The common claim is that Canadian security screening gets heavier every year. IRCC’s own data does not support that. The real picture is more complicated, and ultimately more encouraging.
Seven years at a glance
Total applications referred to security screening, permanent and temporary residence combined:
- 2019: 68,515
- 2020: 18,680
- 2021: 23,190
- 2022: 34,250
- 2023: 61,320
- 2024: 63,560
- 2025 (Jan–Jul): 27,565
Point one: 2019 is the peak, not 2024
This is the finding that gets lost in public discussion. The highest referral volume in the entire period is 2019 — before COVID.
The 2020 collapse to 18,680 reflects closed offices and halted international travel, not a policy change. What followed from 2021 onward is largely a return to normal, not a new wave of scrutiny.
Even at the top of that recovery — 2024, at 63,560 — referrals remain below the 2019 level.
Point two: 2025 is falling
Referrals in the first seven months of 2025 total 27,565. At that pace the full year lands near 47,250.
That is a decline of roughly 26% against 2024.
The drop is consistent with Canada’s broader 2025 posture: lower admissions targets, tightened intake across several programs, and smaller overall application volumes. Fewer referrals is, first of all, a reflection of fewer applications.
Point three: temporary residence dominates
Of the 68,515 referrals in 2019:
- Temporary residence: 47,945
- Permanent residence: 20,570
That ratio holds roughly steady in later years. Most security screening is performed on temporary applications — visitor, study and work — not on permanent residence files.
For applicants who assume screening is reserved for major immigration applications, this is a useful correction: a visitor visa application can enter the same queue.
So why do the waits feel worse?
If referral volumes sit below 2019, why has the applicant experience deteriorated?
This dataset does not answer that directly, but it makes two things clear:
- The distribution by nationality is not uniform. A global decline is not a decline for everyone. Iranian referrals more than doubled between 2022 and 2023 and held there through 2024, while world totals were merely recovering.
- Intake volume is not processing capacity. Referral counts say nothing about the resources available to clear them. Files accumulated in earlier years are still in the queue.
The takeaway
The “unprecedented wave of security screening” framing does not survive contact with the data. What actually happened was a pandemic collapse, a recovery to pre-2020 levels, and a decline in 2025.
That general picture offers little comfort to Iranian applicants, whose share moved against the global trend over exactly the same period.
Source
Figures from IRCC records released under the Access to Information Act, pages 000127–000146, compiled by OPP-DART-2025-34337, covering 1 January 2019 to 31 July 2025. Values between 0 and 5 are suppressed and all others rounded to the nearest multiple of 5. The annualised 2025 figure is our calculation, not an IRCC figure.
Related reading
- Iran leads the world in Canada’s security screening referrals
- How often does Canadian security screening actually fail an applicant?
- What Canadian security screening actually is
