The Hongcouver | Exit strategy: Canada to target tax and visa cheats by tracking departures

Hong Kong and mainland Chinese immigrants be warned. This summer, Canada is plugging gaps in its border management that have allowed some of you to practice passport and taxation fraud.

One of the more alarming facts highlighted by Canada’s ongoing crackdown on citizenship and so-called passports of convenience has been the failure of the government to know where its citizens and permanent residents are at any given time.

By this, I don’t mean a Big-Brotherish ability to track exact whereabouts. It’s far more fundamental than that: Canada currently has no way of knowing for sure if you are even in the country or not.

That’s because passport and residency-card data is collected when you enter Canada, but generally not when you exit. 

This odd situation is well known to anyone familiar with Canada’s border practices. Inky Mark, a Chinese-born former MP who sat on parliament’s immigration committee, said the situation has long troubled him. “Canada needs to keep entry and exit data, which I suggested to Liberals at least a decade ago,” said Mark, a former member of the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance. He is now a Conservative.

“I brought this up when I was vice-chair of immigration committee to deaf ears,” Mark said last month in a Twitter exchange on the subject.