The Current - A conversation with Canada's Auditor General

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

Canada's Auditor General Karen Hogan lays out her latest report findings, which detail lags in RCMP recruitment and gaps in sharing information around international students who have been flagged for potentially not complying with study permits.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Immigration has become an increasingly fraught issue in Canada amid concerns being raised about the numbers of temporary foreign workers and international students here in this country. In the midst of that, Canada's federal immigration department has failed to stay on top of critical investigations into their international student program, that according to one of several reports released yesterday by the country's Auditor General. Between 2023 and 2024, more than 150,000 post-secondary international students were flagged as having potentially failed to comply with the terms of their study permits, just one of several headlines out of the Auditor General's findings. The Auditor General is Karen Hogan, joins us now from Ottawa. Karen Hogan, good morning.

Good morning. Let's talk about this international student issue first. What did your report identify as the biggest concerns around Canada's international student? program. So when we started this audit of immigration refugees and citizenship Canada, we were looking at whether or not they had implemented reforms to the international student program. And one of those was to control growth. So the department achieved that. There was a 67% reduction, approved study permits, but that decline was much steeper than they actually expected and really disproportionately affected some of the smaller provinces. But what was more concerning was some of the integrity measures that we

found. And while they implemented a way to verify acceptance letters from educational institutions, they really failed to act on information they had linked to integrity measures. And in your remarks, you mentioned one, 153,000 or so students were flagged as not complying with their study permits potentially. And because of funding issues, the department only investigated 4,000. But what concerned me about that is about 40% of those. files were closed because the students stopped communicating with the department. And I would have expected that the immigration department would have taken those investigations right to the end. You found that the immigration department itself had identified, what, 800 cases of straight-up

fraud where study permits were issued despite applicants using fraudulent documents or misrepresenting themselves to enter this country. And many of those people went on to apply for another permit and in most cases succeeded in getting the thing that they applied for. How does something let that happen? This was a case where we saw that the immigration department just wasn't acting on the information that it has in front of them. They have fraud detection processes, and they did identify 800 cases after a permit had been issued where there was fraudulent documentation used in those applications. And they have tools in their toolkit where they could have put a flag on the individual's immigration file in case they apply for another permit so that you can, you can, you

can take appropriate steps at that point, or they could have canceled their study permit. But we saw was no action taken on those 800 cases. And you are right, about 92% applied for another permit and a little over half have already been approved. And to your point. So again, here's where they should be doing something. Yeah, to your point, these are words that you said yesterday in your news conference. There are so many things that were raised by the department themselves and then no follow-through. Correct.

I think that would be my biggest finding for them to say you, who, have some great tools, you need to act on the information that you have. Does the federal government know the actual number of students in this country with expired study visas and whether they're still here or not? So that question actually hits the third bucket that I would have said is where they have information they're not acting on. So the immigration department did not know how many students had expired permits and whether they had left the country.

So my audit team worked with them. and we identified a few hundred thousand students with permits who had expired in 2024. And with the immigration department, we found out that a little over 39,000 did not have an immigration status, meaning they hadn't applied for another permit yet. So we worked with the Canada Border Services Agency and identified that about 40% of them have indeed left the country. So now it's really up to the immigration department and the border services to figure

out what to do with this little over 23,000 students that potentially could still be here without immigration status. Potentially. Yes, well, they could have left the country. It's really up to CBSA now to confirm in their systems, right? So they did that first check for us and confirmed 40%. So I think the on making sure, giving the student the opportunity, right, to explain where they're at and what's going on.

But more importantly, they should now use the tools that we worked with them to develop. up to do this on a much more regular basis and share and collaborate with Canada Border Services Agency to help protect the integrity of the International Student Program. Do you think that's going to happen? There's going to be budget and personnel cuts across the civil service. You wonder whether the agency and whether that department of the government will have the people necessary to do the work that you're saying needs to be done. Yeah, I have to admit, I don't know where both of those two departments might be doing some of the cuts during the government's comprehensive expenditure review. But again,

one of the responsibilities of the immigration department is to ensure the integrity of the program when people apply for study permits while they're in Canada and making sure that they comply with one of the important criteria, which is to leave the country. So I would expect that they work it into their processes. Let me just ask you one final bit on this, which is, and it goes to the context that is sort of the beginning of the conversation. The conversation in some ways around immigration in this country has changed. And that comes out of concerns around the impact that immigration numbers are having, perhaps on youth unemployment, on housing, for example. What is the risk that the country runs when you have these programs that don't

have proper oversight? Well, I think you're one of the goals of the reforms was to help support the new immigration plans by the government, which was to reduce the number of temporary residents in Canada. And reducing the number of study permits in the International Student Program was one of those key elements. And as I said, there was a decline. The goal was a 35% decline of study permits. And it was about 67%. So now it really is a time to decide with, you know, partners in the provinces and educational institutions, do we need to justice because the decline was much steeper. But then the fact remains that having integrity measures in place and acting on that information are essential regardless of where you end up with

how many permits you want to have issued. So I think it's a basic requirement I would see in a program that has two measures. You're making sure that individuals who come to the country are able to come here as immigrants, but then also meet the eligibility of a program. So, you know, both factors need to be considered. We just have a couple of minutes left. I want to ask you about something else that was part of your reporting, and that is on the RCMP and recruitment for the RCMP. This was a top priority for the force in 2018,

and the shortage has actually worsened in terms of the number of people who are part of that force. How is something like that happened? The shortage will actually get worse in the last couple of years. Well, I think there will be a few things I would point to here when we looked at recruitment for the RCMP, they don't have a complete understanding of the number of police officers needed

to staff the full force. They really turned their attention to frontline police officers that usually come in through their contract and indigenous policing business line. So it left them, I think, a little missing some of the other

needs that they had in federal policing or specialized services. They also hadn't factored in attrition rate of police officers as they were setting their targets. So as a result, their targets were much lower than their actual needs. They were actually based on who they could train. But I think the biggest thing that impacted recruiting was the slowness to process applications

to join the RCMP. There isn't a shortage of applicants. It's just it's taking a little over 330 days to process an application. And so many people are just walking away from the process or stop communicating with the RCMP when it takes along. And so you say, as a result of chronic shortages of frontline police officers, the RCMP faces a higher risk of police officer absences and burnout, which could make it more challenging for the force to prevent and investigate crime, contribute to national security. That sounds alarming. How concerns Canadians be? Well, I think just a few days ago,

the commissioner of the RCMP actually publicly stated that, you know, security and safety are always at the forefront of their mind. But when you have chronic short, shortages and staff, I think everyone can agree that you're going to have some form of impact on services. And we interviewed some high-ranking officers in some of the divisions across the country. And what they told us was that they were making difficult choices in choosing to respond to urgent calls and not doing other things like traffic stops or community services. And when you're covering a really large geographic area and there's fewer officers, it will take longer to respond to calls. So I think those are the real impacts that some communities are

feeling and they're going to feel it differently, obviously. But also concerning is that many of the police officers are now doing some overtime or they're on call. And those officials we interviewed talked about stress and burnout on police officers. So, you know, the current situation isn't sustainable. And that's why urgent action by the RC&Ps needed to improve the number of recruits. We will see whether that urgent action is taken. Karen Hogan, good to speak with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's Canada's Auditor General. Karen Hogan. She was in Ottawa. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m.

at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca.com or on the CBCListen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com. podcasts.