DO NOT DISCLOSE: Immigration Canada's complicity in the India fraud pipeline | Wiretap Media
Ottawa's own manuals flagged the immigration fraud years before it exploded, then tried to bury the evidence.
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Searching a public database of Access to Information releases on Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, we came across a 391-page bundle of the department’s internal temporary foreign worker procedure manuals, the rulebooks its officers use in New Delhi, Manila and Islamabad to approve and refuse work permits for applicants from three of Canada’s largest source countries. It was labelled “Part 1”; one of the three manuals was missing entirely, and two pages had been withheld outright.
Then we hit the banner, stamped across the top of a page in block capitals inside a document the public was never meant to see — “DO NOT DISCLOSE” — with a section on truck drivers beneath it and, above it, a section teaching officers how to interrogate married couples about whether their marriage was real. Read end to end, the manual reads less like a processing guide than a confession, because the department documented, in its own words, the exact frauds that would go on to define two of Canada’s most troubled industries, international students and trucking, years before those frauds hit the front pages.
The document that confesses
The manual is not a polished public guide but an internal working text, and it reads like one — patched, provisional, and in places openly unsure of itself. Two pages, 275 and 276, are missing altogether, withheld under the law-enforcement and investigations exemptions of the Access to Information Act, and they sit tellingly at the very point where the New Delhi section begins, so that even the rulebook has holes in it. The dating reinforces the sense of a document written while it was being applied, since the Manila pages are stamped “Date modified: 13 August 2020” and “Last amended: 2021 May 10,” the New Delhi section is headed “Last updated on: 2021-11-29,” and elsewhere the manual literally asks, in angle brackets, “What else is super important to place here? Open to suggestions!” Real people’s futures were being decided by officers working off a draft.
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The scheme the newspapers found first
The most explosive passage concerns what the department calls a marriage of convenience — a marriage entered into, at least in part, to obtain immigration status — and it appears under the heading “WORK PERMITS: C41 & C42 Processing SOPs → MOC.”
Read that again, because IRCC is describing a market — a service — created by its own program design, in which a student needs tuition money, a “spouse” wants a work permit, and the two marry, sometimes as near-strangers, so that money can change hands with the marriage as the vehicle. The manual does not merely assert this, but shows the receipts: reproductions of newspaper matrimonial advertisements from India, alongside Canadian media coverage headlined “Wanted: ‘Wife’ going to study in Canada.”“It is becoming more and more common practice for those who are successful in obtaining a study permit to engage in a MOC in order to bring an accompanying spouse to Canada with them on an open work permit. That spouse essentially will pay for the studies of the student for this ‘service’.”
That coverage is dated July 14, 2017, and in it the former Canadian citizenship judge Shinder Purewal said the quiet part out loud: “Immigration officials are aware of the scheme, but it’s hard to determine if marriages are real.” The same article noted that Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom had already cracked down on the practice while Canada was still running ads about it, which means the scheme was publicly documented in 2017, officials conceded they knew, and four and a half years later the department’s own manual was still calling the practice “becoming more and more common.” This was never a surprise so much as a growth curve.
A second admission is arguably more damning, because it goes to whether any of the verification could be trusted at all. On proving a marriage, the manual instructs officers: “Do not send request letters for proof of relationship as we find that applicants will give you everything you ask for because they think you need it – these items may or may not be genuine.” The paperwork, in other words, proves nothing, because people fabricate precisely what they are asked for. And a third admission goes to the fragility of the decisions themselves, warning that “all refusals for possible MOC should first go through an interview and/or PFL process,” since “most of these refusals will get JR and failure to PFL/interview will lose us the case” — meaning the government knew its refusals were shaky enough that a procedural fairness letter was needed simply to survive Federal Court.
The frauds then follow in the text. One section is titled “Workers – Review e-Apps with E05 Fee Exemptions for possible A40,” and describes applications arriving “without an LMIA, an LMIA exemption, and/or an offer of employment from Canada.” Under NOC 7511 Truck Drivers, the instruction is blunt, warning that if the federal employment data does not populate the screen, the offer is fake and an A40 procedural fairness letter should follow, while an entire assessment flow exists because “the main concern in this category is that the job offer may not be genuine.” Most revealing of all is how the department learned any of this: the manual reproduces a press clipping, “Immigration agent in dock for fraud,” about an agent in Chandigarh accused of taking roughly ₹28 lakh and handing a client a counterfeit visa, so that the officers’ training material is quite literally a photocopy of a scam report.
The drawer marked do not disclose
Here the processing story becomes a story about concealment, and it begins with the fact that these manuals are never published. They do not live on canada.ca, so unless someone files an Access to Information request, the public never sees the rules that decide their lives; you have to ask, and wait, and hope. When the document does come out, it comes out pre-marked for concealment, since every Manila page carries the footer “Internal Use Only – ATIP Exemptions May Apply,” the truck-driver section carries the “DO NOT DISCLOSE”banner, personal information is severed under one section of the Act, the safety of individuals under another, third-party commercial information under a third, and the advice and deliberations of officials under a fourth.
The irony is exquisite, in that a document which says “do not disclose” reached the public only because of the disclosure law it says to withhold under. Call it concealment by default: less a conspiracy than a policy, in which the rules were kept in a drawer, and the public had to file paperwork to read them.
Sixteen dead on a Saskatchewan highway
Two consequences flow from a system that admits volume faster than it can be verified, and pushes a workforce onto the road faster than it can be trained, and both have killed people. On April 6, 2018, a semi-trailer ran a stop sign near Tisdale, Saskatchewan, and tore into a bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team, killing sixteen people.
View: https://youtu.be/4zyE-eTs2DI
The driver, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, was not a fraudster but the output of the system, a legally licensed immigrant trucker who had obtained his commercial licence after roughly a week of training and whose employer, Adesh Deol Trucking, was alleged in court filings to have trained him inadequately. He pleaded guilty to 29 counts of dangerous driving causing death and was sentenced to eight years, and years later an immigration tribunal ordered him deported and revoked his permanent-resident status, so that the immigrant licensed by a too-fast system was ultimately removed by it. Saskatchewan and British Columbia only moved to mandatory, longer semi-driver training after Humboldt, meaning the fix arrived once the bodies did.
The murders in Abbotsford
Then there is Abbotsford, British Columbia. On May 9, 2022, Arnold De Jong, 77, and his wife Joanne, 76, were tortured and murdered in their home by men they had hired for gutter cleaning, in a killing a Crown prosecutor described as driven by greed, and two of the three accused were Indian nationals in Canada on international student visas. One of them, Gurkaran Singh, had arrived on a student visa on April 16, 2022 — three weeks before the murders — and by the Crown’s account never attended college, working full-time in Canada on a document that called him a student. The couple’s daughters later told Global News the suspects had “exploited an immigration loophole,” and three men were ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder.
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The De Jong killings are the perfect, brutal illustration of what a student visa had quietly become: not a study permit but a general-purpose entry ticket, with no real check on whether its holder ever darkened a classroom door. The pattern repeats elsewhere, since two suspects in the 2023 killing of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar entered Canada on student visas and, in 2024, a man accused in a double murder in British Columbia had arrived on a student visa weeks earlier.
Beneath all of it sits the volume, because between 2015 and 2023 the number of people in Canada on active study permits rose from roughly 352,000 to more than 1,040,000 — a 195 percent increase — while trucking carried its own separate rot in “Driver Inc.,” a billion-dollar scheme in which carriers force drivers to incorporate as “independent contractors” to dodge payroll taxes, CPP/EI and labour obligations. In Parliament, the Bloc Québécois MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval put it plainly: “fraud is rife throughout the industry.”
A gang on student visas
The most recent alarm came from Global News in August 2026, when Stewart Bell obtained a classified Canada Border Services Agency intelligence report titled “The Bishnoi Gang: An Emerging Threat in Canada,”circulated to immigration officers the previous December. Its central finding was that the gang’s Canadian franchise had been built substantially on Indian youths who arrived on student visas, and the report warned of the group’s “demonstrated use of Canada’s immigration programs for criminal purposes,”noting that “investigations increasingly identify Indian foreign nationals on study permits and work permits as participants in these organized criminal activities.”
The numbers behind it are almost absurd. Crimes by Indian student-permit holders rose 8,800 percent between 2016 and 2024, and in 2024 alone more than 13,040 criminal charges were laid against Indian citizens on study visas. Between 2019 and 2023, 4,000 Indian citizens on study permits were charged with 17,929 offences, a third of them serious or organized-crime related, and 97 percent of those violent. The gang’s top lieutenant, Goldy Brar, had arrived in Canada in 2017 ostensibly to attend Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and the agency conceded it was “unknown” whether he ever attended a class, while another man, Abjeet Kingra, came on a student visa in 2018, was recruited as a gunman, was paid $4,000 for a shooting and was deported this year. Brar is alleged to have overseen the recruitment of the men charged in the 2023 killing of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
The criminologist and former CBSA officer Kelly Sundberg did not mince words. “It’s a perfect storm of nonsensical policy and law resulting in a flood of young foreigners into Canada with limited support for them once here, leaving them prey for the criminals of their home country to recruit them here. Ottawa is 100 percent to blame.”
And that is the same machine seen from a different angle. An agent forged admission letters in 2017 and 2018, and the students wore the misrepresentation findings and the five-year bans. An employer sells a fake job offer, and the driver gets the A40. A carrier misclassifies a worker, and the carrier keeps the payroll savings. The middleman collects the fee and, usually, walks, which is what makes the arrest of the Punjab consultant Brijesh Mishra the exception that proves the rule.
What Canada monetized
None of this was an accident. Canada built it deliberately, and it built it to scale. International students became a multi-billion-dollar export industry, temporary foreign workers became the standing answer to every labour shortage, and the machinery of visas was tuned above all else for volume, because volume was where the money was. Every permit issued was tuition collected, a fee banked, a job filled, a population grown. The faster the queue moved, the less anyone stopped to look inside it.
That is the heart of it, because Canada turned arrival itself into a product. A study permit became something to be sold, a work permit the promise bundled with it, and permanent residency the subscription waiting at the end of the tunnel. And like any business that scales faster than its own quality control, the machine looked immaculate on paper and behaved badly in practice, since the one thing it never priced in was the cost of getting it wrong.
The costs were not abstract. They were sixteen people on a Saskatchewan highway, killed by a driver handed a licence after a week of training. They were an elderly Abbotsford couple, tortured to death by men who had arrived on student visas and never set foot in a classroom. They were hundreds of thousands of young people, sold a dream by agents nobody properly policed, who carried the blame and the ban when the paperwork turned out to be forged.
And through every one of those failures, Ottawa collected. The fees arrived whether the application succeeded or the student was later deported, the labour showed up whether or not the screening or the training could keep pace, and the revenue was guaranteed while the risk was pushed outward — onto applicants, onto employers, and finally onto Canadians, who inherited the consequences of a system built to admit first and ask questions later.
So this is not the story of a program that failed. It is the story of a program that worked precisely as designed, because it was designed to move people and to bill them, and the checking was always somebody else’s problem. Canada monetized its own immigration system, and the bill for the shortcuts was settled in five-year bans, in ruined families, and — on two separate and avoidable occasions — in blood.
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