The Math Doesn't Work: Inside Canada's Widening Deportation Gap

There is a number CBSA does not put in its press releases: 468,628.

That’s how many active cases in the agency’s own removal inventory are marked “no action” - meaning nobody is actively working to remove that person from the country. It’s not a leak, not an estimate, not an opposition talking point. It’s in CBSA’s own case-management data, as of October 31, 2025. It sits inside a total inventory of 556,690 cases the agency is formally tracking, alongside another 33,190 marked “wanted” and 25,330 the agency has classified as “not possible to remove.”

Put plainly: for every case CBSA is actually working, there are roughly nine sitting untouched.

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This is the story underneath the headlines about “record deportations” - a system that is genuinely enforcing more than ever, and still losing ground.

The government’s own number

Start with the population nobody wants to put a firm figure on. In a 2024 briefing to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada put the undocumented population as high as 500,000 to 600,000. A separate Department of Finance briefing note - obtained through Access to Information - used the same range, describing it as people who “overstayed visas or have had asylum claims rejected,” while cautioning that “evidence in this area is rather poor and possibly unreliable.”