Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below.
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The average time it takes the Canada Border Services Agency to complete a national security screening on a permanent residence application has climbed from 53 calendar days in 2021 to 390 days in 2025 — more than seven times longer in five years, according to records released by the agency. The increase shows up across every category of permanent resident applicant and in nearly every country of birth, with screening on some files now averaging well over a year.
The figures come from records released by CBSA under access-to-information request A-2025-60255, which asked for screening processing times broken down by year and application category. The release covers calendar years 2021 through 2025 and reports average screening times in calendar days for four classes of permanent resident applicant: economic, family, refugee, and a category labelled simply "OTHER."
What the Documents Show
The pattern in the data is consistent and steep. In 2021, the overall average security screening time across all permanent resident classes was 53 calendar days. It rose to 91 days in 2022, 174 days in 2023, 313 days in 2024, and 390 days in 2025. That is a roughly sevenfold increase over the period, and the climb happened every single year — there is no year in the dataset where average screening time fell.
The growth was sharpest in the early years of the period. Average screening time rose about 72 per cent between 2021 and 2022, then jumped a further 91 per cent into 2023 and another 80 per cent into 2024. The increase between 2024 and 2025 was smaller in percentage terms, at roughly 24 per cent, but it came on top of an already-elevated base, pushing the average past the one-year mark.
Every applicant class moved in the same direction. Economic-class screening averaged 52 days in 2021 and 408 days in 2025, nearly eight times longer. Family-class files went from 75 days to 461 days. Refugee-class screening rose from 54 days to 311 days. The "OTHER" category showed the most dramatic relative change, climbing from 23 days in 2021 to 386 days in 2025 — a factor of more than sixteen — though the small early numbers in that column make the multiple look larger than the day-count change alone suggests.
By 2025, family-class applicants faced the longest average screening of the four groups at 461 days, followed by economic applicants at 408 days. Refugee-class screening, while still up sharply, remained the shortest of the four categories in the final year at 311 days.
It is worth being precise about what these numbers measure. The figures are averages of CBSA's national security screening step specifically, not the total end-to-end processing time for a permanent residence application. Security screening is one stage among several — admissibility, medical, and criminality checks sit alongside it — so the totals here represent the security-screening portion of the journey, not the full wait an applicant experiences.
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A Country-by-Country Divide
The records break the averages down by country of birth, and the spread is wide. Applicants from some countries saw screening times balloon by factors of eight or ten, while a handful of others stayed comparatively low. The overall direction, however, was the same nearly everywhere: longer.
Among larger source countries, applicants born in India saw average screening rise from about 70 days in 2021 to 397 days in 2025. For China, the figure went from 51 days to 501 days, close to a tenfold increase. Iran climbed from 45 days to 376 days, Pakistan from 63 to 331, and the Philippines from 142 to 362. Nigeria showed one of the largest relative jumps of any major country, from roughly 15 days in 2021 to 362 days in 2025.
Some of the highest single-year figures in the 2025 data are striking. Files for applicants born in Iraq averaged 587 days, China 501 days, and Russia 464 days. Even applicants born in the United States and the United Kingdom — countries not typically associated with lengthy security review — saw averages of 605 days and 117 days respectively in 2025, up from much lower figures earlier in the period. Because some countries have only a small number of applications in a given class, individual country averages can swing sharply year to year, but the broad pattern of escalation holds across the table.
This kind of agency-level data is one of the recurring themes of CBSA records released through access-to-information requests. The agency's internal record-keeping has surfaced before in figures on COVID-19 infection rates among its own border staff and in the scale of its billion-dollar property portfolio, both of which were drawn from the same disclosure process that produced these screening numbers.
Why the Numbers Matter
Security screening sits on the critical path of a permanent residence application. CBSA conducts the screening as part of a trilateral arrangement involving Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and a file generally cannot be finalised until the screening clears. When the average screening step alone runs past a year, it lengthens the total wait for applicants who in many cases are already in Canada on temporary status, waiting on family reunification, or holding job offers contingent on their status.
The records do not explain why the times have grown. They contain no commentary, no narrative, and no breakdown of causes — only the average day counts by year, class, and country. Whether the increase reflects rising application volumes, a more comprehensive screening process, staffing constraints, or some combination is not addressed in the released material. The data documents the trend without diagnosing it.
The escalation also lands at a time when Canada's immigration system is under broad scrutiny and reform. Ottawa has moved to tighten oversight elsewhere in the system, including new measures targeting immigration consultant fraud and misconduct, and processing timelines have become a recurring point of public and parliamentary attention.
What's Missing from the Data
The original access-to-information request asked for screening statistics covering January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2025 — an eleven-year span. The records that were released cover only 2021 through 2025. The first six years of the requested period, from 2015 to 2020, do not appear in the disclosed material. The document does not explain the gap, so it is not clear from the release whether earlier data was unavailable, held in a different system, or simply not produced. That missing window matters: without the pre-2021 baseline, it is impossible to say from this release alone whether the 2021 starting point of 53 days was itself low or high by historical standards, or how the screening times behaved before the period of rapid growth began.
Beyond the date range, the records are purely numerical. They contain no information on application volumes, so the averages cannot be weighted by how many people sat in each category. They do not distinguish between straightforward files that clear quickly and complex files that drag on, meaning a high average could reflect either a broad slowdown or a smaller number of very long cases pulling the figure up. And the "OTHER" applicant category is never defined in the release, leaving its contents open to interpretation.
The data also stops at the security-screening step. It says nothing about total processing times, approval or refusal rates, or what happens to an application after screening concludes. For those questions, this release offers no answers.
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Support Government FilesAll figures referenced are from the Canada Border Services Agency, access-to-information request A-2025-60255, obtained through Canada's Access to Information process. The records report average national security screening times in calendar days for permanent residence applications, broken down by year, applicant class, and country of birth, for calendar years 2021 through 2025.
