I Knew Something Was Wrong. And I Wasn’t the Only One Feeling It.

 I Knew Something Was Wrong.

And I Wasn’t the Only One Feeling It.

For years, I kept saying something was happening in Canada that people didn't seem to want to talk about.

I saw it in Surrey.

I saw it on buses.

I saw it on SkyTrain.

I saw people arriving in enormous numbers, looking for somewhere to live and somewhere to work. I watched the pressure build while rents climbed, jobs became harder to find, and ordinary people — Canadians and newcomers alike — struggled to keep their heads above water.

And when I said it, sometimes even my own family didn't believe me.

I wasn't saying that immigrants were the problem.

I was saying something was wrong with the system.

Now, years later, the Canadian government is effectively saying the same thing.

The numbers became enormous

Canada dramatically expanded immigration and, particularly, temporary immigration.

The previous 2024–2026 immigration plan called for 500,000 permanent residents a year in 2025 and 2026. Then the government changed course.

The 2025–2027 plan cut the permanent-resident target to 395,000 in 2025, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027.

For the first time, Canada also established targets for temporary residents — international students and temporary workers — and announced that it wanted temporary residents to represent only about 5% of the population. The government projected a decline of more than 445,000 temporary residents in both 2025 and 2026 compared with the previous year.

That isn't a tiny policy adjustment.

That is a government acknowledging that the previous trajectory wasn't sustainable.

And now the removals are surging

The latest CBSA statistics are startling.

Between January 1 and June 30, 2026, Canada recorded 10,607 removals.

India was the largest nationality group, with 3,323 removals.

Mexico was next with 1,573.

For comparison, Canada removed 3,779 Indian nationals during the entire year of 2025.

So in only six months of 2026, the number of Indian nationals removed was already almost 88% of the previous year's total. CBSA also lists 7,669 Indian nationals in its “removal in progress” inventory.

Those numbers are real.

But there is something important we should NOT do with them.

We should not look at 3,323 people and assume they were all criminals, scammers or fraudulent immigrants.

CBSA's citizenship statistics don't tell us that.

People can be removed for many different immigration reasons, including failed refugee claims, loss of status, non-compliance with immigration requirements, misrepresentation and other grounds.

A person can have made an immigration mistake without being a bad person.

And some people were almost certainly victims themselves.

Because there was exploitation on the other side too

This is the part that makes me angry.

Imagine being a young person in India, believing that Canada is a place where you can study, work hard and build a future.

You sell property.

Your family borrows money.

You pay tuition.

You pay an immigration agent.

You arrive here expecting opportunity.

And then you discover that the job you thought you were going to get doesn't exist.

The room you were promised costs a fortune.

The wages aren't what you expected.

There are thousands of people competing for the same jobs.

And the person who sold you the dream has already collected their money.

Canada's own immigration department warns applicants about exactly these kinds of scams. It says unauthorized representatives may charge large sums for little or no service, use fake documents, promise jobs or permanent residence, or tell people they have special connections with immigration officials.

IRCC has also uncovered problems in the international-student system. In 2024, it verified more than 650,000 letters of acceptance from Canadian schools and found approximately 14,000 that did not initially match school records. Some were legitimate discrepancies that were resolved, but others were withdrawn or refused.

That doesn't mean every international student was fraudulent.

Far from it.

It means there were people making money from a system that had grown too big and wasn't being adequately controlled.

Meanwhile, Canadians were hurting too

And this is where the conversation became so toxic.

If you complained about housing, you could be called anti-immigrant.

If you complained about wages, you could be told that immigrants were doing jobs Canadians wouldn't do.

If you questioned the number of people arriving, you were sometimes treated as though you hated newcomers.

But I don't hate newcomers.

I have met wonderful immigrants my entire life.

I know people who came here with almost nothing and built beautiful lives.

I also know that the people arriving here were often not the people making the most money from the system.

The people at the bottom were competing for housing.

They were competing for entry-level jobs.

They were sometimes sleeping several people to a room.

They were being scammed.

And Canadians at the bottom were competing for the same scarce housing and jobs.

That is not a recipe for solidarity.

It is a recipe for resentment.

Vancouver made this painfully obvious

Anyone who has tried to rent in Vancouver knows that housing didn't suddenly become affordable because the government eventually admitted there was a problem.

In 2025, CMHC recorded a 3.7% vacancy rate for Vancouver's purpose-built rental market — the highest level in more than 30 years — yet affordable units remained extremely difficult to find. CMHC found that only about 1–2% of rental units affordable to lower-income households were vacant.

And Statistics Canada's first-quarter 2026 data put Vancouver's average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment at about $3,100.

So when someone says, “The rental market is improving,” that may be statistically true.

But tell that to someone who has $1,500 a month to spend.

A vacancy rate doesn't automatically create an affordable home.

I wish people had listened earlier

This is the part I struggle with personally.

I remember saying that there were suddenly tons of extra people on the buses and SkyTrain in Surrey.

I remember looking for work and wondering how on earth I was supposed to compete.

I remember seeing people desperate for jobs.

And I remember thinking:

Something is happening here.

Maybe I didn't have the vocabulary for it then.

Maybe I didn't know the immigration numbers.

Maybe I didn't understand the temporary-resident system, international-student recruitment, private colleges, immigration consultants, LMIA programs or the financial incentives behind them.

But I could see the pressure.

And now the government itself has acknowledged that temporary migration had grown beyond what communities could comfortably absorb.

Canada has introduced student caps, reduced temporary-worker targets, tightened work-permit rules and strengthened fraud controls. The government says these measures are intended to reduce pressure on housing, infrastructure and services and improve the integrity of the immigration system.

But let's not turn suffering into hatred

This is where I want us to be careful.

The answer isn't to blame Indians.

It isn't to blame international students.

It isn't to blame refugees.

It isn't to blame immigrants.

And it isn't to pretend nothing happened.

The answer is to ask:

Who designed the system?

Who benefited from enormous numbers of international students?

Who collected tuition?

Who recruited them?

Who sold them immigration dreams?

Who profited from temporary workers?

Who benefited from cheap labour?

Who allowed housing construction to fall so far behind population growth?

Who allowed people to pay enormous amounts to unscrupulous agents?

Who was supposed to be watching?

And why did ordinary Canadians have to feel the consequences before governments finally started changing course?

Those are the questions worth asking.

Because there are victims on both sides of this story.

There are Canadians who couldn't afford housing.

There are young people who couldn't find work.

There are newcomers who arrived expecting opportunity and instead found exploitation.

There are families who borrowed everything they had to send someone to Canada.

There are people now facing removal after spending years here.

There are businesses that genuinely needed workers.

And there are people who absolutely did exploit the system.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

We needed immigration.

We needed better planning.

We needed more housing.

We needed honest immigration advice.

We needed enforcement against fraud.

We needed employers who couldn't simply use desperate temporary workers to hold wages down.

We needed governments to listen when communities said they were overwhelmed.

And most of all, we needed to remember that immigration policy isn't just about numbers.

Every number is a human being.

Including the person who was removed.

Including the Canadian who lost their apartment.

Including the worker who couldn't find a job.

Including the family sleeping six people to a room.

Including the person who was promised a Canadian dream and discovered that someone else had sold them a lie.

I wasn't imagining the pressure I was seeing.

The numbers eventually caught up with what people were experiencing on the ground.

Now let's have the conversation without hatred, without scapegoating and without pretending the system didn't fail.

Because Canada can do better.

And the people who came here believing in Canada deserved better too.

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