As Alexander Brown points out, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and Canada’s immigration system produces vast amounts of fraudulent immigrants with only token attempts to detect and punish it. So Canada actually has an Immigration Fraud System, because that is what it does:
Let’s be clear about immigration fraud.
It started at the top. It was on purpose. And it’s still happening on purpose.
After a week of damning reports, and even a craven disregard for a return to decency, it has become abundantly clear that the government’s much-touted “reforms” are more about managing political perception than fixing a broken system. Behind the rhetoric lies a reality of widespread fraud, a continued lack of oversight, and an immigration department which has lost even greater control of its own bastardized mandate.
One of the most glaring failures has been the confirmed explosion of fraud within the international student program. Earlier this week, a scathing report from the Auditor General revealed that the IRCC failed to investigate the vast majority of cases flagged for potential fraud or non-compliance. Out of 153,000 cases identified in 2023 and 2024, only about 4,000 investigations were actually launched — a measly 2.6%. Even more troubling, 40% of these investigations were simply dropped because the students didn’t bother to respond to emails.
Speak to industry insiders and they’ll tell you that a “pay-to-play” market ran rampant between the years of 2021-2024, almost entirely on the basis of an understanding that fraudulent letters of acceptance, through equally dodgy institutions, would not be investigated through official immigration channels.
Let us not forget, even Ontario Premier Doug Ford touted this unvetted explosion — the worst policy decision in our nation’s history — as a success story. And yes, his office assisted in building for Conestoga, the worst offender of all the nation’s illegitimate institutions.
This culture of non-enforcement extends to the asylum system, which has seen a massive surge in claims. Since 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants has grown by a staggering 2,900%. While the government speaks of protecting the “vulnerable,” critics (read: normal people with morals and scruples) point out that the system is being exploited by those using it as a legal strategy to stall their removal from Canada. International students have spammed asylum claims after striking out in the labour force, making the trend so obvious that even then-immigration minister Marc Miller admitted it “[didn’t] smell good.”
Record levels of asylum fraud, in the six figures, is no mere matter of paperwork. The programme has become the safe haven for serial extortionists, varying degrees of triggermen from the Indian subcontinent, and those who have exploited a key loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement: Canadian judges no longer care to enforce the law.
