Canada

Canada does not sort visitors into visa and no visa. It sorts them into three. A citizen of a country named in Schedule 1.1 needs no visa, and flying in needs only an electronic travel authorization. A citizen of one of the seventeen countries in the table to section 7.01 needs a visa or an authorization, and may apply for the authorization only if they have held a Canadian visa at some point in the previous ten years or hold a valid United States nonimmigrant visa. Everyone else applies for a temporary resident visa. The middle class is the one no summary mentions, and most of this corpus is in it.

Canada's naturalisation rule is written as a duty rather than a discretion: the Minister shall grant citizenship to a permanent resident who has been physically present for at least 1,095 days in the five years before the application, has filed the tax returns required of them for three of those years, and if aged between 18 and 54 can show knowledge of English or French and of Canada. Time spent in Canada before permanent residence counts at half a day a day, to a ceiling of 365 days. Nothing in the Act asks what other nationality you hold.

The Income Tax Act has two routes to Canadian residence and they work in opposite directions. The one with a number is a deeming rule: sojourn in Canada for 183 days or more in a year and you are deemed resident throughout it. The one that catches most people has no number at all - the Act says a reference to a person resident in Canada includes a person ordinarily resident in Canada, and leaves the phrase undefined. Against both of them sits subsection 250(5), which takes residence away again where a tax treaty with your country makes you resident there and not here.

The default work permit in Canada rests on an assessment by the Department of Employment and Social Development that the employment is likely to have a neutral or positive effect on the labour market. Two sections cut around it. Section 205 exempts work in Canada's own interests. Section 204 exempts work performed under an agreement between Canada and a foreign state, under a federal-provincial agreement, or under a youth mobility arrangement - and it names no country at all. Whether your nationality lets you skip the labour market test is therefore not answerable from the Regulations: it is answerable from the list of agreements, which is kept somewhere else.

Canada's federal route for a business founder is the start-up business class, and its central requirement is not money of yours. It is a commitment from an entity Canada has designated - a business incubator, an angel investor group or a venture capital fund - obtained within the six months before the application. The Regulations do not state how much that entity must invest: subsection 98.05(1) makes the Minister establish the amount. What the applicant must show is language at benchmark 5, settlement funds of half a published low income cut-off, and a business already started. The class is open only to people who intend to live outside Quebec.

A spouse, common-law partner or conjugal partner of a Canadian citizen or permanent resident is a member of the family class, which is one of the three classes through which a permanent resident visa can be issued. It is also the only one that escapes provincial selection: subsection 70(3) applies Quebec's criteria to a foreign national intending to settle there who is not a member of the family class, which means a sponsored spouse heading for Montreal is assessed by Canada alone.

A study permit turns on acceptance at a designated learning institution, and since 2024 the post-secondary institution must confirm that acceptance to the Minister directly rather than leave the applicant to produce a letter. Quebec adds its own document: an officer may not issue a permit for study in the province to someone without a Certificat d'acceptation du Quebec where the province's laws require one. Neither the cap on study permits nor the provincial attestation letter that enforces it appears anywhere in the Regulations.

Canada belongs to no union that gives anyone a right to live here. What it has instead is section 204 of the Regulations, which lets a work permit be issued for work performed under an agreement between Canada and a foreign state, under a federal-provincial agreement, or under a youth mobility arrangement - without naming a single state. The rights are real and they are in the agreements, not in the Regulations. One of those agreements has been read for this corpus: Chapter 16 of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, whose Section D makes a Party grant temporary entry to a professional listed in its Appendix 2 on proof of citizenship of a Party, and forbids labour certification tests and numerical limits on that entry.

Canada puts the right to open a bank account in the Bank Act rather than in a bank's policy. A member bank must open a retail deposit account for a natural person who asks in person and produces two documents from a reliable source, and the statute's own list of examples includes foreign passports. Nothing in the section asks about immigration status. One paragraph later the picture narrows: if the bank has reasonable grounds to suspect the person is misrepresenting their identity, it may require one piece of Canadian federal or provincial photo identification bearing a signature - which a new arrival, by definition, does not have.

Tariff item 9807.00.00 lets a settler bring household and personal goods into Canada free of duty, on one condition about the goods and one about the timing: they must have been owned, possessed and used abroad before arrival, and they must accompany the settler, unless they are reported on arrival and follow later. Alcohol and tobacco come in fixed quantities inside the same item. Goods sold or disposed of within twelve months of importation fall out of it. What Chapter 98 does not do anywhere in its notes is say who counts as a settler.

Canada issues no driving licence. Each province does, which means the answer to this question is ten different answers and the one recorded here is Ontario's. Ontario exempts an applicant from its examinations if they surrender a licence from a state of the United States, the United States Department of State or Canada Forces Europe, and separately if they surrender one from Japan or from a jurisdiction that is party to a reciprocal exchange agreement with Ontario. The regulation names the United States and Japan. Every other country reaches the exemption only through an agreement the regulation does not reproduce, and no state of Latin America or the Caribbean is named in the text.

What makes someone insured in Canada is residence in a province, not citizenship: a resident is a person lawfully entitled to be or to remain in Canada who makes their home and is ordinarily present in the province, and the definition excludes a tourist, a transient or a visitor. A province may impose a waiting period before coverage begins, and the Canada Health Act caps it at three months. The Act is not a grant of rights to individuals: it sets the conditions a provincial plan must meet for the province to receive the federal transfer, which is a different instrument from a right a patient can claim.

Subsection 70(2) of the Regulations lists every class through which a permanent resident visa may be issued: the family class, eleven economic classes, and two refugee classes. None of them is entered by showing an income. The economic classes are entered through work, a provincial nomination, Canadian experience, a trade, an Atlantic employer, a business backed by a designated entity, or self-employment in culture, athletics or farming - and in three cases through Quebec's own selection. A passive income, however large and however foreign, is not a route into any of them.

Canada has no retirement visa. The eleven economic classes in subsection 70(2) of the Regulations are all built on economic establishment - work, a nomination, experience, a trade, a business - and the start-up business class says so in terms, prescribing a class of persons who may become permanent residents on the basis of their ability to become economically established in Canada. A person who has stopped working has nothing to establish. The routes that remain for an older applicant are the family class as a sponsored parent or grandparent, and nothing else in the list.

There is no ancestry class in subsection 70(2) of the Regulations: descent from a Canadian gets nobody a permanent resident visa. Descent can make you a citizen outright, and that is a different question with a sharp limit on it. A person born abroad to a Canadian parent is a citizen under paragraph 3(1)(b) - but where that parent was themselves a citizen by birth abroad, subsection 3(3) now withholds it unless the parent was physically present in Canada for at least 1,095 days before the birth. The 2025 amendment replaced a flat bar on the second generation with that day count, so the question is no longer which generation you are but how long your parent actually lived in Canada.