Students outside Sheridan College’s Davis Campus in Brampton, Ont., on Sept 29, 2021.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
Ottawa will revise the way it counts non-permanent residents this month and take into account delays by the immigration authorities in processing the paperwork of international students, foreign workers and others who want to extend their stay in Canada.
Rather than presuming they have left the country 30 days after their permits and visas expire, Statistics Canada will stretch the hiatus period, counting them as still in the country for around four months while their paperwork is being processed.
The changes to its methodology follow warnings from economists that there may be around one million more non-permanent residents living in Canada than official figures suggest.
Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC Capital Markets, said Statscan’s system assumes that temporary resident visa holders leave the country 30 days after the expiration of their visas, even though many of them remain longer and apply to extend their stays.
Mr. Tal estimates that about 750,000 of the non-permanent residents absent from the official numbers were missed this way. Another 250,000 – mostly international students – were missed by the census, he says.
Statscan said on Thursday it has been counting non-permanent residents as having left the country 30 days after their visas expired but it believed Mr. Tal’s estimate of those missed from the figures was too high.
But it said later this month it would revise its methodology, and count non-permanent residents as having left the country at around 120 days after their visas expired. This would take into account the amount of time it is actually taking Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to process visas.
Laurent Martel, director, demography, at Statistics Canada, said because there is no exit data on the number of non-permanent residents leaving the country, it has to rely on the date at which permits to stay in Canada expire as an indication of when non-permanent residents are no longer here.
He said the processing times for people wanting to renew or extend their visas and permits fluctuate. But he said Statscan has been in close contact with IRCC and had adjusted its assumptions to accurately reflect the time it is taking officials to process the paperwork.
“For those who are in the process of renewing their permits, we have to rely on assumptions. Up to now the assumption, designed in partnership with the IRCC ... it was 30 days,” he said in an interview. “What we have done recently is that we have adjusted the processing time so now we’re changing that assumption.
“It will go from 30 days to 120 days because right now it’s a better reflection of the reality currently with IRCC in terms of processing times.”
He said Statistics Canada would continue to monitor the situation and may revise its assumptions again if IRCC’s processing times change. He said the publication of the revised figures was timely and came against a backdrop of a very large increase in the number of non-permanent residents in Canada.
Mr. Tal welcomed the revised methodology, which Statistics Canada described in background briefings on Thursday.
The federal government has boosted its immigration targets in recent years, and is now aiming to admit about 500,000 new permanent residents a year by 2025. But that doesn’t include foreign students on visas or people on temporary work permits.
Statscan said it believed its figures were robust and revised figures to be produced later this month would not show an enormous difference. Mr. Martel said because it was working closely with IRCC, “we truly believe that our assumptions do make sense actually.”
He said non-permanent residents whose visas and permits had expired but had not applied to renew or extend them, and were still in Canada, were not counted in the official statistics.
A former federal economist, Henry Lotin, who is the founder of the consulting firm Integrative Trade and Economics, said he began telling Statistics Canada six years ago that its population forecasts for non-permanent residents fall short.
Like Mr. Tal, Mr. Lotin has estimated that at least one million more non-permanent residents are living in Canada than are captured in official numbers.
“They know they had to change and I appreciate they have responded to re-examine how they count non-permanent residents,” Mr. Lotin said.
But he said that there were still huge backlogs at IRCC and many non-permanent residents have waited far longer than four months to have their papers extended or renewed.
He said if 120 days is the average time non-permanent residents have to wait for the paperwork to extend their stays to be processed, many waiting far longer would still not be counted as in the country.
Mr. Lotin added that non-permanent residents waiting for extensions after the expiration of their visas and permits were legally in Canada.