Who Canada screens, and who it lets in

The fairest way to ask whether one nationality is screened more than another is to divide each nationality’s comprehensive security screening referrals by its own volume of applications. That share, measured against the national average of 0.86%, is the report’s headline. A bar past the line marks a nationality whose applicants were referred for comprehensive security screening more often than the average applicant to Canada, and a bar short of it, less often. Because the measure is a rate rather than a count, a small source country and a large one are compared on the same footing.

A rate answers how often, but not how many. This view turns to the comprehensively screened population itself and asks which nationalities the comprehensive security screening referrals actually belonged to. A nationality can dominate the composition simply by sending a large number of applicants, so a wide slice here is not evidence of a high comprehensive security screening rate. But it does show which nationalities IRCC’s screening resources are skewed toward.

Placing applications beside comprehensive security screening referrals makes the gap between volume and scrutiny concrete. India files far more applications than China but is screened far less; Iran is starker still — far fewer applications than either, yet the second-most screenings of any country (behind only China) at a rate (about 4.7%) higher even than China’s.

Read “difficulty” as two things — the chance of being pulled for screening and the chance of final approval — and the eight most-screened countries and territories differ sharply. The Palestinian Territories carry the highest screening rate (about 14.5%, roughly one in seven) yet an approval rate under 40%; Pakistan is screened only modestly but has the lowest approval of the eight (about 33%). Iran and China are screened heavily (about 4.7% and 3.5%, well above the 0.86% national average) yet approved often — China highest at about 80%, Iran about two-thirds. India, despite by far the most applications, has one of the lowest screening rates (about 0.3%) and middling approval (about 64%). The full approval comparison is in Part II.

Widening from a handful of countries to all of them, this scatter plots each nationality by its total applications against the comprehensive security screenings those applications produced. The diagonal is the national-average comprehensive security screening rate, so a country above it is screened more than its volume alone would predict and one below it less. Both axes are logarithmic, which keeps countries spanning three orders of magnitude of volume legible on the same plot.

Mapped geographically, the volume of admissions traces a pattern that is easier to read than a ranked list. Countries are shaded by the number of Confirmation-of-Permanent-Residence documents issued to their nationals in 2025, so the darkest countries are those Canada admitted the most permanent residents from. Because those counts span several orders of magnitude, the shading is on a square-root scale.

Approval is the outcome that matters most to an applicant. This chart shows the share of each nationality’s processed temporary-residence applications that IRCC approved in 2025, measured against the national average of 59.6%. Bars above the line clear it more often than the average applicant, and bars below it less often.

The final view sets the two questions against each other, plotting each nationality’s comprehensive security screening rate on one axis and its approval rate on the other. If the nationalities screened most heavily were also refused most often, the dots would trend together; the color encodes the ratio of the two rates so that the exceptions stand out, whether a nationality is approved far more often than it is screened or screened nearly as often as it is approved. This is where the comprehensive security screening story and the approval story either reinforce each other or come apart.