Canada is deporting people at a record pace, and the political story being used to justify that pace does not hold up. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the federal agency that enforces immigration law and carries out deportations, removed 23,160 people in 2025, the highest number in a single year in Canadian history, and was removing roughly 400 people a week by March 2026. 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 not simply because they show an expansion of immigration enforcement, but because of 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. On the one hand, Carney has argued that lower immigration is necessary to relieve pressure on Canada’s housing market. On the other hand, Carney has 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.
Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, became law in March 2026. The government justified the legislation in terms of border security, law enforcement, preventing money laundering and improving the efficiency of the immigration system. But the law sits within a much broader political narrative in which reducing immigration is increasingly presented as a solution to housing, employment, public services and social instability. The problem is not that every aspect of Canada’s immigration system should remain unchanged. It clearly should not. The problem is that a legitimate need to reform immigration policy is being transformed into a justification for an enforcement regime that increasingly treats migrants themselves as the source of problems they did not create.
That is the central argument of this article. Canada’s deportation campaign is scapegoating migrants for crises produced by decades of government and institutional policy failures. The housing crisis predates the recent immigration surge. Canada’s declining construction productivity and looming labor shortage cannot be blamed on migrants. Governments and educational institutions deliberately built an immigration system that relied heavily on international students and temporary workers, and employers benefited from the precarious labour force that system created. Now that the political costs of that model have become impossible to ignore, the same people who were recruited into it are being blamed for its consequences. There is, however, an important exception that should be acknowledged plainly. The Bishnoi network—an India-based organized crime group linked by Canadian authorities to extortion, contract killings, and the 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Khalistan movement activist—has used the student visa system to move people in. Removing people connected to that network, or to real fraud, isn’t scapegoating. It’s exactly what Bill C-12’s stated justification is supposed to cover. Canada has legitimate reasons to deport people who commit serious crimes, commit immigration fraud or pose genuine security threats. The problem is that this narrow, real category is being used to justify sweeping up a population many times its size, which feeds anti-South Asian racism against communities that are themselves the network’s primary victims.
The Contradiction Carney Can’t Escape
At a July 2026 press conference in Red Deer, Alberta, Carney said his government had “taken back control” of immigration. He cited asylum claims down by a third, temporary workers down by half and foreign students down by two-thirds and described previous immigration levels as “far too high.” He added that Canada might need “a few more years of restraint” because of housing pressures.
Yet weeks earlier, when asked why Canada was heading toward recession, Carney acknowledged that falling immigration was itself a factor. “It’s a basic fact,” he said, referring to the effect of declining population growth on the economy. Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) economist Nathan Janzen explained that years of exceptionally high immigration had supported Canada’s headline GDP even as economic conditions per person deteriorated. Population growth reached 2.4 percent in 2022 and 3.1 percent in 2023, compared with roughly one percent before the pandemic, before flattening in 2025 and potentially shrinking in 2026. Janzen’s research found that Canada is now losing approximately 25,500 workers to retirement every month, roughly twice the rate of a decade ago, while the number of working-age arrivals is becoming insufficient to replace them.
This does not mean that immigration should never be reduced. It means the government should be honest about the trade-offs involved. Lower immigration may ease housing demand, but it also reduces population growth at a time when Canada is already facing slower economic growth and a rapidly aging workforce. The question, then, is not whether immigration is “good” or “bad,” but whether its level and composition are appropriate for Canada’s capacity to house, employ and integrate newcomers. More importantly, reducing immigration cannot substitute for fixing the housing-supply failures that made affordability such a serious problem in the first place.
The Immigration Surge Was Real. It Still Doesn’t Explain the Housing Crisis.
The strongest case for Canada’s recent immigration reductions comes from those who argue that the country simply expanded immigration too quickly. Globe and Mail columnist Tony Keller has made one of the strongest versions of that argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Between 2022 and 2024, Canada’s net immigration relative to population was roughly three times the historic US surge under President Biden. Permanent admissions reached 438,000 in 2022, roughly 60 percent above Harper-era levels, while non-permanent residents reached 539,000, more than three times any previous high. In 2023, Canada added nearly 1.3 million people, more than two and a half times the government’s own target. Foreign student numbers rose from fewer than 200,000 in 2008 to more than one million by 2023, with much of the growth concentrated at rapidly expanding colleges such as Conestoga, prompting then-immigration minister Marc Miller to describe the worst institutions as “puppy mills.” Real GDP per capita grew only two percent across the entire 2015–2024 decade, compared with almost 20 percent in the United States. Keller is therefore right that the scale of immigration changed dramatically and that Canadians noticed the consequences.
But Keller’s argument does not establish that immigration caused Canada’s housing crisis. His analysis concerns immigration volume and per-capita GDP, not the decades-long failure to build enough affordable housing. Even on the economic question, there is disagreement over causation. Keller argues that rapid population growth diluted output per person, while Janzen argues that high immigration helped mask economic weakness caused by interest-rate increases rather than causing that weakness itself. If Janzen is right, cutting immigration does not restore per-capita growth; it removes one of the factors that had been supporting total GDP. That is precisely why the government’s housing argument requires separate evidence. It is not enough to show that immigration increased demand. The government must demonstrate that immigration is the principal reason housing became unaffordable, rather than one additional pressure placed on a housing system that was already failing.
Keller’s own diagnosis points toward a more targeted response. Weak screening, unaccountable colleges and unsustainable recruitment practices are reasons to reform those institutions, not reasons to construct a deportation system that can cancel immigration status without notice or a hearing, retroactively bar refugee claims, or detain vulnerable people for extended periods. Legal scholars Vincent Wong and Arman Sohi, in their scholarly article, provide important context for understanding how the system developed. Ontario reduced provincial funding for education and healthcare by roughly $8 billion annually beginning in the 1990s, and universities increasingly turned to international tuition as a source of revenue. At the University of Toronto, international tuition became the largest single source of revenue by 2019, exceeding provincial funding, while the gap between international and domestic tuition grew from 3.8 times to 9.5 times between 2005 and 2021. The expansion of international education was therefore not simply the result of migrants demanding access to Canada. It was also the predictable outcome of governments and institutions creating financial incentives to recruit them.
That history is important because it changes who should be held responsible. International students did not design the funding model that encouraged colleges and universities to recruit them. They did not set immigration targets. They did not decide how many students particular institutions should admit. Governments and educational institutions made those decisions because they benefited from them. It is therefore convenient, but misleading, to treat the migrants who entered through that system as though they were responsible for the system’s expansion.
The Deportation Machine in Practice
While the economic case for blaming migrants remains contested, the enforcement system has continued to expand. In the first four months of 2026, Quebec accounted for 55 percent of Canada’s deportations. In contrast, for the entire year of 2022, Quebec accounted for 30 percent of Canada’s deportations. Louis-Philippe Jannard, an immigration researcher with immigrant advocacy group TCRI, linked the shift to increasingly hardline political rhetoric rather than simply to changes in caseload. Recent reports from Quebec describe CBSA officers confronting vulnerable people, including an elderly woman in a wheelchair, and migrants being detained and told they would be deported upon first contact. CBSA also exceeded its annual target of 20,000 removals in 2025, deporting 23,160 people, while 83 percent of first-quarter 2026 removals were failed refugee claimants rather than criminals.
Nationally, CBSA was removing roughly 400 people every week by March 2026. Its tip line asks members of the public to report suspected visa overstays and people working or studying without authorization, generating 47,900 reports in 2025. New Canadian Media founder George Abraham has noted echoes of the early US crackdown under Trump, which likewise began with non-criminal immigration violations, though the same reporting cites researchers who see no parallel between Canada’s enforcement push and the severity of what has followed in the US. The significance is not that every person removed is innocent of violating immigration law. Many are not. The significance is that the government’s enforcement machinery is increasingly directed at immigration status itself rather than being limited to the security threats used to justify the broader crackdown.
Even the scale of the supposed underlying problem is uncertain. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre claimed in March 2026 that as many as two million people whose permits were set to expire might remain in Canada without authorization. Poilievre then said, “[W]e don’t know how we are going to deal with their refusal to leave and what this means for housing, health care, and jobs.” But researcher Christopher Worswick pointed out that there is no reliable way to determine whether people leave after their status expires. The two-million figure is therefore a prediction. Yet figures such as this can become politically powerful because they create the impression of a massive enforcement emergency before the underlying facts have been established.
The human consequences are considerably easier to document. A non-governmental organization, The Welcome Collective, worked with eight Montreal families in two months in which one parent faced deportation, including a father facing removal to Mexico while caring for a gravely ill child and a mother facing deportation to Guinea after fleeing genital mutilation. One father was deported, six families received reprieves and one continued to fight. Anne-Cécile Khouri-Raphaël, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, described the intensity of the pattern as unprecedented, while noting that Quebec has fewer than 300 refugee lawyers available to challenge the removals. CBSA maintains that it has a legal obligation to remove people with enforceable orders as soon as possible while considering the best interests of children, but that legal obligation does not answer the broader policy question of whether the government is using an increasingly aggressive enforcement system to compensate for failures elsewhere.
A spokesperson for Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Alexandre Boulerice wrote to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree noting that Canada is now deporting more people than at Stephen Harper’s 2012 peak of nearly 19,000, and received only word that a response would come “in due course.”
Canada deported 3,323 Indian nationals in the first half of 2026, making them the country’s most-deported nationality and passing Mexico. Most removals involved non-compliance, rejected refugee claims or overstays rather than criminal conduct. The figure is particularly significant because it shows how the government’s enforcement campaign can become associated with a particular national-origin population even when the overwhelming majority of people being removed are not being accused of serious crimes.
Bill C-12 Turns Administrative Failure into an Enforcement Tool
Bill C-12 gives this broader enforcement strategy a legal infrastructure. The government’s official justification for the legislation emphasizes security, law enforcement and system efficiency, but some of its most significant powers do not require proof of fraud, criminality or a security threat. Under the law, the Governor in Council can cancel, suspend or vary groups of immigration documents on public-interest grounds, subject to Canada Gazette publication and after-the-fact reporting to Parliament. The cancellation can take effect without advance notice or a hearing, with Parliament informed only after the decision has been made. The legislation also imposes a one-year bar applying to claims filed after June 3, 2025 by people who entered Canada on or after June 24, 2020, regardless of when their need for protection developed. IRCC has since notified some 30,000 applicants they may be ineligible.
This is where the government’s stated justification and the actual design of the policy diverge most sharply. If Bill C-12 were narrowly aimed at organized crime, fraud and genuine security threats, its most important powers would be structured around identifying those threats. Instead, some of its most sweeping provisions operate on administrative status and timing. That makes the law capable of affecting people who are not criminals and who have never posed a security risk. The result is an enforcement system whose reach is substantially broader than the problems the government invokes to justify it.
Who Actually Built the Housing Crisis?
The government’s housing argument becomes even weaker when the timeline is examined. 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.
The federal government’s attempts to address the problem have not matched its scale. Justin Trudeau’s National Housing Strategy, introduced in 2017, relied heavily on loans and incentives involving private developers and institutional investors, often without sufficiently strong affordability requirements. Carney’s own Build Canada Homes, a federal housing agency created in 2026, was billed as a break from that pattern, but the Parliamentary Budget Office projects that the agency will add only 26,000 homes over five years against Carney’s election promise of building roughly 500,000 homes a year. Housing researcher Carolyn Whitzman calls Build Canada Homes’ governing legislation “haiku-ish,” meaning minimalist to the point of vagueness, because although the housing minister describes it as “all about non-market housing,” that commitment appears nowhere in the actual law.
The numbers reveal why blaming immigration is so politically attractive. Housing researchers Carolyn Whitzman and Alexandra Flynn have traced the shift directly to that federal retreat: in 1980, when Ottawa was still financing public housing at scale, the average Canadian home cost 2.5 times the average household income. By 2023, the average home cost 8.8 times the average household income nationally. In Toronto and Vancouver, the situation was even more dire, with homes costing 13.2 and 14.4 times average household income, respectively. 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.
Immigration can increase housing demand, particularly when population growth is concentrated in already expensive cities. That is an important consideration for immigration policy. But demand is not the same thing as the root cause of a supply crisis. When a country fails for decades to build enough housing and then experiences rapid population growth, newcomers enter a shortage that already exists. They can intensify that shortage without having created it. The distinction is crucial because it determines who should be held accountable. If migrants created the housing crisis, deportation would be a logical response. If governments failed to build sufficient housing and then allowed immigration to expand without matching infrastructure, the logical response is to fix the supply failure.
The People Being Deported Helped Subsidize the Growth Canada Now Wants to Restrain
There is another uncomfortable contradiction. The people increasingly being treated as a burden were also part of the economic model governments deliberately constructed. 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. Wong and Sohi found that institutions collected approximately $9.6 billion in international tuition in 2020 alone. 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. Then, when housing became unaffordable and public frustration grew, the same population was increasingly portrayed as the cause of the country’s problems. That does not mean migrants should be exempt from immigration law. It means the government should not pretend that the people it recruited were independently responsible for the consequences of the system it designed.
The same pattern appears in temporary labor. NDP critic Jenny Kwan has argued that both the Liberals and Conservatives turned the Temporary Foreign Worker Program into an ongoing business model that suppresses wages and weakens worker rights. If an employer knows that an exploited worker risks losing status by leaving the job or reporting abuse, the worker becomes easier to control. Deporting that worker does not punish the employer who created the exploitation. It can make the employer’s threat more effective.
A Real Exception, and Why It Has Limits
The Bishnoi network is the strongest case for a serious immigration-security response. A classified CBSA report describes how the 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. Extortion charges involving Indian citizens increased 47 percent in 2024 even as the overall rate declined by 10 percent, while charges involving Indian permit holders rose dramatically between 2016 and 2024. Criminologist Kelly Sundberg has described the visa system as having been too open to exploitation. This is a genuine security problem and should be treated as one.
But 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. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (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. McGill law professor François Crépeau has argued that the same policy-created precarity that attracts migrants into Canada can create opportunities for predators to exploit them.
The government’s own numbers further undermine any attempt to turn the Bishnoi problem into a generalized argument about Indian migrants. The 2,418 Indian students charged with crimes in 2024 represented just over one percent of the 188,125 Indian students in Canada that year. That is evidence of a serious but identifiable problem, not evidence that the broader population is a security threat. The appropriate response is to fix the screening system that allowed organized crime to exploit the visa program.
The honest position therefore requires holding two truths at once. Canada should remove people connected to genuine criminal activity or fraud when the law permits it. It should strengthen screening and dismantle networks such as Bishnoi. But it should not use a real criminal network as a political justification for treating ordinary students, workers and families as though they are part of that network. Doing so is especially perverse when the communities affected by the crime are often its primary victims.
Why This Is Scapegoating
Scapegoating does not require the underlying problem to be imaginary. It occurs when responsibility for a complex crisis is redirected toward a weaker group while the institutions that created the conditions for the crisis escape equivalent scrutiny. That is increasingly what is happening in Canada’s immigration debate. The immigration surge was real. Governments expanded admissions too quickly. Some colleges operated irresponsibly. Screening systems were inadequate. Employers exploited temporary workers. Organized crime exploited immigration pathways. All of those problems deserve policy responses.
But none of those facts explains why Canada stopped building sufficient public housing in the 1990s. None explains decades of restrictive zoning. None explains the collapse in construction productivity. None explains why governments allowed universities and colleges to become increasingly dependent on international tuition. None explains why employers were allowed to rely on immigration programs that gave workers precarious status and limited bargaining power.
Those were policy choices. The immigration surge was then layered onto that already dysfunctional system. Newcomers entered cities where housing supply was inadequate, universities that had become financially dependent on their tuition and labour markets where employers had incentives to exploit their immigration status. The resulting pressures were real, but they were not created by the people who entered the system.
The timing of the public backlash is revealing. Public attitudes toward immigration remained broadly positive as late as 2018 and 2019, when 68 percent of Canadians said immigrants made the country stronger. The sharp change came as housing became increasingly unaffordable and economic insecurity intensified. Hate crimes against South Asian Canadians subsequently rose 143 percent between 2019 and 2022. That does not prove that government rhetoric caused every incident, but it demonstrates the danger of turning an already vulnerable population into the face of broader economic frustration.
The political appeal is obvious. Housing construction, zoning reform, public housing and labour-market regulation are difficult and expensive. They require governments to confront developers, municipalities, employers, educational institutions and their own previous policies. Deportation is much easier to communicate. A government can announce that it removed thousands of people and present the number as evidence that it is “taking back control.”
But removing people does not build a home. It does not make construction more productive. It does not create a new hospital bed. It does not reform a university funding model. It does not stop an abusive employer from exploiting another worker. And it does not repair the immigration-screening failures that allowed organized crime to enter through legitimate immigration channels. It simply makes migrants absorb the political consequences of those failures.
What Canada Should Actually Do
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. As noted in an article on Maclean’s, non-market housing represents only about four percent of Canada’s housing stock, compared with an OECD average of roughly seven percent. A Deloitte study found that reaching the OECD average by 2030 could deliver a $67 billion economic boost and increase productivity by up to 9.3 percent.
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. These are the policy levers that determine how much housing can actually be constructed in the places where people want to live. Cutting immigration may reduce demand at the margin, but it does not repair those supply constraints.
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. Currently, Northern Ontario lacks the population and infrastructure needed to attract sustained growth. 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.
The construction labour shortage should be addressed directly rather than through policies that remove workers from an industry already facing a projected shortfall of more than 245,000 workers by 2032. If the government genuinely believes immigration is worsening housing affordability, it should explain why it is simultaneously removing people from the workforce Canada needs to build more homes.
Bill C-12 should also be narrowed so that legitimate security and system-integrity objectives do not become a basis for sweeping administrative powers. The public-interest cancellation power and retroactive refugee bar raise serious concerns because they allow significant immigration consequences to operate without the procedural protections normally associated with decisions affecting people’s legal status and access to protection.
Canada should also 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.
Finally, the Temporary Foreign Worker and International Mobility programs should be reformed so that employers cannot use immigration status to suppress wages or prevent workers from challenging abuse. 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.
Conclusion
Canada’s immigration surge was real, and the system needed correction. The Justin Trudeau government allowed immigration numbers to rise rapidly without ensuring that housing, infrastructure, educational institutions and labour protections could accommodate that growth. Governments should be held accountable for that failure. Colleges that recruited students irresponsibly should be scrutinized. Employers that have exploited and continue to exploit temporary workers should face consequences. Screening systems that allowed organized crime networks such as Bishnoi to exploit immigration pathways should be fixed. And people who commit serious crimes or immigration fraud should be dealt with under the law.
But those truths do not make migrants responsible for Canada’s housing crisis. The housing crisis was decades in the making. The erosion of public housing began long before the recent immigration surge. Construction productivity has been declining for years. Zoning and development rules continue to restrict supply. Canada is facing a massive construction labor shortage. Educational institutions became dependent on international tuition because governments created the financial incentives for them to do so. Employers benefited from temporary workers whose immigration status often made them vulnerable to exploitation. These are the structures that produced the crisis.
Carney’s government is instead increasingly asking migrants to absorb the consequences. That is why the contradiction in its immigration policy matters. The government says immigration is necessary for economic growth and yet presents reducing immigration as a solution to housing. It says enforcement is about security and yet much of the deportation machinery targets people whose primary violation is their immigration status. It points to organized crime and fraud while applying increasingly broad suspicion to communities whose members are often the victims of those same crimes. It presents migrants as a burden while continuing to depend on their labor, tuition and economic contribution.
Canada can reduce immigration without scapegoating immigrants. It can dismantle organized-crime networks without treating entire national-origin communities as suspect. It can tighten screening without abandoning due process. It can correct unsustainable immigration targets without pretending that newcomers created a housing crisis that governments allowed to develop for decades.
The fundamental question is therefore not whether Canada should have fewer immigrants. It is whether the people who were brought into a dysfunctional system should be made to pay for the failures of the governments and institutions that built it. Increasingly, they are. And that is why Canada’s deportation machine is punishing the wrong people.
Pitasanna Shanmugathas holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. He also has a Master of Global Affairs from the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. As a law student, Shanmugathas held various roles with JURIST, including Senior Editor for Long Form Content.
