A federal investigation has revealed that an admitted human smuggler received a new Canadian passport despite court orders requiring him to surrender his travel documents. RCMP investigators discovered the passport during a June 2023 search of Thesingarasan Rasiah’s Montreal home, where he was living under electronic monitoring.
The passport, issued by Service Canada on April 11, 2023, was obtained in violation of Rasiah’s release conditions stemming from a 2021 human smuggling arrest. Rasiah had previously surrendered his original passport to the RCMP and was explicitly forbidden from applying for new travel documents.
The case has exposed significant vulnerabilities in Canada’s passport system. Kelly Sundberg, associate professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, told CBC News that the current system is the “weak link in the security chain,” noting that passport screening operates independently from court and police databases. Sundberg recommends moving passport administration under the Canada Border Services Agency, which has direct access to law enforcement databases.
Rasiah’s criminal history includes multiple human smuggling-related offenses. He served 52 days in jail in 2008 for possessing two unauthorized Canadian passports, and in 2017, received an 18-month conditional sentence in Quebec for “counselling misrepresentation.”
In September 2023, he received a 15-month jail sentence for smuggling a Sri Lankan national into Canada for $7,000. He was re-arrested in May on charges of leading an international smuggling network that moved hundreds across the Canada-U.S. border. Investigators have linked his organization to the deaths of nine people — two families from India and Romania, along with their boatman — who drowned in the St. Lawrence River in March 2023.
Conservative MP Tom Kmiec has called for an emergency meeting of the House of Commons’s citizenship and immigration committee to examine the case, requesting that Immigration Minister Marc Miller and passport officials explain the security breach.
Immigration Canada declined to comment on the case, citing privacy laws per CBC, but said they work with law enforcement regarding passport surrender orders.
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