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Tasha Kheiriddin: Bill C-12 will not solve Canada's immigration problems

A modest tightening of the rules will dismiss 19,000 claims, but leaves 288,000 pending cases and a broken system largely untouched

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Last month, Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act received royal assent. The law gives the Minister of Immigration, Lena Diab, the power to pause applications “in the public interest.” It also retroactively bars persons with expired one-year permits (such as student visas, or temporary work permits) from subsequently filing refugee claims, as they can now do when other avenues to permanent residency are closed. It also eliminates the loophole whereby persons who enter the country illegally and remain undetected for 14 days can also file a refugee claim, under the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement.

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These changes would result in the dismissal of 19,000 such refugee applications, according to Diab. That’s a drop in the bucket of the 288,271 pending asylum claims currently clogging the system. Immigration lawyers and refugee advocates are nevertheless crying foul and plan to contest the law in court.

Tasha Kheiriddin: Bill C-12 will not solve Canada's immigration problems Back to video

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What they fail to mention is that one in five of those 288, 271 applications will be rejected. Or that it will take years to process these cases due to backlogs. Or that Canadian taxpayers will continue to pay the costs of supporting these claimants while they wait for adjudication: healthcare alone is estimated at $1 billion a year, rising to $1.5 billion by 2030.

How did we get here? For years, the Canadian government opened wide the floodgates on immigration, admitting five million newcomers, including students and temporary workers, between 2022 and 2024, in a country of 40 million people. This created predictable outcomes: colleges relied on foreign students to fund their operations. Hundreds of thousands moved into communities where there wasn’t enough housing, creating shortages and driving up rents. Students and temporary workers flooded the low-skilled job market, such as fast food, delivery and hospitality work. Today we have a youth unemployment rate of 14.1 per cent, more than double the national rate of 6.7 per cent.

Worse yet, the system didn’t have the resources to vet all these people. Among one million foreign students with work permits in 2023-2024, Federal Auditor General Karen Hogan recently found 150,000 cases of fraud —  but investigated only 4,000, and marked 1,600 as inconclusive because the student in question did not respond. That lack of resources meant that fraud goes unpunished, leaving Canadian taxpayers and workers paying the price: costs to support newcomers who shouldn’t be here and jobs that Canadian workers would otherwise have filled.

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As Conservative Immigration critic Michelle Rempel-Garner told the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley this week, “This is a dumpster fire.” Rempel-Garner states the obvious: “If those resources aren’t in place, then we shouldn’t be pumping through…. hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people into a system that’s not designed to detect fraud.”

When a system breaks down, so does public confidence. It’s no accident that most Canadians now say there is too much immigration, want to restrict access to social programs for newcomers, and want newcomers to pay for their own healthcare.

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C-12 does address some of these concerns, requiring copays on some health costs, but it isn’t enough. Rempel-Garner points out that there are still 3 million people whose visas will expire this year, with no plan to remove them from the country. Some of these people will no doubt claim asylum before their year is up, buying time while the overburdened system adjudicates their cases, at the expense of both taxpayers and legitimate refugees now stuck in the back of an endless queue.

No one blames foreigners who want to stay in Canada. People will do whatever the system allows them to do, to make a better life for themselves: it’s human nature. But if you allow the system to break down, you end up failing everybody, newcomers and Canadian citizens alike. This is not compassionate or humanitarian — it is an irresponsible recipe for social unrest.

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