Canada’s citizenship system is rubber-stamping nearly every application that crosses its desk — and the federal government doesn’t even know if it’s granting citizenship to convicted criminals.

According to Order Paper Question Q-348, tabled by Conservative MPs and answered by Immigration Minister Peter Fragiskatos, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) received 1,859,281 citizenship applications between January 2019 and August 2025. Of those, 1,820,495 were approved, while only 11,364 were refused — less than 0.6%.

Go Ad Free

Even more troubling, just 2,530 of those refusals were due to criminal or security prohibitions under section 22 of the Citizenship Act, which covers serious offences such as indictable crimes, terrorism, and war crimes.

But when pressed on how many applicants with criminal records were actually approved, the department threw up its hands. The response reads:

“Due to data limitations, the Department is unable to report on the number of applications for which an applicant has a criminal record that were (i) received, (ii) approved, (iii) denied… nor is the Department able to provide a breakdown by type of crime which the Department determined was severe enough to deny citizenship, and not severe enough to deny citizenship.”

In other words, Ottawa doesn’t know how many new Canadians were convicted criminals.

Under section 22, applicants can be denied if they’re serving a prison sentence, on probation, or have recent convictions for serious offences — but those checks appear to rely on incomplete data.

For a government that insists its immigration system is “secure and rigorous,” these numbers tell a different story: a near-automatic approval system that can’t tell the difference between a law-abiding immigrant and a convicted felon.