Canada Deports Wrong People at Alarming Rate

By Heather Phillips 24/08/2026 5 min read 3 views

Canada is deporting people at a record pace, with the Canada Border Services Agency removing 23,160 people in 2025, the highest number in a single year in Canadian history. Indian nationals accounted for 3,323 of those removals in the first six months of 2026 alone, already 88 percent of the total number of Indian nationals removed in 2025, with another 7,669 awaiting removal.

The numbers are striking because they show an expansion of immigration enforcement, and who is being made to bear the consequences of Canada’s immigration and housing failures. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has offered one explanation and acknowledged one consequence for the same policy, and the two sit uneasily beside each other.

Carney has argued that lower immigration is necessary to relieve pressure on Canada’s housing market. Carney has also acknowledged that falling immigration and slower population growth are weighing on Canada’s economic growth and contributing to the country’s slide toward recession.

The contradiction matters because it reveals a broader political strategy: immigration is increasingly being presented as the explanation for problems that were largely created by government policy long before the recent immigration surge. The government can reduce immigration if it believes previous targets were too high, but that is very different from claiming that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis, weak productivity, labour shortages and broader economic insecurity Canadians are experiencing.

Canada’s housing crisis predates the recent immigration surge by decades. Federal social-housing funding effectively ended in 1993 under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government, when the federal government eliminated new funding for social-housing construction and abandoned a longstanding commitment to building roughly 20,000 units a year.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which had directly built public housing for decades, increasingly shifted toward mortgage insurance rather than direct construction. Subsequent governments managed the resulting shortage rather than reversing it, while policies involving cheap credit, weak rent controls and restrictive zoning reinforced housing scarcity.

National housing prices have risen 80 percent since 2009, and by 2024, 68 percent of Canadian households could not afford to buy a home on earned income alone. Residential construction productivity fell 37.3 percent between 2001 and 2023, while the industry faces a projected shortage of 245,000 workers by 2032.

These are not problems that can be solved by reducing the number of people entering Canada. They require building more homes, changing how housing is financed, reforming zoning and development charges, improving construction productivity and expanding the public and non-profit housing stock.

International students contributed nearly $31 billion to Canada’s GDP by 2022, more than twice the contribution of the auto industry. International tuition increased 170 percent between 2006 and 2022, compared with a 55 percent increase for domestic students.

Migrant construction workers, meanwhile, are significantly more likely than non-immigrants to live in low income, despite working in an industry Canada increasingly depends upon to address its housing shortage. This is the contradiction at the heart of Canada’s current politics.

Migrants were welcomed when their tuition, labor and consumption helped sustain economic growth. Governments and institutions benefited from their presence. Employers benefited from a larger and more precarious workforce. Universities and colleges benefited from international tuition.

A classified CBSA report describes how the Bishnoi network, run from India by Lawrence Bishnoi, built a Canadian operation through the student-visa system and became linked to extortion, contract killings and political violence.

However, the existence of a genuine criminal network does not justify treating the broader migrant population as responsible for its activities. International students are themselves frequently the victims of fraud and exploitation.

IRCC identified nearly 1,550 fake-acceptance-letter applications for school admissions in 2023 and intercepted more than 10,000 fraudulent documents after strengthening verification. The government’s own numbers further undermine any attempt to turn the Bishnoi problem into a generalized argument about Indian migrants.

If the government wants to address the problems that have driven public frustration, it should begin with housing. Canada needs to rebuild public, non-market housing at a scale comparable with other OECD countries.

Non-market housing represents only about four percent of Canada’s housing stock, compared with an OECD average of roughly seven percent. Reaching the OECD average by 2030 could deliver a $67 billion economic boost and increase productivity by up to 9.3 percent, as noted in a study on economic necessity.

Provincial and municipal governments also need to reform development charges and zoning so that family-sized homes, duplexes, triplexes and other forms of “missing middle” housing can be built more easily.

Canada should also direct more infrastructure and economic investment toward underpopulated regions such as Northern Ontario, which holds 90 percent of the province’s land but just six percent of its population.

A better distribution of population would reduce pressure on congested cities like Toronto and Vancouver without unnecessarily reducing the number of workers and taxpayers Canada needs.

Bill C-12 should also be narrowed so that legitimate security and system-integrity objectives do not become a basis for sweeping administrative powers.

Canada should create a genuine regularization pathway for long-term workers, students and family members who have established lives in the country without secure status.

A regularization program would recognize that prolonged immigration precarity is often produced by the structure of the system itself.

It would also reduce the ability of employers to use deportation as leverage over workers who report exploitation.

Stronger wage protections, greater labour mobility and less dependence on employer-controlled immigration status would address the underlying exploitation more effectively than simply removing the workers who experience it.

Canada can reduce immigration without scapegoating immigrants.

Canada can dismantle organized-crime networks without treating entire national-origin communities as suspect.

The people who were brought into a dysfunctional system should not be made to pay for the failures of the governments and institutions that built it.