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"About 41 percent of these cases could not be closed because of a lack of response from students."

"Another 50 cases were identified as non-compliant and requiring further follow-up by the [immigration] department."

"[An increase in the number of study permit extensions relative to new study permits] ...due in part to the number of international students with post-secondary study permits who were in Canada, which, according to the [immigration] department, totalled 675,070 as of September 2025."

Auditor General of Canada report 

Over the past year, international students have protested in major provinces across Canada, opposing the myriad of policy changes. Photo: Mehakdeep Singh

"We are protesting on behalf of everyone because we want fair pathways to permanent residency and PGWPs [post-graduate work permits]."

"The protests have been going on for the last couple of months, led by various support organizations in Canada." 

Bikram Gill, former international student, Brampton, Ontario 

International students in Canada gather for a protest to call for support. PHOTO: OMNI News

 

Out of a total of 153,000 cases flagged for potential non-compliance under Canada's international student program, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada managed to conduct 4,057 investigations in 2023 and 2024, according to a recently released report by the Auditor General of Canada, which pointed out that almost 93 percent of 700 Canadian teaching institutions had submitted reports between the years 2023 and 2025 flagging the 153,000 cases. 

 

The reality of the situation is a scarcity of departmental operational funding to enable investigation. Leading to a situation where funding is available for only 2,000 cases to be investigated annually. The immigration department took 'limited action', according to the  report, in confirming non-compliance beyond contacting the investigated student for additional information, and few responded. The audit also undertook a study to determine how the immigration department worked around the cap of international students set into motion in 2024.

 

The approval rate for new study permits was found to be lower than initial projections foresaw. The forecasted approval in 2024 of 248,900 permits prior to the announcement of the cap, pivoted to 149,559 approvals for new study permits, a 57 percent reduction in comparison to 2023.  That trend continued in 2025, when 50,370 new study permits were approved rather than the departmental forecast for 2025 of 255,360 study permits. 

*Between 2023 and 2024, the department identified over 153,000 students as potentially non compliant with study permit conditions.

*However, IRCC had funding to investigate only 2,000 cases each year. This means more than 98% of flagged cases went uninvestigated due to processing backlogs.

*The audit also uncovered 800 confirmed fraud cases where applicants used fake documents or misrepresented information to enter Canada between 2018 and 2023.

*The department took no action in any of these cases even after discovering the fraud.

Auditor General Report  

The report noted larger-than-anticipated declines in new study permits for all provinces, as well as an increase in the number of extensions for study permits, relative to new study permits. Two-thirds of approved study permits were identified by the report for extensions of existing study permits, totalling 77,295 to last September, with an additional 50,547 unprocessed extension applications.

 

The immigration department failed to monitor which students were expected to leave each year,  and which students had voluntarily exited Canada. The auditor general's office confirmed with the Canada Border Services Agency that 15,000 students had left the country of the 39,500 individuals who should have left. Needless to say, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has no idea where the foreign students who no longer have a valid study permit, might be and how they may be disposing themselves in Canada.

 

 

Canada, Diminished and Faltering

"One could argue that we've lost that unifying sense of right and wrong."

"The very sense of [the] liberal, permissive, non-judgmentally embracing society that our countries were fundamentally founded on is now being openly exploited for the purpose  of reshifting the balance." 

Former Vice-Chief of the Canadian Defence Staff, Mark Norman

 

"Symbolic politics has never been sufficient, it is a sign of weak leadership. Condemnations without enforcement, statements without consequences and gestures without policy are not leadership."

"Canadians do not need additional legislation layered over existing statutes. We need the consistent application of the laws already in force.e"

"Canada is lost and no longer immune. A nation cannot remain open if it forgets how to be a nation. The choice is not between tolerance and cohesion. It is between a confident pluralism anchored in shared civic norms, and a politics of endless accommodation that dissolves the very framework that makes diversity possible."

Larry Maher, CEO, Exigent Foundation

Anti-Israel protesters block a downtown Toronto street to pray as police watch. Photo by Caryma Sa’d/X

 

It took no more than a  decade to fundamentally alter Canada, reverse many of its values, not the least the outstanding human right assurance of equality and rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With that assurance came the expected responsibility of each member of society to respect the social contract that ensured equal opportunities (if not equal outcomes) to succeed and prosper for Canadian citizens who obeyed Canadian laws and whose experience in the general education system helped them to understand their citizen obligations to the country. 

 

In an earlier era those rights and obligations were unevenly applied and issues of discrimination against minority groups reflected a European heritage of entitlement and belittlement of the exotic 'others' who had made their way into North America, many as refugees fleeing persecution and conflict. Under moderately good governance evinced by leaders who at best understood their own guiding obligations to the people they served, laws were passed that ushered Canada into an era of fair justice and social cohesion.

 

Migrants from abroad who entered Canada in the first half of the 20th century as immigrants from impoverished backgrounds to make a home for themselves in a new country where opportunities abounded worked hard, obeyed laws, and accommodated themselves to a new culture with values that suited their own notions of being and belonging. Canadian authorities refined immigration rules to eventually reflect Canada's needs in a point system that rewarded education, professional qualifications, age suitability and an assessed philosophical fit.

 

A succession of Liberal governments in more recent times gradually morphed toward the kind of liberal progressivism that loosened qualifications and requirements of suitability to join the Canadian population. Sympathy for people searching for haven from authoritarian governments, from endemic poverty, from societal crime rates, from conflict zones opened the gates of entry to Canada wide, including the refugee class and illegal migrants who bypassed normal entrance procedures to declare themselves refugees. 

 

Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, is greeted by Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, centre, as he arrives in Doha on Jan. 18. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

 

The intake swelled, fulfilling what government and business leaders professed to be a need to replace an aging, low-child-bearing population with new recruits to build Canada's working population. Entry to the country no longer relied on screening for adaptability and suitability for integration into the prevailing culture, its values and its laws. To the point where landed immigrants and new citizens openly declared their defiance of those values and accompanying laws, bringing havoc and division and open discrimination to the very streets of the cities throughout the country where they settled in influential numbers.

 

Newcomers to the country felt no loyalty to the country that had adopted them and there were no expectations from government that they should integrate and accept the prevailing social order as it was. Instead religious and ideological divisions erupted and with no amending reaction from government and institutions at any level, those divisions deepened, becoming more publicly expressed, including through deliberate acts of law-breaking.   

 

Canadians of long standing were treated to displays of overt challenges to the  public order in universities and cultural institutions where mass protests took to the streets, bringing foreign campaigns, conflicts, ideological convictions averse to Canada's own, to the fore, with no government intervention at any level. All the while Canada congratulated itself as a bastion of liberal democracy. Politicians rather than applying themselves to Canada's and its populations' defense, eyeing the numbers of voluble protests and the votes they represented, chose appeasement of activist groups.

 

Canadian PM Mark Carney : China's President Xi Jinping AP

 

And from the outside world, lax attention to the actions of foreign powers that invaded Canada's sovereignty through the infiltration of foreign agents acting on their behalf on the social, academic and political levels exercised the 'soft power' of authoritarian regimes and of extremist movements, effectively interfering in Canada's politics as well as the social contract unique to Canada. Russia, China, Iran, 
Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood all have made an indelible impact within Canada with their malign presence. 

 

The moral, institutional foundations of Canada's principles of equality and human rights have been assailed by Islamist, Marxist, socialist and other radical engagements in destabilizing Canada, as well as other Western nations they have entered both legally and under the radar. What all these Western nations appear to have in common is an attitude of oblivious disinterest in the interference and subtle changes being wrought in normalizing abnormal social behaviour and its effect on their institutions.

 

The exploitation of liberal societies, priding themselves on their Democratic principles of inclusion appear willing to accept the slow erosion of their adherence to the public weal rather than risk being labelled racist, exclusionary or 'Islamophobic'. Identity politics, moral relativism, and DEI guide governments content to do nothing in response to the unravelling of their nations' stability and social coherence. If there is a solution to Western democracies' inaction in the face of this dilemma, it has not yet shown its face. 

 

Canadian universities have seen a surge of pro-Palestinian protests following similar demonstrations across North America.  University Affairs

 

Galloping Immigraton Slows to a Canter in Canada

 

"There was considerable asymmetry to the cuts to overall immigration that saw much larger percentages in reductions to refugees over the 2024 to 2025 period. It seems as though many Canadians believe that there are man asylum claims that are not legitimate, thus fuelling greater distrust in refugees."

"In previous surveys we've done there was much less dissonance and lesser distinction in either trust or positive sentiment towards immigrants and refugees, but we're now seeing a widening gap between the two, owing, in my view, to a growing perception that many claims are not valid and thus raising questions about the admission process."

Jack Jedwab, president, Association for Canadian Studies  

Compared to 2024, the same eight-month period in 2025 saw a 32.7 percent drop in refugee claimants to Canada; at the same time there was a 18.6 percent drop in economic immigrants while an 8.1 percent drop was seen in family sponsorship immigrants. This, according to an analysis by the Association for Canadian Studies of Immigration, Refugees and Citizen Canada's own data. According to the analysis "The numbers of asylum claimants has gone into a veritable free-fall." 

"We regularly see that polls produce different results depending on how the question is framed, and people's answers are also impacted by the narratives they see being replicated in the media and by political leaders."

Gauri Sreenivasan, o-executive director, Canadian Council for Refugees

In the first eight months of 2025, Canada experienced a drop in asylum claims from from all countries, except for those from Haiti, which went up by 130 per cent. Photo by Clarens Siffroy/AFP via Getty Images

 

The federal government recently announced changes in immigration policies for the direct purpose of reducing the number of people arriving in Canada. Canada's population swelled by millions in the past several years with immigration target numbers, family reunification, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers, refugees and foreign students studying at Canadian universities stretching the limits of the country's social welfare systems and its housing stock, and most critically its universal health care system beyond the breaking point.

 

A new poll conducted by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies saw 43 percent of respondents stating their distrust of refugees. More respondents, according to the poll, trusted immigrants, on the other hand, some 46 percent. The really interesting part of this revelation is that distrust is highest among immigrants themselves, against refugees, albeit in lower percentages for immigrants. 

 

People from Haiti claiming asylum from their gang-violent nation of poverty and social unrest, increased by 130 percent in that period. Asylum claims from Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Ghanians, and people from India, on the other hand saw drops from 68 to 79 percent. Airport asylum claims dropped 76 percent in the first eight months of 2025, over 2024.

 

More men than women stated their distrust of refugees on the survey question. And the same applied for distrust of immigrants; men outnumbering women. International students garnered a 44 percent trust level, while in the distrust category, once again men outnumbered women.  

 

"Immigration has become one of the sharpest fault lines in Canadian politics. Eighty-two per cent of Conservative supporters say there is too much immigration, compared with 40 per cent of Liberals and 30 per cent of New Democrats. This partisan gap is now the widest recorded since the late 1970s and shows no sign of narrowing."

"This political split extends to almost every aspect of the immigration debate – from refugees and integration to perceptions of crime. Supporters of the governing Liberals tend to see immigration as an economic and cultural strength, while Conservative supporters increasingly view it as a strain on resources and national identity."

Immigration Canada 

 

Canada's Gross Mismanagement Under Trudeau Liberals : OECD

"Rapid population growth has exacerbated previous housing affordability challenges. Housing supply should keep pace with immigration targets."

"The skill composition of recent immigration, which included many students and temporary workers, has also likely reduced average labour productivity."

"[Canada's] GDP per capita growth has lagged in recent years, particularly compared to its close neighbour, the United States."

"Canada's population grew rapidly, by 3.0 percent in 2023 and 2.5 percent in 2024. This is much faster than in other OECD countries such as the United States or countries in Europe." 

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 

A Canadian flag is shown near the GM Oshawa assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont. (Carlos Osorio/Reuters)

 

A group of 38 countries representing the developed world, the OECD conducts a comprehensive "economic survey" of each of its members, produced by economists from within the OECD every two years, presenting the completed survey to the member-country for its edification. In the latest issue of its survey for Canada, the report was anything but flattering to the way in which the Canadian government under the Liberal Party under the leadership of its former prime minister Justin Trudeau had governed the country. Under that leadership productivity suffered; openly excess immigration resulted in a crippling of the country's universal health care system, and its unaffordable housing stock, all the while doing its utmost to conceal from the Canadian public the state of economic growth in Canada.

 

The most recent survey presented to Canada placed a particular focus on housing, goods affordability and worker productivity, areas where the  country now ranks with the developing world's most laggardly. Record high immigration was singled out for its effect on worsening the problems. Canada, warns the OECD, has accepted millions of new immigrant workers into its labour force, lacking comparable increases in "productivity-enhancing investment". The stagnant economy that has resulted relates to workers in Canada receiving an increasingly short share of the economic pie in total.

 

Canada's previous immigration intake system prioritized high-skilled immigrants in professions such as medicine and engineering. In contrast, migration flows now are mostly comprised of low-skilled workers. Statistics have indicated that Canada has become an outlier on housing affordability, placing in the OECD's most recent tally of "price to income" ratio the regrettable situation that identifies Canadian housing to be the highest of all member states other than Portugal. 

 

 

In OECD rankings of gross-domestic-product growth per capita, Canada has been identified as one of the worst performers over the past ten years that correlate with the governance of the Trudeau Liberals. For comparison, GDP growth per capita from 2014 to 2022 was close to three times higher than Canada's in the United States, at 1.7 percent. A note of optimism appeared in the report in its summary with the declaration that Canada's economy is "resilient", endowed with "robust public finances".

 

Canada's immigrant intake represented a million newcomers absorbed annually. In 2022 the Canadian population was about 38.5 million; three years later it stands at 41.6 million, increased by over three million, judged to be some six times faster than its peers in the OECD where in 2023 the average OECD country grew by 0.5 percent, in comparison.  The report confirms as well a phenomenon Canadian analysts have warned of since 2023: that Canada has been in a "per capita" recession for several years.

 

This worked out to about one million newcomers entering Canada each year. At the beginning of 2022, the Canadian population stood at about 38.5 million. Now, it’s at 41.6 million, an increase of more than three million.

 

While the injection of three million people appeared to increase GDP, given their impact on the economy paying rent, buying groceries and thus contributing to the amount of money circulating within the economy, on an individual basis the reality is that the average Canadian's wealth and purchasing power has been notably dropping. When ranked by "real GDP per capita", Canada's economic performance falls behind dramatically. The subtitle of the report aptly reads: "GDP growth has been supported by high population growth".  

"Inflationary pressures from higher tariffs will require a more cautious approach to lowering interest rates."

"Increased government spending, particularly on housing affordability and new social programs, has recently worsened the general government balance, although it had previously been in surplus." Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 

 

In Canada : The Glorification of Terrorism

 

"The terror apologists' celebration of the solemn occasion of October 7 as 'resistance' and an opportunity to target Canadian Jews is a testament to the Trudeau government's laissez-faire approach to crime, national security, immigration and integration."

"By failing to give law enforcement greater powers to crack down on protesters' intimidation and harassment of Jews and others, the government has enabled repugnant behaviour to escalate."

"Moreover, with Canada battling a teen terrorism problem, these protests are fertile grounds for radicalization." 

Joe Adam George, national security analyst, Middle East affairs, contributing writer, Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Montreal Imam Adil Charkaoui's speech has drawn broad condemnation for inciting an anti-Israel mob from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. (Adil Charkaoui/X)

 

Suddenly the Canada that celebrates itself for its peaceful, tolerant multiculturalism has become a country no longer recognizable. Cradling to its bosom a large contingent of the population to the tune of 1.8 million Muslims whose presence totally eclipses the much smaller demographic of Canadian Jews numbering 300,000 nation-wide. Jews in Canada also vastly pre-dated the entry of Muslims as Canadian citizens and landed immigrants; in a sense mirroring the situation in the Middle East in the contested geography popularly known as 'Palestine', an area of traditionally Judean ancestral heritage that local Muslims originally from Syria and Egypt claim as theirs.

Jews first arrived in Canada in 1760. It took another 120 years before the first Arabs arrived, pre-dating a Muslim influx to join the Arab Christians that had come before, roughly following the end of the First World War, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. World Jewry now stands at about 16 million, in contrast to the Muslim empire with well over a billion people. Islam is considered to be the fastest-expanding religion in the world, at the present time. Militant, political Islam has pinpointed Jews as their universal enemy, picking up where German fascism left off.

And in Canada the results have over the years simmered covertly in Muslim suspicion and distrust of Jews. It has taken a combined Palestinian terrorist pogrom, an organized mass murder and rape of Israeli Jews in a horror of marauding psychopaths in their thousands who hunted down, raped, mutilated and slaughtered Jews on October 7, 2023, to reveal the deep hatred, contempt and violence in the minds of majority Muslims and Arabs worldwide on a rampage of antisemitic rage that has taken over the streets of world capitals. In some of the countries of Europe, governments have acted to protect their Jewish populations from harassment, threats and violence.

Such has not been the case in Canada, as day by day since that horrendous atrocity in southern Israel across the border from Gaza, marches, protests and viral gatherings have assembled to indulge in clearly criminal activity to chant inventive against Jews in Canada as Israel has become a target of diabolical slander meant to isolate it while raising doubts in the minds of onlookers, many of whom are prepared to give credence to such slanders as 'apartheid' and 'genocide' being committed by the Jewish State that is a model of accommodation to other faiths and ethnic groups.

Israel has been attacked by proxy militias loyal to the Islamic Republic of Iran in its Shiite Axis of evil intentions whose focus is the elimination of Israel and the death of Jews everywhere. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Quds division, has formed, trained and armed terrorist groups from Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen, Syria and Iraq in a web of antisemitism and the aspiration to destroy the Jewish State, attacking Jews internationally through terrorist plots of lethal violence.

Roving crowds of 'pro-Palestinian' sympathizers who align themselves with the Hamas supporting diehard Jew haters demand a ceasefire, while also shouting 'Intifada', and 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free', chanting that Jews should leave Canada and go back to Europe, the charnel-house of the Holocaust, denying Jewish indigeneity to the Middle East, where Israel sits upon its ancestral patrimony. And so Jews are verbally assault, violently threatened, synagogues and Jewish parochial schools fire-bombed and shot at, Jewish businesses defaced.

 

 

Protest encampment at McGill University’s campus in Montreal. (Peter McCabe/Reuters)

 

And Canadian governments at all levels appear to be blind to the situation, while some among them go out of their way to be helpful and accommodating to the hordes of antisemites, whose focus on Jews strums a familiar chord in some of those authorities' own inner feelings of racist rage. "We don't want two states! Bring us back to '48!", shout many of the anti-Israel protestors, since the fact is just that; Palestinians do not, and never did, envision themselves in a parallel state with that of Israel. Only the elimination of Israel and the freeing up of the land for sole Palestinian possession suits them; both the West Bank and Gaza.

A bit of an awakening has resulted with the anti-Zionist mob ever emboldened by the lack of consequences to their group psychopathology, when there is no action from government authorities or officers of the law, persuading the haters that there are no penalties for their criminal actions and as such enticing them to be more open over the extent of their pathology. Palestinian youth collectives, at the direction of foreign agents paid by Qatar and Iran, continue their raving and organizing of anti-Israel, anti-Jew marches without interference. 

 

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered in downtown Montreal in October 2023. In November, Montreal police received a complaint about speeches made during those demonstrations. (Danielle Kadjo/Radio-Canada)

 

Honouring Hamas and Hezbollah leaders who have died as 'martyrs' as 'great men and 'heroes'. In 2011 the Macdonald-Laurier Institute study of Muslim public opinion in Canada discovered a small minority only of Canadian Muslims unequivocally rejected Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime. Among them 35 percent would not reject al-Qaeda. Recent immigrants, migrants and refugees who have arrived in Canada  under the Liberal government's generous invitation to find haven in Canada from their own governments' depredations, now support the terror they fled, because it targets Jews.

Half of the current 1.8 million Muslim demographic in Canada immigrated from 2011 onward to the present. These newcomer protesters from Lebanon, Syria and Iran came to Canada to escape the terrorist groups that targeted them, the very same terrorists they celebrate, while living in Canada. A mosque in Windsor, among many others in Canada glorified the "resistance" and "martyrs fighting Israel". Muslim youth radicalization in Canada is becoming a problem that uncontrolled immigration is not helping.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside the fenced in area of an encampment on the University of Toronto campus on May 2, 2024, in Canada. Photo by Cole Burston/AFP via Getty Images.

"A year on from the October 7 attacks, the results of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's 'post-national' Canada experiment do not bode well for the country's future."

"Canadian values and national security are under attack, and our leaders are doing nothing about it. The Trudeau government's appeasement of terror apologists has failed Canadian Jews."

"Canada now has parallel societies and mainstreamed violent extremism -- both of which have become the new normal."

Joe Adam George

"Cross-national surveys conducted in the years before the current Israel-Hamas war show that Canada was among the world’s least antisemitic countries, in the same league as Sweden and the Netherlands. To see whether this remained true during the Israel-Hamas war, I conducted a survey in February 2024 involving four independent samples of Canadians: 1,121 non-Jewish adults, 1,010 non-Jewish university students, 414 Jewish adults, and 312 Muslim adults. For non-Jews, I provided a battery of statements about Jews, half positively worded, half negatively worded, calculated an average score, and found little change in attitudes toward Jews since the period before the war. Some 87 per cent of non-Jewish Canadians have positive attitudes toward Jews".

"Yet police-recorded hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed in Canada since the war began. For example, in Toronto, the number of hate crimes against Jews jumped 75 per cent between 2022 and 2023, with the post-Oct. 7 period responsible for most of the increase. In Toronto in 2023, Jews were the victims of 78 per cent of all police-reported hate crimes based on religion. Muslims took second place at 17 per cent."

ROBERT BRYM | OCT 07 2024, University Affairs

"Investing" in Canada's Future

"We are very close to the breaking point due to the excessive number of asylum seekers arriving in Quebec month after month. The situation has become unsustainable."

"Asylum seekers have trouble find a place to live, which contributes to accentuating the housing crisis. Many end up in homeless shelters, which are overflowing."

"The possibility of entering Canada from Mexico without a visa certainly explains part of the influx of asylum seekers."

"The airports, particularly in Toronto and Montreal, are becoming sieves and it is time to act."

Quebec Premier Francois Legault 

RCMP officers unveil a new sign at Roxham Road. (Carlos Osorio/Reuters)

 

The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has much to account for; its laissez-faire attitude toward illegal entry into Canada has come home to roost. The acute housing shortage that Canada and Canadians have encountered, with the younger demographic marrying and preparing to raise a family experiencing the rude awakening of recognition that the normal trajectory of young adults moving into an era of their own where they expect to buy a home to get on with their lives with the same kind of comfortable predictability as their parents is no longer possible.

People get off a bus at a gas station to take a taxi to cross into Canada at Roxham Road on March 25. (Carlos Osorio/Reuters)

 

There is general agreement among financial houses, economists and the broader public that recognizes the influx of people as a result of immigration, refugee intake, student study visas, work visas and illegal migrant arrivals have stretched Canada's resources -- not just housing, but medical and hospitalization, and other levels of social services, including emergency housing of the unhoused and homeless -- beyond its capacity to absorb any more.

The federal government, it has been revealed, introduced a million newcomers to Canada through refugee intake, immigration, student visas, work permits and migrants in the last year alone. And it has stated it has no intention to cut down on absorbing new waves of people into Canada's population. Canada has always welcomed newcomers, but never on this scale; among G7 countries Canada absorbs far more people than its nearest contemporaries. Canada sees it as a competitive story; as populations are failing to reproduce themselves and becoming older, the economy suffers with not enough people to  fill employment needs.

 

Quebec's premier has now formally requested that the Trudeau government cut back on its embrace of asylum seekers. In 2022, he pointed out, Quebec absorbed more asylum seekers than the rest of the country combined through the unofficial Roxham Road crossing point south of Montreal. COVID slowed the influx. "However, t he arrivals have continued to increase at airports. The number of people arriving on a visitor visa and applying for asylum is also increasing significantly", he wrote.

 

 In the first 11 months of 2023 close to 60,000 new asylum seekers registered in Quebec, which has placed the province in a position of "very significant pressure" on services. Asylum seekers awaiting work permits, stressed the premier, receive financial assistance from Quebec. Some 43,200 asylum seekers received $33 million in aid last October. Mexican nationals represent a growing proportion of asylum seekers arriving, among those from the Middle East, Africa and Central America.

Legault's recommendation is that the federal government take serious action to tighten its policies of granting visas. As well the "equitable" distribution of asylum seekers across Canada should be an issue to be studied, possibly by busing them to other provinces. As well, he expects the federal government to reimburse Quebec for the $470  million it has cost the province on taking in asylum seekers in 2021 and 2022, and formalize reimbursement for subsequent years.

People wait at a gas station to take a taxi to cross into Canada at Roxham Road, an illegal crossing point from New York State to Quebec, in Plattsburgh, N.Y. (Carlos Osorio/Reuters)

Sanity Prevails, After All!

"I felt kind of heartbroken. But I was trying to also stay positive, because it was my husband's ceremony still, and so I didn't want to ruin the day for him." 

"That was pretty scary, because that's when I realized that there is actually a risk that I might get deported -- that I might actually end up in a Russian jail."

"People who end up there for political reasons often don't survive it."

Maria Kartasheva, pro-democracy activist, Russian refugee in Canada

Kartasheva, pictured here earlier in January, had her application for Canadian citizenship held up due to a conviction under a Russian law that has been used against critics of the Ukraine invasion. (Matthew Kupfer/CBC)

 

As a result of rising authoritarianism in Russia, Maria Kartasheva and her husband made the difficult decision to leave the country of their birth and citizenship and apply for a visa to emigrate to Canada. That was in 2019. She now works in Ottawa as a tech  operator. While living in Ottawa she also co-founded a grassroots activist group to work toward changing the political landscape in her home country, to bring democracy to Russia.

In 2022 Maria Kartasheva was informed by her family living in Russia that she had been charged by Russian authorities with the wartime offence of disseminating "deliberately false information" about the Russian military, relating to two blog posts that the 30-year-old had composed while living as a landed immigrant in Canada. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, Vladimir Putin had new wartime laws passed making it a crime against the state to criticize his 'special military operation' by naming it a war. 

Since then, internal and external critics of the conflict, including any who criticize Vladimir Putin or the Russian military for its actions in Ukraine, have been charged with offences against state security, and Maria Kartasheva was one of them, among countless others. Ms. Kartasheva dutifully lost no time in notifying Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, alerting them to the charges while uploading translated court documents. 

 

Soon afterward the department issued an invitation to her citizenship ceremony. When she logged into the ceremony along with her husband in June of 2023, they were asked the routine question whether either had ever been criminally charged; part of a list of standard questions, posed by the pre-interviews taking place before being permitted into the ceremony chamber.

 

At that juncture she explained what had occurred and to her surprise an official reacted by separating her from the ceremony, her husband permitted to proceed with his citizenship. Finally, a month ago, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada sent her a letter, that her conviction in Russia aligns with a Criminal Code offence in Canada relating to providing false information -- in which case citizenship can be denied, or even long afterward on discovery, revoked.

 

She is now awaiting a response to having subsequently submitted an explanation. With the explanation of what occurred to her to burden her with a 'criminal record' in Russia, she requests the department to reconsider their decision to block her from citizenship. Clearly, the official who made that decision to set her citizenship application aside, was not in full possession of the facts. 

 

The facts being that Canada has condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, has committed along with other NATO countries to sanction Russia, yet its officials make these egregious, counterintuitive decisions. 

Finally the matter was resolved with the intervention of Immigration Minister Marc Miller. Today, the minister wrote in a social media post that Kartasheva "will not face deportation and has been invited to become a Canadian citizen."

"Canada's citizenship eligibility rules are designed to catch criminals, not to suppress or punish legitimate political dissent." 

 

Russian antiwar activist Maria Kartasheva has now been granted Canadian citizenship, after she was pulled from a previous ceremony because of a conviction in Russia. Kartasheva was convicted under a Russian law which prohibits "public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation."  CBCNews

Cultural Importation Incompatible With Canadian Values

"I wouldn't suggest this is some novel condition that we're suddenly grappling with."

"[While the question doesn't appear often in polls, it's not the first time widespread Canadian endorsement of the notion that] there should be a little more of the melting pot than the mosaic [has been expressed by a large proportion of the Canadian public]."

Andrew Enns, executive vice-president, Leger market, research and analytics 

Canada's inimitable prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is extremely fond of expressing a trite little message to critics that "diversity is our strength", despite the increasingly obvious fact that the very diversity with which Canada has invested itself through its hunger for more bodies to populate this vast geographic area so that the workforce can be increased and more productivity can be seen, at the very time when he has himself shut down the operations of energy extraction production resulting in vast  unemployment numbers and a lack of responsible exploitation of natural resources. 

 

In the process overseeing an immigration system that has brought in populations from countries mired in conflict, religious zeal, and cultural traits incapable of integrating into Canada's value system. Canada's very security and that of its various populations from China, India, Africa and the Middle East have brought with them ancient and more recent issues of victimhood and violence. Now, a new poll reveals the extent to which Canadians in general react to these issues of discontent and importation into Canada of religious and tribal aggravations.

Canadians of every colour and derivation responding to a Leger/Postmedia poll have expressed skepticism of the prime minister's little maxim, believing that, given their experiences, that while diversity can have its benefits, it also brings with it problems. Respondents to the poll in the majority endorsed the belief that new immigrants should be encouraged to accept "values and traditions" already established within Canada's culture. And at the same time, discard the cultural identity issues that are "incompatible with Canada's".

A mixed view of diversity's benefits was favoured by 56 percent of respondents who, agreeing that "some elements of diversity can provide strength", nonetheless supported the reality that "problems" and "conflict" can also arise out of diversity. Only 24 percent saw diversity as an unambiguous "strength", while 21 percent characterized it as predominantly "problematical".

51 percent of respondents agreed that Canadian authorities "should do more to ensure newcomers accept Canadian values", and a higher 55 percent endorsed the idea that the country's immigration policy be premised on "encouraging newcomers to embrace broad mainstream values and traditions", leaving behind beliefs "that may be incompatible with that". 59 percent of white Canadians endorsed the "Canadian values" need, while 46 percent of non-whites did so.

 

Of Caucasians, 23 percent endorsed the counter-sentiment that newcomers be encouraged to "maintain and promote their own cultural and religious identities", that was endorsed by 38 percent of non-whites. Large, disproportionately immigrant-led demonstrations calling for the expulsion of "gender ideology" from public school curricula took place two months ago expressing social conservatism among immigrant communities not always synchronized with the various progressive frontiers championed by Canadian authorities. To be fair, many long-time Canadians found little sympathy with the "gender ideology" sentiments.

More latterly, Canadian cities have been gripped by the phenomenon of regular rallies responding to the Israel-Hamas conflict, since the national survey was conducted after the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group invaded Israel to commit an endless orgy of sadistic savagery victimizing helpless Israeli civilians, raping girls and women, mutilating and killing children, women and men and foreign farm workers on farms, in towns and villages and kibbutzim.

The well-attended, and raucous, normalcy-disturbing 'protests' billing themselves as 'pro-Palestinian' have been organized entirely by Israel-hostile groups such as Samidoun, the Palestinian Youth Movement and Toronto4Palestine, all of them on record as approving of the October 7 massacres in Israel, and all calling for the total destruction of the Jewish state. In the process creating a violent, threatening, disruptive chaos.

A few hundred Pro-Palestinian supporters held a rally on the steps of the TMU (formerly Ryerson) Student Learning Centre at Gould and Yonge Sts. on Friday October 20, 2023. Photo by Jack Boland / Postmedia Network

These groups have spared no effort to bring in official speakers who espouse Islamist extremism and using the vocabularies of pro-terror rhetoric, including a speaker in Toronto calling for Hamas to maintain control of the civilian hostages it took into Gaza for concessions forced on Israel. In Montreal an imam leading a street packed with demonstrators called out prayers to "kill" the "Zionist aggressors". The opening question of the survey found 78 percent of Canadians harboured concerns "over how the Gaza/Israel conflict is impacting Canadian communities".

The notion that non-citizens should face deportation "if they publicly express hatred toward a minority group or support a terrorist organization" was backed by 75 percent of respondents to the poll. That is a policy currently pursued across much of Europe, particularly in Germany when last month German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke to pro-Hamas rallies by stating his country should begin deporting ineligible migrants "on a large scale". In Canada, no mainstream Canadian political party has expressed similar solutions, as yet. 

 

A majority of Canadians, however rejected the basic tenets of "anti-racism" ideology -- now official federal policy --  which, through agencies like the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Federal Anti-Racism Secretariat, openly pursue the belief that Canada's institutions are "systematically racist", and can be redeemed only through "deliberate systems and supports" that favour select "equity-seeking" groups.

In particular, the idea that "certain minority groups should be given additional rights and privileges in accordance with notions of decolonization, anti-racism and equity", was rejected by 50 percent of poll respondents, with only 24 percent backing the program.

INepness ol Canada's Refugee Resettlement System

"She did not apply for a temporary resident visa. She applied for a TRP [Temporary Resident Permit]."

"She has already been beaten to within an inch of her life by the Taliban."

Matthew Behrens, co-ordinator, Rural Refugee Rights Network

"Presumably they're [Canada Immigration services] overwhelmed. But they didn't even read the application properly."

"We have met with a number of Members of Parliament and there has been nothing. The minister has the discretion to approve the application. It's very discouraging."

Bessa Whitemore, retired Carleton University social work professor

 

"When we get support for women’s rights in Canada from Afghanistan, we know we have trouble here."

"Farzana was a high-profile women’s rights activist. She worked for the [former] president of Afghanistan on women’s rights issues. She belongs to an ethnic minority [Adell Ghadiya is Hazara, an ethnic group that has faced persecution in Afghanistan]."

"She meets all the criteria. This is the fourth time she’s in exile and she’s lived in some of the very, very bad conditions. It’s not a joke. Our government needs to step up and get this woman over here."

Sharen Craig, retired English teacher

Afghan women's rights activist Farzana Adell Ghadiya, shown with children in Afghanistan, is now in hiding in an undisclosed country. Supplied photo

Canada has been notoriously lax for over a year in meeting its obligations surrounding a promise by the federal government that it would rescue Afghan citizens for whom life in Afghanistan has become impossible. These are men and women who gave support and took positions with the Canadian military and diplomatic mission in Afghanistan when the U.S.-led UN and NATO mission entered the country to dispel the Taliban and to search for members of al-Qaeda being sheltered by the Taliban in the wake of 9/11.

Their security and safety in Afghanistan disappeared with the departure of U.S. and allied troops and their diplomatic missions, as the Taliban through a nationwide violent campaign, swept back into power, overturning the elected government of Afghanistan, and occupying the capital, Kabul. The Taliban undertook a mission to seek out, imprison and murder Afghan citizens who were part of the former government, and Afghans who had worked alongside foreign governments in the country. 

Many Afghan refugees, after seeking temporary haven in neighbouring countries, did make their way to Canada to take up permanent residency, as promised them by the government. Relatively few were rescued directly from the Kabul airport in the final, confused and hectic days of foreign government departures, as a result of unpreparedness; by no means all departing countries, but certainly Canada. 

Special Temporary Resident Permits for Protection became an emergency Canadian vehicle to allow desperate Afghans with connections to Canada to claim priority and swifter entry to the country. Farzana Adell Ghadiya is an Afghan social and humanitarian worker who applied for the TRP yet she received an advisory that her application was rejected for a visitor's visa, a visa she had never applied for. Ms. Adell Ghadriye certainly qualified for the TRP, given her exceptional circumstances.

Leaving her network of Canadian supporters who have diligently been trying to bring her to Canada  under the auspices of the government's own rescue support operation,  upset and confused at the turn of events. It seemed clear to them that immigration officials had casually laid aside the application describing life-threatening circumstances should the woman return to Afghanistan.

This is a woman who engaged in building girls' schools and maternity hospitals, a woman who was employed as chief of staff for the UN Commission on the Status of Women, in the office of the former president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani. Bessa Whitemore, the retired professor of social work, offered a place to stay in Canada for Adell Ghadiya, once she arrives in Ottawa.

The third country in which she has been waiting out Canada's immigration decision under the TRP program might end up deporting her. The unnamed country was where she had been in August 2021 when the Taliban returned to power. She had been delivering equipment and materials for a trade school for women, but her visa for that country is due to expire at the end of 2022. 

Her Canadian supporters, because she is unable to work in that third country of temporary haven, have been supporting her financially to pay for rent, food and other necessities. Those same supporters have good reason to question the government of Canada's commitment to resettling up to 40,000 Afghan refugees in Canada, as 'quickly and safely' as possible.

"It’s so hard to live as a refugee with an unknown future. I can’t work. I can’t have a job. I have no rights here. I can’t continue my advocacy work for the many women and girls in Afghanistan.”

"Afghanistan has a lower youth literacy rate especially for girls and women because of the decades of war that deprived girls of that time. Building schools providing education is an essential capacity building in the country’s progress toward peace, security and sustainable economic development."

"Education brings empowerment and enlightenment to the future of girls and women to defend their rights."

Afghan women's rights activist Farzana Adell Ghadiya

Yet Another Islamophobe, (sigh)

"[The Muslim School of Montreal was grooming] fundamental activists. [Offering a model of a society] where men are probably going to commit honour crimes against their sisters."
"[The school was institutionalizing] sexual apartheid [and as such was] very far from the values of our [Quebec] society."
Djemila Benhabib, author, feminist, critic of Islamist fundamentalism

Djemila Benhabib says she doesn't regret likening the Muslim Schools of Montreal to militant Islamic training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Radio-Canada)

"Certainly these remarks are severe and could have been hurtful. However, they have a place in a democratic society like ours."
"Everyone must be allowed to express themselves as freely as possible on these questions."
"[Djemila Benhabib's remarks] are at the heart of freedom of expression's raison d'etre, that is, to favour active participation in debate on subjects of public interest."
Superior court Justice Carole Hallee, Montreal

"I was devastated, appalled, horrified, insulted and worried. How was it possible that someone who had never set foot inside our school could make such damaging and insulting statements?"
Ahmed Khebir, president, Muslim School of Montreal board of directors

The Ecoles Musulmanes de Montreal is suing the secularist author for $95,000 in a defamation lawsuit. © EMMS website

Mr. Khebir chooses to overlook the reality that anyone may now access websites on the Internet to form their own conclusions from the very statements pertaining to the site and purpose such websites advertise of their own initiative. And when Ms. Benhabib found herself provoked with interest after perusing a brochure that the school produces which featured female students wearing hijabs, further investigation on their website informed her that the curriculum was heavy on memorization of Qur'anic passages.

One of which, evidently waxed poetic over the beautiful virgins in Paradise, at the service of male faithful choosing to believe in an afterlife where non-believers are consigned to the fires of hell while the faithful are wooed by nobile beauties. Subsequently, in an interview on a radio program, she made her statements that caused such personal and religious anguish to the school board that it felt justified in bringing a lawsuit against the woman, suing her for $95,000.

Her statements linking the school's curriculum to military camps, he insisted elicited fear within the board that an anti-Muslim backlash from the public was certain to erupt by fanatics who hate Islam. However, the justice hearing the case found logic and truth absent in the credibility of Mr. Khebir's statement of injured protest. The school, she pointed out, presented no evidence of reputational suffering resulting from that interview.

She did find acceptability to Ms. Benhabib's reasonable explanation that when she uttered the statement relating to military camps it was her intention to describe a rigid military mindset, and not reference to camps involved in terrorist training. Furthermore, Justice Hallee stated that there was no support in reality of the contention that enrolment dropped s a result of what the school board considered pernicious slander waged against it.

Her considered judgement was that Ms. Benhabib had not slandered the school or the school's students. She was merely discussing issues of contention in the wearing of the hijab and rote memorization of Qur'anic religious passages. "In this case, the court acknowledges the very important role of freedom of speech and freedom of expression", noted her lawyer, Marc-Andre Nadon.

Serving Patients Through a Cultural Lens

"He was in tears, saying he did not know what to do. He'd been sent into the delivery room to take care of deliveries ... and he had never even seen a lady with her clothing off."
Supervising physician

"In some countries, males look after males and females look after females. [But] we can't be selective in the kind of patients that our physicians end up treating. If you're not familiar with the anatomy of the opposite sex, it's very difficult to end up in the delivery room and deliver a baby."
Olga Szafran, associate research director, University of Alberta, family-medicine department

 


Previously, in years past, there was much head-shaking and hands-wringing at the plight of foreign-trained medical doctors arriving as immigrants to Canada, able to find employment only in unskilled jobs, shut out of practising medicine in their new country because their professional training did not match the kind of exposure that produced practising doctors for the Canadian public. Standards of the licensing bodies in Canada meant to authorize medical practitioners had to be met, and foreign-trained doctors were expected to put in several years at Canadian teaching institutions to enable them to qualify as physicians in Canada.

Now, it seems, things are looking up for many of those foreign-born-and-trained doctors who have taken the required steps to achieve Canadian recognition as health professionals. On the other  hand, while their professional qualifications have been updated to reflect Canadian medical practise and values, the realization is sinking in that there may yet be significant areas of medical professionalism as practised in Canada that remain foreign to them. Just as there are culture clashes when people migrate from one culture to another, those cultural differences can show up in professions like medicine.

A newly released study out of Alberta examined the situation and released the findings. Many of the "international medical graduates" [IMGs] though highly educated, have cultural perspectives informing them, as well as reflecting their own strong character traits, according to the report where colleagues surveyed for the study had been interviewed, their views sought, to gain perspective. Some of the foreign graduates who have undergone two-year family[medicine residencies balk when being taught by female doctors. They find English language nuances difficult to interpret. And their body language can be inappropriate.

They can be, moreover, less inclined to feel comfortable dealing professionally with mentally ill patients; another new experience. And they can be unfamiliar with the concept of patient confidentiality, according to the researchers. Leading to a recommendation that these consistent difficulties should be recognized and dealt with by incorporating "medico-cultural" education into curricula. Graduates from medical schools outside North America now make up about a quarter of practising physicians in Canada. They are relieving a situation where too many Canadians were unable to find family physicians.

Typically, medical schools at universities in Canada reserve a number of residency places for foreign doctors. While Dr. Szafran, the study's lead author, did not specifically name countries of origin, it is known that the top five sources of IMGs in Canada, derived from 2012 figures, were from South Africa, India, Libya, the United States and Pakistan, according to a Canadian Medical Association report.The Alberta study team interviewed or held focus groups with doctors supervising family medicine trainees, and with nurses and other health professionals, along with both Canadian and international medical residents.

The positive aspect of the IMGs is their place in giving service to a growing multicultural patient demographic. Difficult-to-interpret accents and the mastery of English can often impact the level of patient communication, a process that "makes life difficult and diagnosis difficult and affects everything", the researchers were advised by one physician-trainer. Cultural-informed body language such as bypassing eye contact with patients, or invading their personal space, was cited as another problem. Subtleties in communication to spare patients' feelings over their health conditions if they are considered self-induced are not recognized.

Study participants pointed out IMGs being unfamiliar with common mental-health conditions such as depression, addiction, anxiety and panic attacks, as the types of social and individual problems that were never seen in the IMGs' countries of origin since patients tend not to seek out medical help for these conditions in their home countries. Some foreign graduates refuse to shake hands with patients of the opposite sex, let alone to acknowledge that a female doctor might have authority over them. "They tend to walk over you a bit, and  you have to stand your ground and push back and just remind them about gender equality", noted one female physician.

Interim chair of the University of Toronto's medical department, Dr. David White, spoke of his experience with a male medical graduate from southwest Asia who had never in his career before coming to Canada treated women or children. He was left with "knowledge gaps you could drive a truck through". Yet Dr. White felt that such knowledge gaps could be closed by teaching these doctors individually, for example, how to conduct a pelvic exam. Perhaps it is Dr. White who needs some updating himself.