Border agency on lookout for 35,000 asked to leave

OTTAWA — Canada’s border agency has failed to promptly remove most of the people under orders to leave the country, and in tens of thousands of cases it has simply lost track of them, the federal auditor general says.

In a report tabled Wednesday in Parliament, the auditor said the Canada Border Services Agency’s efforts were hampered by poor data quality and case-management flaws, resulting in avoidable delays in thousands of cases.

Problems in information-sharing with immigration officials also slowed things down.

The border agency is responsible for carrying out removal orders to ensure public safety and the integrity of the immigration system.

The report noted the federal government had made significant investments over the last decade to improve the efficiency of the asylum system, including removals.

However, the level of enforceable removal orders — those involving people who have exhausted or waived all legal avenues to stay in Canada — remained largely unchanged, even for priority cases.

As of April 2019, there were about 50,000 people in Canada with enforceable removal orders. Two-thirds of these — 34,700 cases — involved individuals whose whereabouts were unknown. Of these, 2,800 had criminal histories.

Still, the border agency was often not conducting regular follow-ups to try to find them by opening each file at least every three years, or once a year for people with criminal issues.

Data integrity shortcomings limited the agency’s ability to know which removal orders to enforce, the report said.

“Without a reliable inventory of removal orders, the agency could not effectively prioritize removals according to risk and complexity. We also found cases in which the agency was unaware that removal orders had been issued,” it said.