How we verify

There is a hierarchy behind every figure. The statutes and regulations reproduced on this site are taken from the Justice Laws Website consolidations of IRPA, IRPR, the Criminal Code, the CDSA, and the Cannabis Act. Program figures come from IRCC’s own pages, from the provincial immigration sites that run their own nominee programs, and from IRCC’s published data feeds for things like rounds of invitations and processing times.

Aggregator sites, news write-ups, forums, and consultant blogs are never treated as sources. They are sometimes useful for noticing that something has changed, but a change is only recorded here once the official page confirms it. If the official page and a secondary write-up disagree, the official page wins and the write-up is ignored. Where IRCC operational manuals or internal guidance are cited, they are the publicly published or Access to Information-released versions, obtained from public URLs; nothing on this site draws on non-public material of any kind.

Every tool shows a visible verified-on date. That date is not decoration: it is the day the underlying dataset was last read against its official source, and it is stored beside the data itself, so the tool and this page can never tell you two different things. The ledger below is generated from those same constants.

Three checks run behind that date so it cannot quietly rot. A build-time lint validates every statutory citation and every visible verified-on date on the site, and the build fails rather than shipping one that does not resolve. A freshness watchdog re-reads the draw feeds, the fee pages, the visa lists, and the program-status pages against the snapshot committed in this repository, and writes a report a human reads. And the programs themselves carry a status registry with live badges, so a stream that pauses or closes says so on the page instead of leaving a stale "open" behind.

When a figure cannot be verified against an official source, it does not get published as fact. It is either labelled an estimate, with the reason it is an estimate shown next to it, or it is removed. Processing times are the clearest example: a handful of streams are not in IRCC’s published tool at all, and those rows are marked as estimates rather than dressed up as official figures.

This site is education, not advice. It explains publicly available law and reproduces published government figures so you can check them yourself. It does not assess anyone’s case. A CBSA officer at a port of entry, or an IRCC officer on an application, decides real cases, and nothing here binds either of them.