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"About 41 percent of these cases could not be closed because of a lack of response from students."

"Another 50 cases were identified as non-compliant and requiring further follow-up by the [immigration] department."

"[An increase in the number of study permit extensions relative to new study permits] ...due in part to the number of international students with post-secondary study permits who were in Canada, which, according to the [immigration] department, totalled 675,070 as of September 2025."

Auditor General of Canada report 

Over the past year, international students have protested in major provinces across Canada, opposing the myriad of policy changes. Photo: Mehakdeep Singh

"We are protesting on behalf of everyone because we want fair pathways to permanent residency and PGWPs [post-graduate work permits]."

"The protests have been going on for the last couple of months, led by various support organizations in Canada." 

Bikram Gill, former international student, Brampton, Ontario 

International students in Canada gather for a protest to call for support. PHOTO: OMNI News

 

Out of a total of 153,000 cases flagged for potential non-compliance under Canada's international student program, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada managed to conduct 4,057 investigations in 2023 and 2024, according to a recently released report by the Auditor General of Canada, which pointed out that almost 93 percent of 700 Canadian teaching institutions had submitted reports between the years 2023 and 2025 flagging the 153,000 cases. 

 

The reality of the situation is a scarcity of departmental operational funding to enable investigation. Leading to a situation where funding is available for only 2,000 cases to be investigated annually. The immigration department took 'limited action', according to the  report, in confirming non-compliance beyond contacting the investigated student for additional information, and few responded. The audit also undertook a study to determine how the immigration department worked around the cap of international students set into motion in 2024.

 

The approval rate for new study permits was found to be lower than initial projections foresaw. The forecasted approval in 2024 of 248,900 permits prior to the announcement of the cap, pivoted to 149,559 approvals for new study permits, a 57 percent reduction in comparison to 2023.  That trend continued in 2025, when 50,370 new study permits were approved rather than the departmental forecast for 2025 of 255,360 study permits. 

*Between 2023 and 2024, the department identified over 153,000 students as potentially non compliant with study permit conditions.

*However, IRCC had funding to investigate only 2,000 cases each year. This means more than 98% of flagged cases went uninvestigated due to processing backlogs.

*The audit also uncovered 800 confirmed fraud cases where applicants used fake documents or misrepresented information to enter Canada between 2018 and 2023.

*The department took no action in any of these cases even after discovering the fraud.

Auditor General Report  

The report noted larger-than-anticipated declines in new study permits for all provinces, as well as an increase in the number of extensions for study permits, relative to new study permits. Two-thirds of approved study permits were identified by the report for extensions of existing study permits, totalling 77,295 to last September, with an additional 50,547 unprocessed extension applications.

 

The immigration department failed to monitor which students were expected to leave each year,  and which students had voluntarily exited Canada. The auditor general's office confirmed with the Canada Border Services Agency that 15,000 students had left the country of the 39,500 individuals who should have left. Needless to say, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has no idea where the foreign students who no longer have a valid study permit, might be and how they may be disposing themselves in Canada.

 

 

Sanity Prevails, After All!

"I felt kind of heartbroken. But I was trying to also stay positive, because it was my husband's ceremony still, and so I didn't want to ruin the day for him." 

"That was pretty scary, because that's when I realized that there is actually a risk that I might get deported -- that I might actually end up in a Russian jail."

"People who end up there for political reasons often don't survive it."

Maria Kartasheva, pro-democracy activist, Russian refugee in Canada

Kartasheva, pictured here earlier in January, had her application for Canadian citizenship held up due to a conviction under a Russian law that has been used against critics of the Ukraine invasion. (Matthew Kupfer/CBC)

 

As a result of rising authoritarianism in Russia, Maria Kartasheva and her husband made the difficult decision to leave the country of their birth and citizenship and apply for a visa to emigrate to Canada. That was in 2019. She now works in Ottawa as a tech  operator. While living in Ottawa she also co-founded a grassroots activist group to work toward changing the political landscape in her home country, to bring democracy to Russia.

In 2022 Maria Kartasheva was informed by her family living in Russia that she had been charged by Russian authorities with the wartime offence of disseminating "deliberately false information" about the Russian military, relating to two blog posts that the 30-year-old had composed while living as a landed immigrant in Canada. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, Vladimir Putin had new wartime laws passed making it a crime against the state to criticize his 'special military operation' by naming it a war. 

Since then, internal and external critics of the conflict, including any who criticize Vladimir Putin or the Russian military for its actions in Ukraine, have been charged with offences against state security, and Maria Kartasheva was one of them, among countless others. Ms. Kartasheva dutifully lost no time in notifying Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, alerting them to the charges while uploading translated court documents. 

 

Soon afterward the department issued an invitation to her citizenship ceremony. When she logged into the ceremony along with her husband in June of 2023, they were asked the routine question whether either had ever been criminally charged; part of a list of standard questions, posed by the pre-interviews taking place before being permitted into the ceremony chamber.

 

At that juncture she explained what had occurred and to her surprise an official reacted by separating her from the ceremony, her husband permitted to proceed with his citizenship. Finally, a month ago, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada sent her a letter, that her conviction in Russia aligns with a Criminal Code offence in Canada relating to providing false information -- in which case citizenship can be denied, or even long afterward on discovery, revoked.

 

She is now awaiting a response to having subsequently submitted an explanation. With the explanation of what occurred to her to burden her with a 'criminal record' in Russia, she requests the department to reconsider their decision to block her from citizenship. Clearly, the official who made that decision to set her citizenship application aside, was not in full possession of the facts. 

 

The facts being that Canada has condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, has committed along with other NATO countries to sanction Russia, yet its officials make these egregious, counterintuitive decisions. 

Finally the matter was resolved with the intervention of Immigration Minister Marc Miller. Today, the minister wrote in a social media post that Kartasheva "will not face deportation and has been invited to become a Canadian citizen."

"Canada's citizenship eligibility rules are designed to catch criminals, not to suppress or punish legitimate political dissent." 

 

Russian antiwar activist Maria Kartasheva has now been granted Canadian citizenship, after she was pulled from a previous ceremony because of a conviction in Russia. Kartasheva was convicted under a Russian law which prohibits "public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation."  CBCNews