Transit Visa

A transit visa is for passing through Canada on your way somewhere else. You change planes at a Canadian airport, you are there for 48 hours or less, and you never enter the country.

The thing to know before anything else: changing planes in Canada counts as travelling to Canada. A connection in Toronto or Vancouver on a route between two other countries needs a document, and airlines check it at the departure gate on the other side of the world. Being refused boarding for a connection you thought was incidental is the most common way people meet this rule.

Which document you need

Four answers, and which one applies to you depends on your passport, not your itinerary.

• Nothing, if you are a United States citizen or permanent resident. You transit on your existing documents, by any means of travel.
• An eTA, if your passport is visa-exempt and you are flying. This is the most common answer, and it takes minutes.
• A transit visa, if your passport is visa-required, you are flying through, and you will be in Canada for 48 hours or less.
• A visitor visa, if any of the above does not hold — see below.

When a transit visa is not enough

The transit visa is narrow on purpose. You need a visitor visa instead if:

• You will be in Canada for more than 48 hours, including an overnight connection that runs long.
• You want to leave the airport — to see the city, to stay in a hotel outside the terminal, to visit somebody. Any of that is a visit to Canada, however brief.
• You are transiting by land or sea — car, bus, train, boat or cruise. The transit visa is for air connections only.
• You already hold a valid visitor visa, in which case you have what you need and should not apply for anything.

Some travellers transit without any visa

Canada runs two programmes — the Transit Without Visa Program and the China Transit Program — that let certain visa-required travellers connect through Canada without one. They are narrow, and all of the conditions have to hold at once: a passport from one of a short list of countries, a valid United States visa, travel to or from the United States, an approved airline, and a connection through an approved airport — in practice Vancouver or one terminal at Toronto Pearson.

The lists of eligible airlines and departure cities are set by IRCC and change, so they are not reproduced here. Check the eligibility tool on IRCC's page before you rely on it, and have a fallback: if any condition fails at check-in, the programme does not apply and you will need the visa you did not apply for.

Where Skylam comes in

Usually only to answer the question — which document does this connection need? — and that answer is often "an eTA, and you can do it yourself in ten minutes". Where it is worth more than that is when a transit application has already been refused, or when you have been turned away at a gate before: both go on your record, and both are worth addressing before you book again.