More than 250 Canadian organizations have asked Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to suspend removal orders issued to 10 international graduates at a Calgary protest, in an open letter that also demands an independent investigation into how border officers came to be checking immigration status at a demonstration.
The letter, organized by the Migrant Rights Network and signed by groups including Amnesty International, CUPE Ontario and Climate Justice Saskatoon, was made public Sept. 4. Neither government had issued a public response as of Wednesday.
The Canada Border Services Agency says its officers checked the status of 20 people at the northeast Calgary protest on Aug. 12, identified 12 as possibly inadmissible under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and directed them to a CBSA office. Ten removal orders were issued the same day, according to the agency’s own account, as reported by CBC News. More than 1,000 international graduates, most of them Indian students, had been protesting at the site for close to two weeks over mass rejections of their post-graduation work permit applications.
Most coverage of the letter has stopped there. The part that will decide whether these 10 people stay in Canada sits in the letter’s fourth demand: a review of the graduates’ work permit applications under the eligibility rules that applied at the time they enrolled. That phrasing is not incidental. It points at a rule that has been rewritten more than once, most recently three months ago.
The graduates studied in programs delivered through arrangements between Portage College, a public institution in northeastern Alberta, and private providers, including the Canadian Institute of Osteopathic Therapy in Calgary and Campbell College in Edmonton. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced on Jan. 22, 2024, that graduates of these public-private curriculum licensing programs would no longer qualify for a post-graduation work permit, with the change taking effect May 15, 2024. Students who began such a program on or before Jan. 31, 2023, were told they might still be eligible.
That grandfathering clause is what many of the Calgary graduates believed protected them. It did not. On June 24, 2026, IRCC updated its published guidance to spell out that non-credit programs do not qualify for a post-graduation work permit, a separate exclusion that operates independently of the partnership rule. A graduate can fall inside the 2023 grandfathering window and still be refused because the program itself is classified as non-credit. The Portage College student union estimates roughly 1,500 graduates have been caught by refusals tied to these arrangements.
That leaves two questions the coverage has not pressed. The first is provincial. Portage College is a public Alberta college, and the credentials at issue carried its name. Alberta’s advanced education ministry approves and oversees the province’s public institutions, but the province has not said publicly whether it reviewed how these partnership programs were marketed to prospective students, who paid international tuition rates on the understanding the credential would lead to a work permit. The letter is addressed to Smith as well as Carney for that reason.
The second question is procedural speed. CBSA issued 10 removal orders on the same day its officers arrived at the protest. Removal orders can be issued quickly where a person’s status has lapsed, but the timing is the specific fact the signatories want examined, and the agency has not explained what prompted the status checks at that location on that date.
The Migrant Rights Network argues in the letter that targeting people for enforcement while they are protesting immigration rules violates the Charter right to free expression and will discourage others from speaking. “Migrants across the country are being told that joining the next protest, picket line or public meeting could put their ability to remain in Canada at risk,” the letter says, as reported by CTV News.
Neither CBSA nor IRCC has said whether the 10 orders are on hold while the graduates’ outstanding immigration files are processed. Until one of them says so, the question at the centre of the letter, whether a rule clarified in June 2026 can be applied to someone who enrolled years earlier, is being answered one file at a time, with no public policy that anyone can read.
via CBC News. Additional reporting from CTV News and Amnesty International Canada. Post-graduation work permit eligibility rules confirmed against Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
