Monthly Archives: March 2026

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Immigration ‘solution’ far from it

Even Liberals know Bill C-12 is a dud

  • National Post – (Latest Edition)
  • 28 Feb 2026
  • Jamie Sarkonak
Even Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s Liberal colleagues don’t think she’s doing a good job, Jamie Sarkonak writes.

The Liberals’ newcomer apocalypse has finally turned into their worst political problem. Hospitals are overburdened, schools are struggling with second-language students, job prospects remain poor, birthright citizenship continues to exist and judges routinely help criminals and fraudsters remain in-country.

None of this will go away by nibbling away at the edges of immigration law, which is all the Liberals plan to do with the bill they’re pitching to Canadians as the solution: C-12.

Currently before the Senate, Bill C-12 would add a handful of conveniences to the immigration minister’s tool box. In theory, it would make information sharing between government agencies easier, bar temporary residents who have been here for more than a year from claiming asylum, and allow the minister to cancel visas and visa applications, among other things.

But these are only half-solutions to deeper problems. Easier screening thanks to better information-sharing in government is nice, but there are currently thousands of refugees from some of the most dangerous countries in the world who received protected person status without proper screening. What’s happening with them? Nothing, as far as the Liberals are concerned.

Instead of ending asylum abuse, Bill C-12 merely gives it a deadline. Barring those who have been in Canada for a year from making asylum claims will work on desperate international students trying to buy more time as they approach graduation … while still allowing anyone on a visitor visa to join the asylum queue and instantly get health coverage superior to that of a Canadian citizen. (The cost of providing enhanced care to the thousands of claimants will be $1 billion this year, rising to $1.5 billion in 2030.)

And the problem of birthright citizenship remains: any international student, temporary worker or asylum seeker who has a kid in Canada establishes a permanent umbilical cord to our social safety net.

Most significant about Bill C-12 is that it would give the immigration minister the power to cancel permanent resident visas, temporary visas, work permits and study permits. Theoretically, it could be used against criminals, but the Liberals aren’t bothered by foreigner crime; plus, if they wanted to actually expel these people with haste, they’d write it directly into the law.

BILL C-12 GUARANTEES VERY LITTLE.

Similarly, C-12 could be used to cancel whole classes of permanent residents — something that the Liberals won’t do, because that would mean admitting that they’ve been handing out PR like it’s free swag at a trade show. The French-language stream of the Express Entry program, for example, routinely accepts people with immigration scores so low that they shouldn’t even be getting temporary visas, let alone permanent ones. Don’t expect the Liberals to do anything about it, though: they frequently brag about exceeding francophone immigration targets.

It’s notable that C-12 could also be used to set country caps going forward, whether they be neutral (the same cap for everyone to prevent a single country from dominating), or targeted (lower caps for crime-exporting countries with low cultural compatibility). That’s theoretical and unlikely; Liberals would likely condemn any mention of country caps as racist.

So, Bill C-12 guarantees very little. It won’t block asylum applicants from safe countries; it won’t remove criminal non-citizens; it leaves most procedural excesses in immigration law untouched; it doesn’t even appear that it will block foreign extortionists from claiming asylum once they run into legal trouble. The bill does tinker with the wording of the rules for asylum seekers charged with crimes, but the gist is the same as what’s on the books right now: if an immigration officer doesn’t think it’s necessary to cancel an asylum application from a person with active serious charges, they don’t have to. Meanwhile, both the existing legislation and the proposed changes are silent on less-serious crimes, which means that many lawbreakers will remain free to make asylum claims.

And remember, the second any visas are mass-cancelled, court challenges will be filed. The Liberals fold like a wet noodle at any mention of “Charter rights,” so any hard stances they take could just as easily be walked back.

Finally, for Bill C-12 to be of any use, it requires ministerial initiative. Immigration Minister Lena Diab will not deliver that. Stakeholder meetings are allegedly a rarity in her office, and her default state is utter cluelessness. Even her sensitive files are handled with neglect. Case in point from earlier this month: her sign-off was needed to authorize the deportation of a fake refugee convicted of threatening to kill a Crown prosecutor, but a recent court decision mentioned that she hadn’t given it. If she can’t be bothered to eject such an obvious menace to Canadian society, she’s not about to purge the immigration queue.

Not even Diab’s Liberal colleagues think she’s doing a good job: nine of her anonymous caucus-mates expressed misgivings about her leadership to the CBC in a report published Wednesday, and when Liberal MP Ben Carr spoke to reporters in a scrum on Wednesday, he couldn’t bring himself to praise her.

Asked, “Is she good?” Carr replied: “Well, what does that mean, ‘Is she good?’ … We could certainly sit down over coffee and have a long conversation about where there are challenges and opportunities across a variety of different files but I think it’s an unfair characterization of any minister to say, ‘Are they doing good or not?’ ”

You know the Liberals feel they’re in big trouble when they can’t even bring themselves to give a little bit of self-praise. And they’re not even panicking yet — just wait until Bill C-12 passes and reveals itself to be a dud. Then we’re really in for fun.

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Enabling Your Replacement: Tens of Thousands of Illegals Admitted With No Vetting At All

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The Liberals broke the asylum system, Editorial Jamie Sarkonak on our inept immigration minister,

  • National Post – (Latest Edition)
  • 28 Feb 2026
  • National Post View

Now that the immigration system — in particular, as it relates to refugees — has come under the harsh light of public scrutiny, Justice Minister Sean Fraser is lashing out at its critics: “We are dealing with, in some instances, some of the most vulnerable people in the world,” he said Wednesday, implying that anyone who touches the issue is a bully.

But the Liberal handling of the immigration file — including Fraser’s personal handling of it from 2021 to 2023 — gives Canadians plenty of reasons to question the asylum system. Immigration officials for years have been mass-approving refugee applications from some of the most dangerous countries in the world by simply rubber-stamping paperwork without an in-person hearing. Untold numbers of fraudsters, terrorists and criminals now have protected person status in Canada, giving them access to generous state benefits and a much higher bar to deportation if convicted of a crime.

A full narrative of this disaster was put together in a January C.D. Howe report by James Yousif, a former immigration tribunal adjudicator and policy director for the government. In 2016, the federal refugee tribunal began getting overwhelmed with claims to the point where it faced the prospect of dissolution. In a desperate bid to keep the lights on, it designed a shortcut to approve asylum claims, reduce the backlog and boost output numbers. This was called “file review.”

“File review,” according to the government, fast-tracked claims from countries and claim types with over an 80 per cent acceptance rate, or those supported by reliable identity documents, or those where the “evidence (of risk) is not ambiguous,” or those where “complex legal or factual issues do not often arise at the hearing.” This was construed to the public in one departmental report as a resource-saver which cut processing time in half.

Among those countries that qualified for rubber-stamping? Afghanistan, Burundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Sudan, Syria, Turkey and Yemen. People claiming asylum from those places are more likely to be in genuine danger, but they are also places of terror and organized crime. Not only does the fast pass through security screening put Canadians in danger, it allows terrorists to follow real refugees who settle here. This has been the plight of our Yazidi refugees — former sex slaves of ISIS — who reported in early 2019 that they were being harassed over the phone by men speaking Arabic, and over texts that referred to their enslavement.

Little could be done to remove a country or claim type from the fast-track list, because once it was on that list, it would generate so many positive asylum decisions that it became an even stronger candidate for fast-tracking. As Yousif put it, “The policy feeds itself with data that have been produced by the policy itself.”

Naturally, Canada’s acceptance rate for asylum claims shot up, rising from 63 per cent in 2018 to 80 per cent in 2024.

This is far from the first bombshell to hit the reputation of the Liberal immigration system. This week, Parliamentarians have been aghast at a Parliamentary Budget Officer report from earlier this month, which projects that the federal health plan covering asylum applicants and rejects will climb to $1.5 billion in 2030.

Over the summer, it became known that the immigration department forgave thousands of foreigners’ criminal records, rendering them legally admissible to Canada. Meanwhile, there are nearly 30,000 people whose deportations are “in progress” according to the Canadian Border Services Agency — which means they’re still here, and they shouldn’t be.

These deportation figures don’t reflect the scale of the problem because they represent only those people who failed to meet an already low bar. And while the most recent example of look-theother-way admissions comes to us from Yousif’s report on the asylum system, similar negligence has occurred in the area of temporary work permits. In 2024, the Toronto Star reported that immigration officials had been directed to skip fraud-prevention measures, even as immigration fraud was happening all over Canada.

Not even the checks on the system can be relied upon to correct these problems. Immigration tribunals hire a portion of their decision-makers to fill diversity quotas, and in 2021, as Yousif points out, they drastically lowered standards for new hires, dropping legal and subject-matter expertise requirements.

A step above, at the Federal Court, it was little different: the feds have prioritized diversity and activism in their judicial appointments, resulting in a bench staffed by gates-open judges like Avvy Yao-yao Go, famed for giving second chances to the most obvious abusers of asylum imaginable. Most recently, Go gave a Pakistani refugee another shot at keeping his status, even though he travelled freely to Pakistan six times after being resettled here — a clear demonstration that he doesn’t need Canada’s protection.

There was a time in Canada when our capacity to shelter good people in need was a point of pride. Now, many Canadians are wondering how many of the people taking advantage of their hospitality are either good or in need at all: just in October, the Environics Institute found that 43 per cent of Canadians agreed that “many people claiming to be refugees are not real refugees.”

Despite Minister Fraser’s bad-faith accusations against those who question the legitimacy of the “vulnerable people,” it was up to him and his colleagues to ensure immigration decisions could be trusted. They failed. (National Post, February 28, 2026)

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Turning Back the Invasion

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Turning Back the Invasion

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