OP-ED: Ottawa prioritized immigration processing over public safety

"Protecting Canadians is the government’s first duty, and speedy immigration processing should never come at its expense."

Source: Adobe Stock

Author: Riley Donovan

Riley Donovan is a freelance journalist and the editor of Dominion Review. He writes for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

The first obligation of a nation’s government is to keep citizens safe. On this critical duty, Canada’s immigration policy is failing us.

On May 9, 2022, 77-year-old Arnold De Jong and 76-year-old Joanne De Jong, an elderly retired couple beloved by their family and community, were killed in their home in a brutal double homicide in Abbotsford, B.C.

Abhijeet Singh, Gurkaran Singh and Khushveer Toor have been found guilty of first-degree murder in the case.

According to a Global News report, the court heard that two of the three perpetrators were on study visas, and at least one did not attend a single class. Their daughter, Heather Hoogland, points out the horrific murders would never have occurred if Canada had simply carried out routine deportations of fake foreign students.

“They would have been kicked out of Canada… The crimes wouldn’t have been committed. My parents would still be here.”

This tragic incident is by no means an isolated occurrence. Temporary resident streams are being used by gangs to bring criminals to Canada, and visa holders are targeted as a rich recruitment pool.

The extortion crisis engulfing communities across the country from Brampton to Calgary to Surrey regularly features police reports and press conferences in which Canadians learn the suspects identified or rounded up are non-citizens, often on active or expired study visas.

An April 2026 special bulletin from FINTRAC, Canada’s national financial intelligence agency, highlights how extortion networks are recruiting “typically financially vulnerable, young male Indian nationals in Canada on study permits” as “foot soldiers” to intimidate extortion victims and as “money mules” to transport proceeds of crime.

The federal government’s failure to enforce its own immigration rules is not simply illustrated by these cases. It is documented in the March 2026 report on Canada’s international student program by Auditor General Karen Hogan.

Hogan’s study found that between 2023 and 2024 Canada’s Immigration Department identified 153,000 foreign students as potentially non-compliant with study permit conditions, but due to funding constraints investigated just 2,000 cases each year. Of the cases it investigated, 40 per cent ground to a halt because students did not reply to the department.

The Hogan report also highlighted the department’s sluggish response to integrity concerns within the Student Direct Stream (SDS), an expedited pathway dominated by Indian nationals. The SDS featured a “light touch” review process—so light that approval rates for Indian study visa applications at one point hit 98 per cent. In August 2023, the department flagged that this stream was being targeted by non-genuine applicants, yet no action was taken, and the SDS was only shut down in November 2024.

The Auditor General’s report also revealed that the Immigration Department identified 800 study permits obtained through fraud or misrepresentation, yet elected not to pursue enforcement action. No alert was placed in these files to warn processing officers, and by the end of the audit period, 92 per cent of these students had been approved or were waiting on decisions for other kinds of permits, including applications for permanent residence.

Temporary visa streams have even figured in a previously rare form of crime in Canada: political assassinations.

U.S. prosecutors recently unveiled an indictment against notorious gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, currently in jail in India, for ordering the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down outside a gurdwara in Surrey, B.C., in June 2023.

CBC reported that the four-man hit squad all arrived on temporary visas, including study visas. One of the “students” was even featured in a promotional video for an immigration service in Punjab, in which he said he obtained his study visa in a matter of days.

Canada’s international student stream began to be widely seen as a hotbed of fraud in the tail end of the Trudeau years, and the Carney government is reforming the program. In response to the Auditor General’s report, Ottawa has pledged to step up actions against fraud and give the Canada Border Services Agency an annual list of students with expired permits obliged to leave the country.

Yet at the same time, the Carney government is exempting graduate students from the cap on international student numbers and offering lightning-fast 14-day application processing for foreign PhD students and accompanying family members.

Security is put on the back burner by an Immigration Department that describes immigration applicants as “clients” and seeks to aggressively clear backlogs.

The remedy is simple. Ottawa must ensure that every temporary permit receives full security vetting. If the Immigration Department does not have enough funding to do so, either boost funding or cut the number of permits. When fraud is found, consequences must be automatic, not discretionary.

Sacrificing security vetting for fast immigration processing is a disservice to the federal government’s only real “clients”: Canadians.