Canadian passport now among the world’s most powerful passports, outranking U.S. for visa-free access

The new Canadian passport is unveiled at an event at the Ottawa International Airport in Ottawa on Wednesday, May 10, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Canadian passport holders have overtaken Americans in terms of their visa-free access to the world.

The Henley Passport Index ranks Canada in 9th place for how many countries Canadian citizens can visit without needing to apply for a visa. The U.S. passport is in 12th place.

Both countries sat at 7th place under Henley’s ranking system, which groups together countries in blocs when they have visa-free access to the same number of countries.

Henley and Partners, which has issued the ranking for two decades, says the shift stems in part from countries imposing reciprocal requirements on American travellers in response to new U.S. visa restrictions or onerous entry requirements.

Unlike U.S. passport holders, Canadians can access Belarus, Papua New Guinea and Uzbekistan without a visa, and they can also skip the requirement for a visa upon arrival in Bolivia and Rwanda.

When the numbers on the passport index are disaggregated, Canada takes 32nd place for visa-free travel, compared to 37th place for the Americans, and both countries ranked 26th place last year.

The passport index singled out China for its rapid rise in visa-free access — from 94th place in 2015 to 62nd place in 2024 — although the Chinese passport did drop down the ranking to 64th place this year.

Henley also said China has made rapid progress on openness by granting visa-free access to travellers from an additional 30 countries in the past year. It says China now offers visa-free entry to people from 76 nations — 30 more than the U.S.

Canada’s own drop in ranking stems in part from countries reimposing visa requirements. Brazil, for example, reinstated the visa requirement for Canadians this year after a failed attempt to get Ottawa to ease its requirements for Brazilian citizens.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press