Ottawa Ends Permanent Residency Exemption for Refugees With Undeclared Family

Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Lena Metlege Diab rises during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, May 26, 2026. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

The immigration minister has quietly ended a policy that helped some refugees sponsor their children or partners for permanent residency, while offering refugee advocates no explanation for the change.

The temporary policy allowed certain refugees to sponsor family members who were not initially declared on their own applications.

Under current rules, a permanent resident normally is permanently barred from sponsoring a family member if they had not already named them in their documentation.

Advocates and academics successfully argued that those rules created gaps for parents who learned their children were still alive, or who had another child between filing their permanent residency application and arriving in Canada.

The policy that took effect seven years ago to address those gaps expired on Thursday, and a department spokesperson says that affected people can now apply instead for an exemption on humanitarian or compassionate grounds.

The policy was last extended in September 2023 and a memo for the immigration minister at the time said about 2,000 applications had been received and that there was “minimal risk” to program integrity.