Two different governments are asking two different questions about you, and the answers do not have to match.
IRCC asks whether you are legally allowed to be in Canada. That is your immigration status — visitor, student, worker, permanent resident.
The Canada Revenue Agency asks whether Canada gets to tax your worldwide income. That is your tax residency, and it is decided almost entirely by your residential ties, not by what permit you hold.
What actually determines it
The CRA looks at your ties to Canada. The significant ones:
- A home in Canada available to you
- A spouse or common-law partner here
- Dependants here
Secondary ties include a driver's licence, bank accounts, health coverage, personal property and social memberships.
Someone on a two-year closed work permit who rents an apartment and lives here is normally a tax resident from the day they establish those ties — despite having no permanent status whatsoever, and despite the permit having an expiry date printed on it.
Why this catches people
The intuition is that temporary status means temporary tax obligations. It does not. Two consequences follow, and both surprise people:
You may owe Canadian tax on foreign income. A tax resident is taxed on worldwide income — rental income from a property back home, interest, a business, foreign investment gains. Not declaring it is not a grey area.
You may be taxed twice unless you claim relief. Canada has tax treaties with many countries specifically to prevent this, and there are foreign tax credits for tax already paid abroad. But the relief usually has to be claimed. It is not automatic, and nobody will apply it on your behalf.
Money sent home to support family is generally not taxable income to you or to them — it is transferred from income you have already been taxed on. Remittances are not the exposure here. Foreign income you still receive is.
Why this one matters for your PNP score
There is a direct connection. Several provincial grids, Ontario's included, award points for Canadian earnings history, read off your CRA Notice of Assessment.
No filing means no Notice of Assessment, which means no evidence of the income, which means zero points on a factor worth up to eight. People who worked and earned but never filed properly discover this at exactly the wrong moment.
Filing is not only a legal obligation. It is the paper trail your nomination is scored against.
What to do
File a Canadian return for every year you have Canadian ties, even a year with little or no income. It costs almost nothing and it builds the record.
If you have income outside Canada, or you arrived or left partway through a year, get an accountant who works with newcomers — part-year residency and treaty relief are genuinely intricate, and this is one of the few places where a few hundred dollars of professional help reliably pays for itself.
Not any accountant. You want someone who handles part-year returns and foreign income routinely, and who is used to explaining it to people filing in Canada for the first time. Ask us and we'll connect you — we work with a tax professional who does exactly this and prices for people in their first Canadian years, not for corporate clients.
The CRA publishes its residency criteria, and will issue a formal determination of residency status if your situation is genuinely unclear. If you are unsure, ask them rather than guessing.