Canada’s immigration policy is undergoing a major rethink. After years of rising admission numbers, Ottawa is now reducing immigration levels to try and relieve pressure on the country’s tight housing supply. In this move toward what policymakers describe as a more sustainable immigration system, the government is approving fewer temporary residents in order to lower permanent resident admissions.

The political logic is understandable. Public concern about housing affordability and population growth has made immigration management one of the government’s most sensitive policy issues. Federal officials frame the current shift as a way to align immigration levels with infrastructure capacity, while remaining committed to economic growth and talent attraction.

However, while the public focuses on how many and what types of immigrants Canada should admit, another critical aspect of immigration governance is receiving far less attention: how the system’s more opaque procedures — notably immigrant security screening — are being administered.

In Canada’s immigration system, prolonged screening is not limited to permanent residence applicants, but also to temporary streams including work permits and study permits. Applicants frequently get referred for extended review for a wide range of possible reasons. Yet because the details of screening procedures are confidential, and applicants are rarely told why they’re being subjected to closer scrutiny, the process remains largely unclear to the public, as reflected by the fact most national security complaints relate to immigration and citizenship screening delays.

Many observers assume that anyone undergoing extra screening must have triggered some sort of security alert, but the lack of transparency makes this difficult to know. Once a case enters extended screening, it can remain under security review for months or years. Thousands of permanent residence applicants experience delays of up to 65 months — more than five years.

Most troubling is that little or no information is available to applicants, employers or institutions who are awaiting a decision. Updates are rare, timelines uncertain and inquiries constrained by the confidentiality that national security procedures require. This........

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