December 22,2025
RED FM News Desk
Immigration Minister Lena Diab has issued new ministerial instructions aimed at limiting the number of international student applications to just under 310,000 in the coming year. The measures require most study permit applicants to provide an attestation letter from a province or territory confirming their eligibility.
The instructions, published Saturday in the Canada Gazette, state that the attestation letters must include the student’s name, date of birth and address.
Under Canada’s annual immigration levels plan, the federal government intends to admit 155,000 international students next year.
Diab also announced a pause on accepting permanent residency applications for the startup visa and self-employed programs beginning Jan. 1, with no end date specified. In addition, applications for permanent residency under the migrant caregiver programs — covering both home support and childcare workers — will no longer reopen on March 31 as previously planned. Instead, those programs will remain closed until March 30, 2030, unless the minister issues new instructions.
The government says the pauses are necessary because of a large backlog of applications that still need to be processed.
The Migrant Rights Network criticized the decision in a media release on Monday, urging the government to reverse the pause on caregiver permanent residency applications. The group said this is the only pathway to permanent status for many care workers. It noted that the most recent application window, which opened on March 31, 2025, closed within four and a half hours, leaving about 40,000 migrant care workers without access to permanent residency.
Current processing times for caregiver applications range from 21 to 33 months, depending on the type of work, level of experience and the timing of the application.
More than 44,000 economic immigration applications are currently waiting to be processed under the startup visa program. Government data shows that applications submitted in January 2020 were expected to be processed in about one month, while applications submitted over the past year face estimated wait times of more than 10 years.
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