There are a lot of things to be furious about these days but let me tell you, one of the things to be upset about is the CBC taking crapulous pot-shots at the college sector for no reason whatsoever. I refer to the story posted between Christmas and New Year’s entitled India’s trafficking claims against Canadian colleges reveal ‘exploited’ immigration, experts say, which was a continuation of an earlier story entitled India alleges Canadian colleges linked to trafficking foreign students over the Canada-U.S. border.

In a word: no, India’s claims do nothing of the sort. And the stories that CBC has been running on the issue border on journalistic malpractice.

All of this coverage is an outgrowth of the so-called “Dingucha” case in which a family of four from the village of Dingucha in Gujarat died while trying to cross the Canada-US Border illegally near Emerson Manitoba in 2022. One member of the family was in Canda on a student visa and was able to bring his spouse (and thus his children) on open work permits.

The hook for the stories that ran over Christmas was a spate of pieces that ran in the Indian press about the case, like this one from NDTV  and this one from The Indian Express. They all say basically the same thing, and CBC parroted them word-for-word (there does not appear to have been any attempt by the CBC to report the story from India). Here’s the heart of what CBC said:

India’s Enforcement Directorate said in a news release on Tuesday it had uncovered evidence of human trafficking involving two “entities” in Mumbai after probing the Indian connection to the Patel family, who froze to death in January 2022 while trying to cross the border from Manitoba into Minnesota during frigid weather conditions. 

The Enforcement Directorate said its investigation found that about 25,000 students were referred by one entity, with over 10,000 students referred by another entity to various colleges outside India every year. 

Arrangements would be made for the Indian nationals to be admitted to Canadian colleges and universities and apply for student visas, according to the Enforcement Directorate. 

But once the Indian nationals reached Canada, instead of joining the college, they illegally crossed the border from Canada into the U.S. and the fee received by the Canadian schools was remitted back to the individuals’ account, the Enforcement Directorate said.

Based on this, CBC got a bunch of “experts” to say a variety of things which put colleges and student visas generally in a bad light. I’ll get to those in a moment, but before we do that, let’s just point out a few things wrong with the story’s framing here.

First, and most importantly, this is all reporting on a press release from the Indian Enforcement Directorate (ED). The ED is not the police; it’s part of the Revenue Ministry. To quote its website, “it is a multi-disciplinary organization mandated with investigation of offence of money laundering and violations of foreign exchange laws.” It is unclear what its connection to a murder investigation might be, and curiously, this is a question CBC never appears to have asked.

(In this same vein, while the ED is in theory non-partisan, it has been accused in India of being used as a tool of the ruling BJP. Could the CBC not think of any reason why a Modi-aligned agency might have a reason to make false and defamatory claims about Canada? Really?)

Second, this press release provides no actual evidence provided here about, well, anything. There are “entities” that refer people abroad for study? No shit, Sherlock. They are called agents. They do it all the time. And while there is no question that the Patels (and presumably others who have crossed the border in the past) got to Canada on a student visa, no evidence has been provided showing that any of these agents are in league with human smugglers based in North America. (Note: the press release is very badly drafted, but I think a fair read of it is that it implies that Canadian institutions were aware of the scheme and were implicitly part of it. Needless to say, there is less than zero evidence of this).

Basically: We’ve known for a couple of years now Indian citizens come to Canada on a student visa and then broke the law by trying to enter the US illegally. Exactly no new evidence was provided by the ED in its press release. It is not impossible that such evidence exists, of course, but for the moment no such evidence has been produced.

So why did the CBC react as if it did?

This was the question I asked them when a CBC producer tried to get me to comment on the story on December 27^th. Why would you do a story on so little evidence? I said I didn’t think the evidence merited a story but agreed to speak to them if they wanted someone to explain exactly why the evidence was so thin. You will no doubt be shocked to learn that CBC then declined to interview me.

Upon reading the story, it’s not hard to understand why. With zero evidence, they got a bunch of experts to repeat talking points about the awfulness of student visas that they’ve been repeating for months now.

• Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, told said “If the allegations are true, it reveals shocking gaps in our integrity protocols.… This is deeply, deeply concerning and problematic,” adding that the allegations suggest “wide-scale human smuggling.”

(The “if” in that sentence is doing a hell of a lot of work – AU)

• Kelly Sundberg, a former Canada Border Services Agency officer who is a professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, said the system has no oversight and is “being exploited” by transnational criminals. “This type of fraud, of gaming our immigration system has been going on for quite some time actually,” he said, noting that the volume of those potentially involved “is staggering.”

• Ken Zaifman, a Winnipeg-based immigration lawyer, says that from his experience, the responsibility of oversight should lie with the educational institutions, but that they did not do so because “they were addicted to international students to fund their programs.”

Ok, so, these comments about fraud and oversight are worth examining. I’m trying to imagine how either the government of Canada or an educational institution could legitimately “prevent fraud” or “exercise oversight” in a case like this one. Are colleges and universities supposed to be like the pre-cogs in the movie Minority Report,able to spot criminals before they commit a crime? I mean, there is a case to be made that in the past Canada made such cross-border runs more tempting by allowing students’ entire families to join them in Canada while studying (as was the case in the Dingucha affair), but that loophole was largely closed ten months ago when the feds basically stopped giving open work permits to partners of students unless they were enrolled in a graduate degree.

Anyways, this is where we are now: our national broadcaster sees no problem running evidence-free stories simply as a platform to beat up on public colleges because that’s a great way to get clicks. Crappy journalism? Sure. But it’s also evidence of the disdain with which Canadian PSE institutions are now viewed by the broader public: CBC wouldn’t run such a thin story unless it thought the target was “soft.” And there’s no solution to our funding woes until this gets sorted out.