Geoff Russ: Is 'deportation' still a bad word in Canada?
Foreigners who knowingly break our laws should not be here.
“Society cannot subsist unless the laws of justice are tolerably observed, as no social intercourse can take place among men who do not generally abstain from injuring one another; the consideration of this necessity, it has been thought, was the ground upon which we approved of the enforcement of the laws of justice by the punishment of those who violated them.”
Those are the words of Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759.
More than 266 years later, Canada’s federal government does not even have the resolve to champion one of the mildest punishments available to a sovereign country, deportation.
Is that truly so beyond the pale?
The D-word frightens people, especially progressives, who hear it and envision pre-dawn raids upon unsuspecting families. That is not necessary.
What is necessary is talking about how many foreign nationals and permanent residents wittingly break our laws, exploit our rules, and treat this country like a joke. To say that these people ought to be sent home is still verboten in polite company, and as incendiary as a firecracker in church.
However, the stack of facts to support such a course of action continues to climb.
On the Queen Elizabeth Way in Ontario, Yasir Baig killed Nicole Turcotte in a fit of road rage. He slammed on the brakes in live highway traffic, causing the accident that killed Turcotte, who was just 22 years old.
Baig, a permanent resident who immigrated from Pakistan, pleaded guilty to the crime of dangerous driving causing death. He got six months less a day in jail, in addition to being found inadmissible for “serious criminality,” and was justly ordered removed from the country. Yet he has, for now, remained in Canada.
The Federal Court sent his case back, as the Immigration Appeal Division apparently failed to include a parole board’s “low risk” finding. The court cited the hardship that his Canadian-born children might face if they return with him to Pakistan.
It was one more example of the Canadian legal system contorting itself to reprieve lawbreakers while their victims remain dead. Up north in Barrie, a young male international student named Aswin Sajeevan secretly filmed his female housemates in the bathroom via a peephole.
The judge called the offences “sinister,” and stated that he ought to receive six to twelve months in jail. However, that same judge opted for five and a half months instead, because anything sterner would trigger “serious criminality” under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, compromising his status in Canada.
Similar undue grace has been extended to fraudsters, and even a man with permanent residency who tried purchasing sexual services from somebody who was believed to be fifteen years old. It is hard to imagine a clearer betrayal of public expectations than allowing such people to keep the privilege of living here.
Adam Smith comes to mind once again.
“They reflect that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and oppose to the emotions of compassion which they feel for a particular person, a more enlarged compassion which they feel for mankind.”
The Canadian legal class, especially the judiciary, has turned this on its head. Justice for victims is offered up as a sacrifice whenever possible for any lawbreaking foreigner on the dock.
Take the trucking sector.
The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) is hardly a fringe outfit, and has been shouting itself hoarse.
In August, after a crash involving a semi-truck killed three people in Florida, it was revealed that the driver was in the United States illegally, had failed his English and driving tests, but somehow received a commercial licence. Within a week, the American government halted the issuance of all work visas for foreign truck drivers and strengthened the enforcement of English-language testing for them. It is remarkable how easy it is to respond to incidents like this.
The CTA has repeatedly warned that immigration-related problems in the trucking industry are obvious, and have to be resolved. It has pointed out how non-compliant carriers and unethical ownership groups are eroding public trust with their unsafe, illegal practices.
However, Ottawa prefers to hold consultations while the casualties and other tragedies pile up. In October 2025, the National Post’s Jamie Sarkonak wrote an extensive and appalling catalogue of multi-fatality pile-ups on the 401 and elsewhere in Canada, caused by drivers using their phones, or cooking up falsified logbooks and blowing right through stop signs and construction queues. Oftentimes they have fled the scene, and oftentimes they are on temporary resident status with suspect licensing.
Many of the apprehended have absconded, and in the name of public safety, may they stay out of Canada forever. Others are fighting punishment and likely deportation on “humanitarian grounds.”
Propping up their cases is our compromised Canadian system, with licence-mill driving schools, bribes, test fraud, and missing qualifications. The provinces themselves bear culpability, only investigating these rogue operators after the carnage makes it onto the evening news.
Between 2020 and early 2025, there were 821 recorded violations in the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Programme, 83 in trucking alone. This is almost certainly a drastic undercount, and one can only guess just how many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of violations have occurred within the TFW regime.
$2.48 million in fines have been levied, with half going unpaid. Imagine how many millions more could be raised if immigration laws were properly enforced, and foreign workers given their due scrutiny.
Critics will call this “anti-immigrant,” but it is merely pro-standards. Those who insist that deporting foreign lawbreakers amounts to bigotry are probably part of a federally funded NGO whose jobs depend on swamping the country with temporary workers.
If the industry insists upon recruiting countless truck drivers from abroad, it is owed to Canadians that those on the road will not lie, cheat, or kill people while cutting across four lanes. These offenders do not need more parole hearings, appeals, and lenient risk assessments, just removal.
Canadians do understand this. A 2024 Leger poll found that 48 per cent of Canadians now back “mass deportations,” and 65 per cent say too many newcomers have been let into the country. In 2019, that portion was 35 per cent.
Half a million people are thought to be living in Canada without status, and Canadians feel like the entire system is out of control, and with good reason.
Almost 600 foreign nationals convicted of crimes are currently wanted by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). They have vanished rather than submit to removal from Canada, and over 70 per cent involve “serious criminality,” revealing the great danger that good, ordinary Canadians face from these strangers.
More than 1,600 criminals are subject to removal orders, but the worst sort of anti-social activists denounce tougher enforcement as a “mass deportation machine.” If only we had such a programme for criminals, and that would be a soft option.
In the great city-state of Singapore, the parliament has just approved a new caning sentence for scammers, who have caused almost $4 billion in value to be lost since 2020. Those convicted shall now receive between six to twenty-four strokes, with Lee Kuan Yew’s ghost surely nodding in approval.
Canada need not thrash criminals with a rattan cane to the backside, but it can place them in the seat of a commercial aircraft, never to return once they clear our airspace. Considering that non-citizens have defrauded Canadians, terrorised communities with extortion, and caused fatal highway accidents, deportation is a moderate and liberal option.
There are some signs of hope that Canada will finally grow up when it comes to enforcing immigration law. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner has proposed a rash of desirable amendments to the existing law.
These include cutting non-emergency federal benefits to failed refugee claimants, deeming claims to be abandoned if they return to the home country they ostensibly fear, rejecting proven liars outright, and tightening the definition of “serious criminality.”
Some refugee lawyers have called these proposed changes cruel. Most people would call them normal. Those truly feeling persecution have no reason to lie on forms or pop back to that supposedly dangerous land for a vacation.
Due process matters, and we must strive to avoid mistakes that could have consequences for honest refugee claimants. Nonetheless, Rempel Garner’s proposals signal that there are at least some in Ottawa who will represent the frustration and anger that Canadians feel over the abuse of our immigration system. Refugees are just one part of a whole menu of items that need to be fixed, from false claimants to falsely licensed truck drivers.
There can be no more paralysis. We are surely capable of mustering the will and national self-respect to tell prospective newcomers that lawbreakers do not belong here. Those crying “xenophobia” had best read the warnings of those law-abiding immigrants who see the perversion of the system. They know it better than most native-born Canadians, and they too care about the future of our country.
Canadians are fatigued by the mercy misapplied to bad actors and the guilty, for that subjects the innocent to cruelty.
Foreigners who knowingly break Canadian law should not be here, and ought to be deported. When our leaders have the courage to say this often, it will change the permissive attitudes towards who gets to live here. That is essential to reviving the culture of a just Canada.
Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.
