Since February 2019, the Canadian government, through the federal immigration ministry, decided to start tracking the movements of those travelers entering and leaving Canada.
The number of days that a foreign national is supposed to stay in Canada is determined by their relevant applications for the following documents.
- Study Permits
- Work Permits
- Permanent Residence Status
- Visitor’s Visas And
- Canadian Citizenship.
Using the Entry/Exit Program, the Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) have managed to obtain all the relevant travelers’ information from the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA). The necessary information of those travelers entering Canada from the US border is directly sent to the Canadian Border Services Agency in the form of an ‘exit report.’
The Canadian government has given IRCC the right to access all travelers’ information for the administration and enforcement of immigration and citizenship programs in Canada. This is according t the CBSA website.
Some of the necessary information that IRCC collects at the border includes:
The full names of the travelers, their date of birth, citizenship, or the nationality and sex of the traveler. The traveling document information consists of the type of traveling document, number, and the issuing country. The government plans to extend this Entry/Exit program to those traveling by air in June of 2020.
The Need to Have an Entry/Exit Program
The right to access the travelers’ necessary information helps the IRCC to be able to authenticate the residency requirement seamlessly and quickly. The residency requirements include those in the application for Canadian citizenship and permanent residency. This is according to the governments’ webpage.
The IRCC will also be able to know when a foreign national has overstayed in Canada than their allowed period of admission. The information also helps in facilitating the IRCC’s investigations into the entitlement of the visitor to a Canadian traveling document.
In case a traveler engages themselves in immigration frauds such as passport fraud, citizenship fraud, and traveling document program fraud, the information collected is used to support the investigations. For inland family class programs, the IRCC can quickly verify that the sponsors and their partners are Canadian residents.
