Nearly five million visas were set to expire in 2025. Where are the visa holders now?

As 2025 began, federal records showed that there were 4.9 million visas set to expire in the coming 12 months, with Conservatives pressing the Liberal government on how it would deal with those who didn’t leave willingly.

“The vast majority leave voluntarily, and that’s what’s expected,” was the official committee testimony of then Immigration Minister Marc Miller.

As to how many ended up doing so, the short answer is that Ottawa doesn’t really know.

Despite Statistics Canada noting a slight contraction of the Canadian population at the end of 2025 – and border authorities reporting an uptick in “enforced removals” – Canada does not keep exit statistics on foreign visa holders.

In 2023, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada estimated that between “20,000 and 500,000 persons” were living illegally in Canada. Known officially as “undocumented migrants,” these were foreign nationals with “no authorization to reside and/or work in Canada.”

“Some may have overstayed their temporary status, while others may have remained in Canada following a rejected asylum claim,” read a backgrounder submitted to the House of Commons Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

In 2024, meanwhile, the immigration minister estimated that the population of foreigners living illegally in Canada could be as high as 600,000.

At the close of 2024, an order paper question by the Conservatives confirmed that a total of 4.9 million visas and immigration permits were set to expire by the end of December 2025.

At the time, the Liberals noted that this figure included everything from tourist visas to temporary work permits for visiting performers.

“We are talking about 4.9 million documents, sometimes many that apply to one person. They are tourists. The vast majority of the people leave the country, including artists who come to this country, such as Bruce Springsteen and others,” Miller told the House of Commons in November 2024.

Nevertheless, it also included a record high number of temporary migrants who had entered the country on student visas or as temporary foreign workers – and were now actively being told those visas would not be renewed as part of an effort to “turn off the taps” on migration numbers.

At the start of 2025, Statistics Canada said there were 3,138,129 temporary migrants in the country; more than double the 1,413,706 the agency had charted only three years prior, at the start of 2022.

As everyone from the Bank of Canada to the OECD has recorded, this influx was unlike anything in Canada’s history. It made Canada the fastest growing country in the G7, with the Bank of Canada noting it represented an “unprecedented surge in immigration” composed primarily of low-skilled migrants from the developing world.

As of the most recent figures, Canada’s population of temporary migrants has dropped to 2,847,737. This was largely credited for a 0.2 per cent drop in the Canadian population charted in the third quarter of 2025.

But it means that of the 1.5 million migrants who surged into the country following the end of COVID lockdowns, approximately 1.3 million are still here.

At the close of 2025, the Canada Border Services Agency released figures showing that their officers were removing record rates of unauthorized foreign nationals from the country.

Although deportation orders didn’t quite hit the highs charted during the first months of COVID lockdowns, the CBSA broke records for what it called “enforced removals.” This is a category that includes deportations, as well as foreigners who left following a deportation order, or who were turned away at the border and given an exclusion order.

For 2025, the total “enforced removals” came to 18,785, as compared to 17,357 the year prior, and 15,207 in 2023.

Throughout 2025, a common critique of the Conservatives was that if even a small portion of Canada’s record-high temporary migrant population refused to self-deport, the feds lacked capacity to remove them by force.

As one example, in October Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada told a House of Commons committee that 47,175 people who had entered Canada on student visas were “non-compliant.” Meaning that they had never registered at a university as promised, and their current location remained unknown.

Even if CBSA could find them, at current rates of enforced removals it would take more than two years just to account for this one category of delinquent migrants.

In June, Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner told the House of Commons “by the end of this year, nearly five million people will be in Canada with expired or expiring visas, and the government has no plan for how it is going to get them to leave.”

This prompted a reply from Immigration Minister Lena Diab, who said “we take our immigration system very seriously on this side of the aisle, as I know all Canadians do.”

She added, “for that reason, we are strengthening the integrity of our system while maintaining the humanitarian ability that we have in this country.”