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TOP STORY
Only minutes after assuring a House of Commons committee that millions of foreign nationals in Canada would be leaving “voluntarily,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller was confronted by migrant activists saying they would be doing no such thing.
Coming just as Statistics Canada confirms there are now three million temporary immigrants in the country, the encounter is yet another hint that they are not taking kindly to Trudeau government suggestions that it’s time for them to go.
During Monday testimony before the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Miller was grilled by Conservative MP Tom Kmiec about internal Department of Immigration data showing that 4.9 million visas are set to expire in the next calendar year.
“How will we know how many of those wind up leaving?” asked Kmiec.
Miller said that any of the 4.9 million visa-holders who don’t obtain a renewal will be “expected to leave.” “When people come here, in many of their visa documents, they undertake to leave,” said Miller. “The vast majority leave voluntarily, and that’s what’s expected.”
Kmiec pressed the immigration minister on how his department would handle migrants who don’t leave voluntarily. To this, Miller said that the Canada Border Services Agency has the right to “remove people,” but he again stressed that “in the vast majority of cases, those people that have come here temporarily and do not have the right to stay, in fact leave.”
As he left the committee room, Miller was confronted by members of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), a Toronto-based group that advocates for “permanent resident status for all.”
A representative of the group blocked Miller’s path, saying, “Mr. Miller, we are the people you are trying to kick out of the country. We are human beings and we are not taps to be turned on and off.”
An MWAC video captured the encounter, and shows Miller pushing his way through the group, eyes fixed forward.
“Callous Liberal Immigration Minister … Ploughs Through Crowds of Migrants He’s Deporting,” read an accompanying MWAC caption.
Over the last three years, the Trudeau government has overseen the highest rates of immigration intake in Canadian history.
In July 2021, the Canadian population stood at 38.2 million. As of the most recent estimates, it stood at 41.3 million.
That represents an increase of 3.1 million people; larger than the entire population of Metro Vancouver, Canada’s third largest urban area.
And a disproportionate amount of that intake has come via temporary immigration. In a Statistics Canada report published Wednesday, the agency estimated that Canada had three million non-permanent residents. Of those, 766,000 are foreign students.
As population pressures have pushed shelter costs to all-time highs, the Trudeau government has begun to hint this is too high. In a five-minute web video uploaded earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was cutting permanent immigration by 20 per cent, and said he probably should have done it earlier.
“Looking back, we could have acted quicker and turned off the taps faster,” he said.
This was also the theme of Miller’s opening statement to the Citizenship and Immigration Committee.
“We do recognize the need to pause population growth and return it to pre-pandemic levels,” said Miller, adding that caps on international students had already begun to reduce rental prices in “high demand” areas like Toronto and Vancouver.
Traditionally, entering Canada on a temporary basis was usually a reliable first step towards obtaining permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship.According to Statistics Canada, about one third of those who enter Canada on a work permit become permanent residents within five years.
But given the historic rates of migrant intake in recent years, sticking to the Trudeau government’s reduced targets will necessarily require outsized numbers of temporary visa-holders to return home.
In May, Prince Edward Island became the first province to make major cuts to the number of temporary workers it was nominating for permanent residency — spawning protests and hunger strikes in the provincial capital of Charlottetown.
In September, Miller himself spoke of an “alarming” trend of foreign students claiming refugee status at the expiry of their student visas. Given current backlogs in refugee processing, even an unfounded asylum claim will usually buy another two years in Canada until the case can be reviewed. “There’s some opportunism that’s being used and exploited there,” Miller told Global News.
Although the Canada Border Services Agency is tasked with removals of people who overstay their visa, it would only take a small number of migrants refusing “voluntary” deportation to overwhelm the agency’s usual capacity.
In 2022-2023, for instance, the CBSA performed just 10,180 removals. For context, in just the first eight months of 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada received 119,835 refugee claims, including 12,915 just from study permit holders.
IN OTHER NEWS
One of the more horrific episodes from Vancouver’s ongoing wave of “stranger attacks” came in 2022, when a 25-year-old Mexican tourist waiting in line at a Tim Hortons was repeatedly stabbed in the back for no reason. His assailant, David Morin, was granted just a three year sentence – and was out within two years. Although he was sent back into custody last month after violating his parole conditions, he’s out again, with the Vancouver Police reporting that the 6’3” Morin poses a “high risk of significant harm to the community.”
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