What the officer has to be satisfied of
A visitor visa application is short and the decision is discretionary, which is a bad combination for anyone who treats it as an administrative form. Almost every refusal comes down to one requirement, and it is not one you can satisfy with a document.
- You will leave at the end of your authorised stay. This is the requirement in the Regulations and the ground most refusals rest on. It is assessed on your circumstances as a whole, and the department's own material identifies purpose of travel, family ties, assets, travel history and current employment as the usual points of difficulty.
- Wanting to stay permanently is not a bar. The Act provides that an intention to become a permanent resident does not prevent you becoming a temporary resident, provided the officer is satisfied you will leave at the end of your authorised stay. We could not source any separate visitor stream for people being sponsored, so the application is the ordinary one with the sponsorship disclosed.
- A visa is required for every mode of arrival. Air, car, train, bus and boat, including a cruise. That is different from an electronic travel authorisation, which is for flying only.
- A visa runs up to ten years, and never past your passport. The ten year biometrics rule is a limit on your authorised stay rather than on the visa. The Regulations end the period authorised for your stay ten years after the last day you gave biometrics, among other dates.
- Single entry has one exception. It can be reused to re-enter only after a trip taken solely to the United States or Saint Pierre and Miquelon, within your authorised stay.
- A visa is not permission to enter. It lets you travel to Canada and seek entry. An officer decides admission on arrival.
Officers can now cancel a visa or authorisation case by case
The Regulations were amended to give officers an express discretionary power to cancel an electronic travel authorisation, a visitor visa, a work permit or a study permit, decided case by case. The department's notice describes the amendments as enabling officers to cancel a document in further situations, including on a grant of permanent residence, on death, and where a passport is reported lost, stolen or abandoned. We could not source any provision making cancellation automatic in those situations, so we treat all of them as discretionary.
One consequence is worth knowing before you file anything. A refusal of a later application, such as a work permit, a study permit or another visa, is itself a ground on which an existing visitor visa can be cancelled. So applications interact with each other in a way they did not before 2025.
How long you actually get, and how to tell
| What is in your passport | What it means |
|---|---|
| A stamp with a handwritten date beside it | That date is the end of your authorised stay |
| A visitor record | The date it says it is valid until |
| A stamp with no date written on it | Six months from the day you entered, or the expiry of your passport or biometrics if that comes sooner |
| No stamp at all, because you came through a kiosk | The same six month default. You can ask a border services officer for a stamp, including after using a kiosk. The published exception is a Super Visa. If you entered on a Super Visa after 22 June 2023 and the officer did not stamp your passport, you can stay for five years |
| A Super Visa entry | Five years, which is the point of that visa |
The default sits in the Regulations, and an officer may fix a different period taking account of your means of support in Canada, the period you asked for, and your passport expiry. Your status also ends early if you leave Canada without authorisation to return.
Not knowing your own expiry date is the most common way a visit becomes an immigration problem. Nothing arrives to remind you, overstaying is a breach of your conditions, and the difference between fixing it and living with it is whether you act before that date. If you are unsure what you were given, work it out on arrival rather than five months later.
If it is refused
- There is no appeal. The department states plainly that there is no formal process to appeal a decision on a temporary residence application.
- A fresh application only helps if something has changed. The department's guidance is explicit that reapplying on the same facts, even through a representative, will likely not change the outcome. Its own examples of a genuine change are a changed purpose of visit, a changed employment or financial situation, criminal rehabilitation approved, and medical inadmissibility resolved.
- Judicial review is the other route. An application to the Federal Court for leave and judicial review, available where the decision is unreasonable or there was an error of law or of fairness. It tests the decision rather than rehearing the merits, and it is time sensitive from the date you are notified.
- A refusal is disclosable in everything that follows. The forms ask whether you have ever been refused any visa or admission, or been ordered to leave Canada or any other country, and whether you have overstayed or worked or studied without authorisation. Answer accurately, because concealment converts a survivable history into a misrepresentation problem.
- One refusal has a specific knock on effect, and it is narrower than it sounds. The Regulations deal with a person who already holds an electronic travel authorisation. If a visa is refused after the authorisation was issued, on the ground that the officer was not satisfied you would leave, you become ineligible to hold that authorisation, which feeds the power to cancel it. That is not a bar on applying for an authorisation. The department tells refused applicants the reverse, that a past refusal of entry to Canada or of a document to travel to Canada does not mean an authorisation will be refused, that each application is assessed case by case, and that you are encouraged to apply regardless of a previous immigration decision.
- We could not source a waiting period before reapplying. Nor could we source any official statement that a refusal creates a presumption against you later. We do not assert either, because we could not source either.
Requirements checker
A structured way to see where you stand against the published criteria. It returns an indication only, not an eligibility decision, not legal advice, and not a prediction that you will be invited.
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