State-led Forced Migration in the Canadian Context: A Look into Canada’s Deportation Flights

This thesis contributes to existing literature on deportation in Canada by providing a viapolitical analysis of how removals are realized in the settler-colonial Canadian context. I argue that the wide-scale incorporation of airplane technology in contemporary deportation regimes has fundamentally reconfigured the way in which present-day expulsions are realized, contributing towards the sanitization and legitimation of what was once considered a severe penal practice comparable to the death penalty. For this reason, it can be said that seemingly benign aircrafts not only facilitate regular migration flows, they also double as politically-charged sites implicated in the violence of coercive expulsion. The normalization of ‘air deportation’ has also led to the emergence of new actors in removal operations: some are unwilling participants while others are driven by profit-incentives, enabling us to speak of the emergence of a distinct Canadian ‘migration control industry’ profiting from the business of air deportation.