The Enforcement Failure That Gutted Canada’s Immigration Integrity
The failure to enforce immigration rules is compounding fraud and eroding civic trust across Canada.
Canada’s international student program was designed to attract talent, but a new Auditor General report suggests something went seriously wrong.
In this episode, Sabrina Maddeaux and Mike Moffatt unpack findings that point not just to rapid growth, but to a deeper enforcement failure. With over 153,000 potentially non-compliant students flagged and minimal follow-up from authorities, the issue is just one of scale; it’s whether the system chose not to act.
They explore how weak oversight, high approval rates in high-risk streams, and a lack of exit tracking have created ripple effects across housing, labour markets, and public trust. The conversation goes beyond the headlines to ask a tougher question: if rules aren’t enforced, what happens to confidence in the system, and what would real accountability actually look like?
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Sabrina Maddeaux: I’ve been writing about immigration fraud for a while now, but a recent auditor general’s report into Canada’s International student program really put numbers to something I’ve been tracking for a while. The federal government has tried to spin this as opening the floodgates too fast. But, Mike, when you look at the actual findings here, is this really just a case of moving too quickly?
Mike Moffatt: I think the key distinction here is between a capacity problem and an enforcement problem. And the Auditor General’s report makes it very clear that it’s heavily an enforcement problem. The numbers here are staggering. Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the rules, identified 153,000 potentially non-compliant students. An absolutely staggering number. However, they only funded around 2,000 Investigations a year, which is a drop in the bucket. In over 40% of those investigations, when they contacted the student, they didn’t get a response.
Now, normally, if a government agency like the Canada Revenue Agency or a police department contacts you and you fail to respond, they’re going to escalate the matter. But IRCC chose not to do that. Instead, they simply accepted the Non-response and dropped the matter. Now, there are a number of scandals here, but the AG report identified a big one, that the department chose not to act, even when they had cases in front of it.
Now, Sabrina, you wrote in a column for the National Post that this isn’t just sloppy administration. You call it, and I quote, deliberate and scandalous. That’s a pretty strong language. So what makes you characterize it in that way rather than just saying, oh, it’s a typical bureaucratic failure?
Sabrina Maddeaux: This wasn’t just a few mistakes that slipped through the cracks.
The Auditor General found that IRCC’s own risk assessment units had flagged 800 cases of fraudulent documents or misrepresented information, and the department didn’t pursue enforcement action in a single one of them. That’s a choice.
They also found 92% of fraudulent applicants were later approved or awaiting decisions on other immigration applications. So this wasn’t an accidental gap. It’s a pipeline that they chose to allow to continue and simply ignore.
Mike Moffatt: And that 92% figure is absolutely massive. And that raises a question. Did the Auditor General indicate that there are any patterns when it comes to these potentially fraudulent applications?
Sabrina Maddeaux: There are a couple of big ones. So, the department had identified India specifically as a high-risk source of targeted fraud in the Student Direct stream, which is also the stream where they found the most fraud. Yet they maintained a quote-unquote light-touch policy here. So that resulted in approval rates going from 61% to 98% in two years.
We should not be having 98% approval on any immigration stream that shows fraud is getting through and should have raised alarm bells.
The government has since cancelled the SDS stream after the fact, but that still doesn’t account for the people who got through during that time period, or answer for who authorized a near 100% approval rate on a flagged stream.
Mike, you’ve studied how immigration policy intersects with housing and labour markets. What are the downstream economic impacts when you rapidly increase the number of international students in a system without a lot of oversight - to put it mildly?
Mike Moffatt: I would say the core idea behind integrating international student programs in the immigration system is actually quite sound. Because traditionally, new immigrants to Canada come in their late 20s and early 30s after receiving their education elsewhere. So it can often be challenging for them to integrate into the Canadian labour market, as their credentials are not often well recognized by employers. And it can be challenging for them to integrate into Canadian culture and Canadian business culture. So instead of bringing people at that age, we could have young, talented people come over at, say, 18 or 19, get their degree or diploma here, work for a couple of years after graduation, then gain permanent residency. And if we do this correctly, it eliminates the credential problem entirely and it gives newcomers years of experience with Canadian culture before they start their careers.
Sabrina Maddeaux: But that’s not what ended up happening.
Mike Moffatt: To be fair, we did see that some schools live up to the spirit of this. And we should be clear about that. There were some institutions that grew slowly and added international students to very valuable programs. But for others, instead, what we saw is the massive scaling up of programs, many of which had little or no educational value. The incoming students were often misled about what they were coming into, and the program devolved into this temporary shadow, temporary foreign worker program, which suppressed wages in sectors such as retail and hospitality, which are disproportionately staffed by young people.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Some students were certainly misled, but then a lot of those who learned to take advantage of the system and organized crime groups who did as well. But the other big thing is that it created a massive demand for housing.
Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. And to be clear, it was actually very rarely the newcomers who were buying housing. But all of these students needed somewhere to live. So investors started buying up a massive number of single-family homes and renting them out to students.
Now, at some level, that’s not a new thing, as long as there’s been college and university students, you have single-family homes being rented to them. But the scale and scope here were different, and municipalities largely didn’t see it coming. And even when they did, if our population counts are overestimating the number of individuals who are returning to their home countries, it’s going to cause municipalities to underestimate the need for housing and other important services like transit.
Your column connects this to a broader question of trust. You know that fraud in one area is infecting others. You’re someone who covers politics and public institutions. Do you think there’s a real risk that immigration fraud bleeds into broader erosion of civic trust? Or, is that a stretch on my part?
Sabrina Maddeaux: No, not a stretch at all. There’s more than a risk. It’s already happening. It’s already happened. And it will continue to happen if something significant doesn’t change and trust is restored.
Canada is historically a high-trust society where people generally assume institutions are functioning and rules apply equally. But when fraud is visibly unpunished and, in this case, actually rewarded with approval and other applications, it signals to everyone that the rules are optional and unfair. So why should they buy into them at all or trust the government? We’re already seeing this in other domains. Scams, cheating, and benefit fraud are all becoming more normalized. Immigration fraud doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Mike Moffatt: So what are the political implications of all this?
Sabrina Maddeaux: When fraud becomes a wedge issue, it tends to produce overcorrections that hurt people who are complying, the legitimate students and workers who did follow every rule. The question isn’t whether Canadians are going to notice this is going on. They already have. The question is whether the government acts in a way that restores confidence or just changes the headline. And if they don’t, you’re also going to have that continued broader disillusionment in the system.
You can even have run-on effects where people think newcomers aren’t here legitimately or they’re involved in fraud or crime. You can even go as far as to see vigilantism rise in the future. So there are some really nasty outcomes down the road if the government doesn’t restore faith and trust in the system.
The AG report noted the government has zero visibility into whether students actually leave when their permits expire, which is absurd. So for one sample group of about 40,000 students whose visas expired in 2024, only 40% were confirmed to have departed. What does it say about the system’s integrity that it can’t answer such a basic enforcement question?
Mike Moffatt: It’s a big, big problem.
Historically, Canada has lacked exit tracking when crossing a border, though the Canadian government has instituted a number of reforms over the recent years. The lack of a robust system for monitoring and tracking departure confirmations and linking that data to permit expiry does create a substantial vulnerability, which the AG highlights.
Compared to how other countries handle permit expiry, most actually have some form of departure confirmation. So the 40% departure confirmation figure means that the government genuinely doesn’t know the size of the unauthorized population when it comes to international student permit expiries. And the AG’s point that this SDS stream has, I quote: Created new risks for study permit extensions, means that the problem compounds because fraudulent entrants don’t just disappear, they find pathways to stay.
You argue in the piece that the fix has to be retroactive and I’m going to quote you here: Enforcement starts now, isn’t enough.
I would say politically that’s a difficult ask, though, that’s more your area than mine. So what does retroactive accountability actually look like here, and why do you think it’s necessary rather than just moving forward with better systems?
Sabrina Maddeaux: You can’t restore trust in the system if you just say, okay, we’re going to let all these people who are staying here fraudulently and are perhaps even here associated with organized crime groups to just stay. There are public safety risks. There’s also the trust in the system in general and the fact that we don’t have oversight into how many people are here, which has implications for housing.
In my mind, people who didn’t respond to IRCC requests need to be tracked down, and non-response can’t be treated as a resolution. Anyone confirmed to have used fraudulent documents should be barred from applying to other immigration streams permanently. That’s a 101 basic thing that I think should be obvious, because right now, many of them are in their approval queue for other programs, so let’s just nip that in the bud.
Also, expired permit holders need to be identified, and those who can’t account for their status should be required to leave within a very reasonable time frame. I’m talking, 30 - 60 days. Without retroactive action like this, the message is that fraud has no consequences. And that’s just a standing invitation for more fraud.
You’re right in that this is politically uncomfortable because it does mean acknowledging the scale of what happened. But the alternative is just letting the integrity problem continue to compound.
Let’s zoom out for a second. The government’s instinct has been to manage this by cutting immigration targets and just leaving it at that. Is that actually the right lever, or does it miss the point of what the AG report found?
Mike Moffatt: I do think it was necessary to scale back on some of these programs, including reducing the permanent residency targets and putting some caps on international students and other programs. But we should be very clear about this: cutting numbers, while it addresses the capacity argument, doesn’t address the enforcement one. If you reduce targets but maintain the same inspection-to-flag-to-case ratio, you really just shrank the pool while leaving the integrity problem intact.
The AG’s findings are really about institutional culture and resource allocation. The IRCC didn’t investigate because it didn’t prioritize investigation. It wasn’t a key priority. You can have lower immigration numbers and still have a department that closes fraud cases because nobody responded to an email. That’s a problem. The fix has to be enforcement infrastructure with meaningful investigations, exit tracking, interagency coordination with the CBSA, and real consequences for third parties facilitating fraud. Target cuts may be a reasonable, separate policy conversation, but they’re not a substitute for enforcement reform.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Cuts are only the start. And certainly, if we do want to see higher immigration in the future, once it is more sustainable, enforcement needs to be addressed now.
Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. And to our producer, Meredith Martin and our editor, Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about being an international student, I’ve been an international student in two different countries, so please send us an email to [email protected].
Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Auditor General Report on International Student Program (March 2025)
Sabrina Maddeaux column, National Post
Funded by the Neptis Foundation
Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative
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