Before a Nepali student can leave to study abroad, the government asks them to collect a document with a bureaucratic name and an outsized meaning: a No Objection Certificate. It is the state’s blessing on their departure, and for years the single most common destination stamped on those certificates, after only one other country, was Canada. Close to 16,000 Nepali students a year were getting them to go there. Canada was the dream — safe, English-speaking, with a path from a diploma to a work permit to permanent residency.
Then, in the space of a single year, the dream got a great deal harder to reach. In 2025 Canada’s study-visa approval rate for applicants from Nepal fell to around 33 percent. Two out of every three who applied were turned away. The busiest channel in the entire Canada–Nepal relationship did not slow. It seized.
What Ottawa did, and why
The collapse was not aimed at Nepal. It was collateral damage from a domestic decision.
Facing a housing crunch and a political backlash over record immigration, Ottawa moved in 2024 and 2025 to cap the number of international students it would admit — setting a national ceiling and cutting it further, to 437,000 study permits for 2025 and 408,000 for 2026. To enforce the cap, it introduced a new requirement: a Provincial Attestation Letter, or PAL, which a student must now obtain from their target province before Ottawa will even process their application. Each province gets an allocation of these letters; once the allocation runs out, the door closes for the cycle regardless of how strong the applicants behind it are.
The aggregate effect was brutal. Canada approved only about 75,000 new study permits in all of 2025 — a drop of roughly 64 percent from the year before, and lower even than the depths of the pandemic. Between the first halves of 2024 and 2025, new permits fell from around 125,000 to 36,000. Applicants from countries like Nepal, competing for a shrinking pool of provincial letters against students from everywhere else, absorbed the cut as a plunging approval rate.
Why this one hurts more than a number
There is a temptation to treat this as an immigration-statistics story. It is really a foreign-policy one, because in the Canada–Nepal relationship the students were not a side channel. They were the main artery.
Every Nepali student in Canada is a node in a dense web — sending money home, sponsoring family later, carrying skills back and forth, becoming, over a decade, a permanent bridge between the two societies. Education was how the relationship reproduced itself, one cohort at a time. Throttle the intake and you do not just lower a number on a spreadsheet in Ottawa; you thin out the next generation of the entire relationship — the future nurses and engineers and community leaders who would have spent their lives connecting the two countries.
The cruelty of it, from Kathmandu’s vantage, is the arbitrariness. Nepal did nothing to earn the collapse. It was not a bilateral dispute or a security concern. It was a lever pulled in Canadian domestic politics, for Canadian reasons, that happened to run straight through the busiest corridor Nepal had into Canada. This is the standing hazard of a relationship built from the bottom up: because no one in government treats it as foreign policy, no one weighs the foreign-policy cost when a domestic decision quietly severs it.
Whether the damage is temporary depends on choices not yet made. Caps can be loosened; approval rates can recover. But trust and momentum, once lost, are slow to rebuild, and the students turned away in 2025 will not be reapplying forever. A country can close a door faster than it can convince people the door is worth knocking on again.