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Chinese students apply for a study permit under Canada's standard stream. The Student Direct Stream, the fast-track study-permit route that had been open to applicants in China, closed on 8 November 2024 and is no longer available to anyone, so every application now goes through the regular process.

That route used a fixed guaranteed investment certificate as proof of funds; the standard stream instead asks for evidence of first-year tuition plus living costs. The living-cost figure a single student outside Quebec must show rose to CAD 23,448 on 1 September 2026, separate from tuition and travel.

Biometrics (fingerprints and a photo) are given in person at a Visa Application Centre in China, and with no fast-track option left it is worth starting the application well before the school's start date.

China sets a foreign-currency purchase quota of the equivalent of US$50,000 per person each calendar year, administered by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) and applied by the banks when currency is bought or sent abroad. The quota remains in force in 2026.

Study-abroad tuition is treated as a current-account expense, not a general purchase, so it can be remitted above the US$50,000 quota when the family gives the bank the school's fee or admission certificate, identity documents and proof of the amount. The quota is personal and cannot be pooled: only immediate family may transact within their own quotas, and using other people's quotas to move money is not permitted.

From 1 January 2026, banks apply expanded identity checks to foreign-exchange transactions above the equivalent of about US$1,000 and keep the records for ten years, under anti-money-laundering rules issued on 31 October 2025. The quota is unchanged, but tuition transfers now carry more paperwork.

China removed the requirement for study-abroad agencies to hold a specific provincial education-bureau licence in a State Council directive published on 21 January 2017. Agencies now operate on an ordinary business licence, and oversight moved to the Ministry of Education and the market regulator, which promote standard contract terms and enforcement in place of the old licence.

So the agent market is large but no longer gated by a dedicated government study-abroad licence. It is worth confirming an agency's business registration and reading its written contract before paying, and MapleRank's independent rankings, which no school can pay to influence, give families a way to check an agent's shortlist against the data.

Canada's Chinese population is about 1.7 million people (4.7 percent of the country in the 2021 census), and almost all of it, 97.7 percent, lives in metropolitan areas of more than 100,000 people. By province it sits mainly in Ontario (47.8 percent) and British Columbia (32.1 percent).

Greater Toronto holds about 680,000 (roughly 40 percent of Canada's Chinese population, 11.1 percent of the metro area) and Greater Vancouver about 513,000 (roughly 30 percent, 19.6 percent of the metro area); Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa-Gatineau follow at 6.0, 5.5, 3.7 and 2.9 percent.

The communities cluster in particular municipalities: around Vancouver, Richmond (54.3 percent of residents), Burnaby (33.3 percent), the city of Vancouver (25.9 percent) and Coquitlam (22.2 percent); around Toronto, Markham (47.9 percent) and Richmond Hill (31.9 percent). Most private schools listed on MapleRank are in Ontario and British Columbia, so established community support and school choice overlap in these areas.