With hindsight, former immigration minister says he would have capped international students sooner
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Justice Minister Sean Fraser, who was in charge of immigration during some of the years Auditor General Karen Hogan found instances of fraud in Canada’s international student program, said with hindsight, he would have acted sooner to fundamentally change it.
The Opposition Conservatives have been calling for his resignation, along with that of current Immigration Minister Lena Diab and Fraser’s immediate successor Marc Miller, from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet.
“With the benefit of hindsight, I would have liked to actually change the program fundamentally and say the federal government is placing a cap on this, and letting provinces allocate their share of the cap to different institutions,” Fraser told CBC News on Wednesday.
However, he also said the federal government was negotiating as part of “a good-faith relationship with the provinces who were requesting additional access to immigration programs at the time.”
WATCH | Hogan speaks with Power & Politics about student visas:
Canada ‘not acting’ on hundreds of student visa fraud cases: auditor general
A new report from Auditor General Karen Hogan has found that Canada is not keeping up with the demand for probes into thousands of possible cases of student visa fraud. She tells Power & Politics that in some cases, Ottawa is ‘not acting on the information that they have.’
He said those negotiations failed, leading to the federal government placing a cap in January 2024.
Fraser was immigration minister from October 2021 to July 2023, succeeded in the role by Miller until March of last year. Diab, a former provincial immigration minister in Nova Scotia, took over the portfolio in May 2025, following a brief tenure by Montreal MP Rachel Bendayan.
In a report made public on Monday, Hogan wrote that she found “critical weaknesses” in the international student program’s integrity controls, saying the Immigration Department did not investigate or follow up on a large number of “high-risk” cases.
Hogan found some 800 cases between 2018 and 2023 where students were able to get into Canada on bogus documents or by providing misinformation, with more than half of them able to stay by renewing student permits or applying for other immigration status.
She also found that, out of about 150,000 cases where there was potential fraud, the department followed up on only 2,000 of them per year in 2023 and 2024, citing a lack of funding.
Conservatives renew call for cabinet firings
“The auditor general condemned the current Liberal justice minister, Liberal heritage minister and Liberal immigration minister for allowing 150,000 cases of fraud to go uninvestigated,” said Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre during question period on Wednesday.
“Will [Carney] fire them, or will he just continue with the same Liberal incompetence?”
“We are investigating 100 per cent of every fraud case since this new government came to office,” Carney replied. “We have the system under control.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Lena Diab says her department is making improvements to oversight of the student visa program. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)
Diab’s parliamentary secretary, Peter Fragiskatos, said the 60 per cent decline in the number of international student permits granted will “allow for greater efficiency as far as the department’s efforts to ensure integrity.”
“The system was simply overwhelmed,” he told CBC News. “I think with the numbers coming down now, it does provide a pathway to ensure the integrity that Canadians expect.”
On Monday, Diab said in a news conference that the department would start “centralizing” and “streamlining” investigations. She did not directly answer a question about whether the budget for investigations would be increased.
Asked about what a centralization of investigations means, Fragiskatos told CBC News “we’ll see what that entails exactly.”
