"In April 2019, we determined that there were about 50,000 individuals with enforceable removal orders. Two-thirds of these - 34,700 cases in the wanted inventory - involved individuals whose whereabouts were unknown", the report said on Wednesday.
The Auditor General said in the report that the majority of the orders have been enforceable for years and a share of them involve criminal cases.
In addition, the Canadian government watchdog found that in many cases the deportation orders took years to execute, including an average of 11 years for deportees involved in criminal cases who have gone missing. Poor data quality and failure to incentivize voluntary removal served as deterrents to removal efforts, the report said.
As of April 2019, the Canadian Border Services Agency has approximately 197,000 deportation orders in its national removal inventory, the report noted.
The agency added that it plans to scale up deportations in the coming years - 15,500 removals annually by 2022. The federal government has allotted an additional $26.64 million in funding to support the agency’s efforts. According to the Auditor General, the agency spent about $34 million on its removal program in the 2018–2019 fiscal year.
