Immigration Minister Lena Diab has issued new ministerial instructions that will cap international student visa applications for 2026 and pause intake for several permanent residency programs, citing a need to manage application volumes and processing backlogs.
The directives, published Saturday in the Canada Gazette, require provincial or territorial attestation letters for all study permit applications. The move is intended to limit foreign student applications to just under 310,000 in the coming year. The letters must include the prospective student’s name, date of birth and address.
Under Canada’s annual immigration levels plan, the federal government aims to admit 155,000 international students in 2026.
Diab also ordered a pause on new permanent residency applications under the startup visa and self-employed streams, effective Jan. 1, until further notice. The government says the suspension is necessary because of the large number of applications already in the system.
In addition, the intake of permanent residency applications for migrant professional caregivers — covering both home support and childcare workers — will not reopen as scheduled on March 31. Instead, the program will remain closed until at least March 30, 2030, unless the minister issues new instructions.
The government says the caregiver pause is also due to the volume of pending applications.
The Migrant Rights Network criticized the decision in a statement Monday, urging Ottawa to reverse the pause and arguing that the caregiver stream is the only permanent residency pathway available to many migrant care workers.
The network said the most recent application window, which opened March 31, 2025, closed within 4.5 hours, leaving about 40,000 care workers without access to permanent residency.
According to federal data, listed processing times for caregiver applications range from 21 to 33 months, depending on the category, work experience and timing of submission.
Backlogs are also significant in the startup visa program, with more than 44,000 economic immigration applications currently in the queue. Government figures show that applications submitted in January 2020 were expected to be processed in about a month, while applications filed in the past year now face estimated wait times of more than 10 years.
The new measures reflect Ottawa’s latest efforts to rein in immigration intake and address growing processing delays across several streams.