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Chris Selley: Canada's unwillingness to deport violent criminals is part of a much bigger problem

Deporting criminals to the European Union is an easy win, every time. We don't do it

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If it weren’t for this newspaper you’re reading right now, you wouldn’t know about a lot of absolutely bananas criminal-justice and immigration-related stories in this country. But even Toronto Star readers are getting a window into the madness this week, via its sister paper the Hamilton Spectator. Readers learned that one Erik Kalanyos, who is now 29, has been identified as the suspect in the murder of Daniel Musafiri, who was then 29, outside a Hamilton billiards parlour in December 2023.

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At the time, Kalanyos had been “unlawfully at large” for violating parole conditions related to the armed robbery of a pharmacy in 2019. “During his months on the lam,” the Spec reported, “he also committed human-trafficking offences, for which he has been convicted and is awaiting sentencing.”

Chris Selley: Canada's unwillingness to deport violent criminals is part of a much bigger problem Back to video

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He had been ordered deported. He wasn’t deported.

The problem, or one of them anyway, is that Kalanyos came to Canada as a child as a refugee, and it’s not easy to deport refugees. A “danger opinion” is in some cases required from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), concluding the person is a greater threat to Canadians than his home country would be to him were he sent back.

This makes at least some theoretical sense on a humanitarian level — though, of course, it does not follow that we have to hand dangerous people absurdly lenient sentences for armed robbery, and let them wander freely around Hamilton or any other Canadian city after their absurdly early release from custody.

But it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever in this case, because Kalanyos is from Hungary, and Hungary is in the European Union, which famously affords citizens of its member states freedom of movement and work within its boundaries. If Budapest doesn’t do it for you, Bologna, Barcelona, Brussels, Bordeaux and Bergen await.

Many reasonable people would argue it’s patently absurd that Canada even agrees to hear refugee claims from citizens of the EU, though the Supreme Court has ruled we owe literally everyone a hearing. This explains the 858 pending asylum cases from American citizens as of Dec. 31, 2025, and the 144 from France, and the 118 from Ireland — Ireland, for heaven’s sake! — and the 524 from Hungary.

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Of 327 asylum claims from Hungarian citizens finalized in 2025, precisely zero were rejected, 143 were approved and 163 were abandoned or withdrawn. (How many of those people left? It’s a safe bet the government doesn’t know.)

On New Year’s Day, Canada had 299,614 pending refugee claims on the books, 3,315 of which were from EU member states. That’s only 1.1 per cent, but it’s a 1.1 per cent waste of time that brings the entire system into disrepute. How can we possibly be working on more claims from citizens of the EU than we are from citizens of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, or Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, or Myanmar’s or Sudan’s military juntas, or many other countries currently touching bottom in the various human-rights rankings, while telling ourselves we’re running a program designed to help and resettle the world’s most imperilled people?

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I’m not dismissing the truly world-class discrimination and violence the Roma people have suffered in Hungary and other Eastern European countries, incidentally, especially in previous decades. (It’s not clear Kalanyos is Roma, but most refugee claimants from Eastern Europe are.)

But if we’re going to declare Donald Trump’s United States a “safe country” for the purposes of turning back would-be refugee claimants who show up at the border, which we do, then it makes absolutely no sense not to do the same for claimants from Ursula von der Leyen’s European Union.

There are thousands of those little 1.1 per cent wastes just waiting to be found in government departments. And they add up, not just monetarily but in terms of the stupid situations they produce — like this one — and in terms of lost confidence in government, and Canada’s overall ability to do the things we watch other countries do and want to do ourselves.

Speaking of which, on Monday, National Post’s Chris Lambie reported on the heartbreaking tale of 10-year-old Shakeil Boothe, who died in 2011 after enduring horrific abuse. Nichelle Nikiss Rowe, Shakeil’s stepmother, was convicted of second-degree murder along with the boy’s father (who by all accounts was more culpable). She was ordered deported back to Jamaica.

She’s still here, and will be for some time longer thanks to Federal Court Justice Anne Turley, who ruled various factors — including Jamaica’s less-than-stellar mental health-care system — had not been properly factored into her deportation order.

But what’s most incredible is, having been handed a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 13 years in June 2014, Nichelle Nikiss Rowe isn’t even in prison! She got full parole in March 2025.

Nobody wants Canada to be like this. Canada’s immigration system has already become a white-hot liability for the Liberal government. It’s past time the criminal justice system did as well.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com

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