Half of CBSA foreigners considered security threats let in by Canadian immigration officials
An internal audit of the Immigration National Security Screening Program reveals immigration officers in Canada allowed nearly half of foreign nationals flagged as security risks by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to enter the country.
“That is extremely worrying. It means there is a gap between the partner agencies that deal with the processing of foreign nationals seeking to enter Canada. It’s really alarming,” criminologist and former border guard Kelly Sundberg reportedly told the National Post.
During the five years ending in 2019, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) ultimately admitted 3,314 of the 7,141 cases into Canada that had been given a “non-favourable” recommendation by the screening program for ties to serious crimes, including war crimes, espionage and terrorism. That’s 46.4 percent.
The audit found that 1,887, or 56.9 percent, of foreign nationals allowed into the country, despite security concerns, were admitted because another government department pushed their applications with public policy exemptions “in the national interest for high-profile foreigners who are inadmissible.”
IRCC officials disagreed with the CBSA’s assessment of foreigners’ security risks and approved their entry into Canada in only 177 of those cases.
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That audit of the screening program lists seven recommendations, including a call for a monitoring system to ensure that the IRCC is indeed referring all foreign nationals for security screening that need to be checked. The audit also calls for better interdepartmental training.
As a criminologist, Sundberg says a determination by the CBSA that a foreign national is a criminal should be taken more seriously.
“If it happens 46 percent of the time, why the hell would you bother to have CBSA?” he asks. “Why did you ask them in the first place if you actually flip a coin?
Border officials demoralized by disrespect for their recommendations
“This is yet another example of why we need serious oversight and constant auditing of CBSA and its relationship with other agencies.”
The audit’s findings are a wake-up call, he says.
“This is yet another example of why we need to take a serious look at how policing, security and intelligence are conducted in this country and how we can coordinate and make it more efficient and effective,” he told the newspaper. National Post.
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With so many of their recommendations being ignored or brushed aside, CBSA officials are becoming demoralized and there are concerns that the integrity of the security investigation itself is being undermined, stakeholders who remained unnamed said.
The audit also found that there were consistent backlogs in the CBSA’s screening department and that it routinely failed to deliver its recommendations within the expected timeframes.
