has been returned unless you log in and check, as no email or other notification is sent. Luckily, the permanent resident application side of the portal at least provides a letter of return and greets you with a bright red box when you log back in to the main page:

 

The return letter will include a generic explanation of why the application was returned. It will state something like:

 

And you can then look at the form and play the fun game of “what from this list is missing”. A thorough review of one client’s IMM 5406 revealed a single missing postal code for one non-accompanying family member.

 

Consequence of Returned Applications

Applicants who must resubmit their application go back to the “end of the line,” and the processing time is the same as if they had never previously applied. Spouse or Common-Law Partner Inside Canada Class applications have a 21-month processing time, and Family Class applications are approximately 15 months for non-complex applications. Our firm is still awaiting a decision on a complex Family Class application submitted in September 2023, in which the clients received multiple “returned as incomplete” letters before contacting our firm. The couple married in November 2020 and are still separated by an international border while carrying the costs of two households. I can’t imagine the stress they are under, and how their marriage is handling the strain.  For those living in Canada, extended processing times mean not being able to visit family back home for long periods.

 

A return of a sponsorship application may cause the principal applicant to lose their ability to work in Canada during processing if they had also submitted a work permit extension application. If the principal applicant is without status in Canada, having to resubmit an application will mean a longer wait time to apply for a work permit. Worse still, the return of an application can cause permanent family separation. Adult children who are close to 22 years old might not be able to be included in the subsequent application if they have a birthday in the intervening period.

 

IRCC’s promised new portal is intended to address some of the concerns, particularly regarding character limits. It’s an eagerly awaited project that will consolidate the various portals for different types of applications into one place. However, it remains to be seen whether implementing the new portal will result in fewer applications being returned as incomplete.

 

February 2026

Having an application refused by IRCC is disappointing or even heartbreaking. The disappointment is often accompanied by confusion over the boilerplate language in refusal letters. This language provides the applicant with no information about why their application was refused, beyond very general terms.