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Sabrina Maddeaux: Liberals won't admit that immigration system has been corrupted

Ottawa wants to pretend the problem was failing to keep the system sustainable, but it runs much deeper than that

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The federal government would love Canadians to believe their monumental immigration screwup was a simple one — that they naively opened the floodgates too far, too fast, surging newcomer numbers past sustainable levels. This version of events both limits their political liability and allows for a band-aid solution of temporarily decreasing immigration targets.

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But the auditor general’s report, released on March 23, into Canada’s international student program shows the real story to be much more complex, much more deliberate, and much more scandalous. Critically, fixing our immigration system will take far more than just cutting back numbers.

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As it turns out, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has almost entirely neglected to enforce immigration rules for international students, allowing fraud to go virtually unchecked and unpunished as permits skyrocketed.

The problem starts with a federal government that doesn’t take immigration enforcement seriously, and therefore sees no reason to invest in it. The auditor general found that, between 2023 and 2024, IRCC identified more than 153,000 students as potentially non-compliant with their permit conditions, such as staying enrolled in school, actually attending classes, and respecting work hour limits. However, it only had funds to “investigate” 2,000 cases per year.

This means nearly 150,000 cases of potential permit violations went “univestigated” over the course of two years. That is approximately equal to the population of the City of Waterloo, ON.

IRCC can’t put all the blame on lack of funding, however. You may have noticed I keep putting “investigate” in quotation marks — this is because IRCC’s version of an investigation doesn’t match that of any reasonable person. There are toddlers who routinely conduct more thorough inquiries into why the sky is blue.

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The auditor general found that, of the 4,057 “investigations” IRCC did pursue in the 2023-2024 period, 40 per cent of cases were shut “because students did not respond to requests for more information” and “another 50 cases were identified as non‑compliant and requiring further follow‑up by the department.”

It’s impossible to imagine any equivalent organization from law enforcement agencies to the Canada Revenue Agency or even professional licensing bodies simply taking “no response” as an answer to a serious inquiry and quickly moving on. The report found the department took “limited action” to confirm information beyond the most basic step of attempting to contact students.

But the outcome wasn’t any better when they got answers, either. The auditor general reviewed three investigative reports created by IRCC regional risk assessment units, which identified 800 cases where study permits issued between 2018 and 2023 either used fraudulent documents or misrepresented information. The IRCC had discretion to take enforcement actions and investigate whether third parties were behind any of the fraud, but “did not consider” doing so for even one of the 800 cases.

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The outcome? Nearly every single fraudulent applicant — 92 per cent of them — was later approved or awaiting a decision on other immigration applications.

None of this was because IRCC is blind to the existence or scale of fraud in the system. Its own risk assessment units identified significant concerns with the Student Direct Stream (SDS), which accounted for a large portion of all permits issued between 2022-2024. The auditor general says the department was “slow to act on integrity concerns it had identified with the stream, such as higher rates of fraudulent documents, reports of students not actively pursuing their studies, and increased asylum claims by students.”

Those same risk assessment units identified India in particular as a high risk source of targeted fraud, yet the department maintained a policy of only reviewing applications originating from the country with a “light touch.” This not-so-coincidentally resulted in approval rates for Indian nations in the SDS stream going from 61 per cent in 2022 to 98 per cent in 2024.

The government has since cancelled the SDS stream, but the concerns and impacts remain. How can Canadians be sure it was only the most egregious outlier? Who will be held accountable for allowing the largest coordinated incidence of immigration fraud in Canadian history? How can anyone be sure it won’t happen again, or isn’t still happening, not just in student permit streams, but any immigration program?

Similar red flags are waving so furiously they may take their poles with them into the wind in the temporary foreign worker stream and the refugee system, where claims have surged so quickly there’s a backlog of approximately 300,000 applicants. Asylum claims from foreign students already in Canada are a significant part of that uptick, and the independent tribunal that decides refugee claims has increasingly been skipping standard in-person hearings altogether, instead relying on just paperwork.

The entire immigration system didn’t just become unsustainable; it was thoroughly corrupted. The federal government allowed fraudsters into the system and let them remain there even in the rare case it bothered to identify them. More than that, they made it clear to applicants who may have otherwise never considered fraud as a viable immigration path that there are no downsides, only upsides.

The auditor general says that fraudulent applications “have an impact on the broader immigration system.” For example, the report warns that while the SDS stream has closed, “the disproportionately high approval rates for these permits, sustained over several years, created new risks for study permit extensions.”

In other words, large numbers of fraudsters are already here, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t find a way to stay, legally or otherwise. The report also noted the department has zero clue whether students actually leave Canada when their permit expires. The auditor general, as a representative sample, identified approximately 40,000 students whose visas expired in 2024 and should’ve left the country— but was only able to confirm 40 per cent of them ever did so with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

Reducing immigration targets is only the start. To fix our broken immigration system, and restore public confidence, politicians must act quickly to enforce the rules that both protect Canadians and secure public buy-in. Many of them will find this politically uncomfortable, but the solution can’t be “enforcement starts now”; it must be retroactive. Among other measures, the government must pursue those who never responded to IRCC requests, ban those found to have committed fraud from applying for permits in other streams, and ensure expired permit holders leave the country.

Fraud in one area of society often infects others. Canada is historically a high-trust society, but that’s already beginning to change as scams, cheating, and crime become more pervasive. Why would immigration fraud not transition to fraudulent job applications, tax filings, or benefit claims? If more and more people are getting ahead this way, why shouldn’t others who are falling behind? The issue is both a legal and moral one. It’s also existential in that, if left unchecked, it will erode the very idea of what it means to be and become Canadian.

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