Canada bill targeting refugees feared to signal new era of US-style border policy | Canada
Canada’s Liberal government is introducing sweeping new laws targeting refugees that observers fear will usher in a new era of U.S.-style border policies that fuel xenophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants.
Bill C-12, or the Strengthening Canadian Immigration and Borders Act, includes many changes related to border security, as well as new ineligibility rules for refugee applicants.
It was fast-tracked and passed a third reading in the House of Commons on 11 December before MPs stood up for the holiday. If it receives Senate approval in February, the bill will become law.
“This is an extremely reactionary situation in terms of protecting refugees,” said İdil Atak, professor of refugee and human rights law at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Atak said the legislation marks an unprecedented expansion of executive power in terms of sharing information about refugees among government agencies and the ability to control, revoke or amend immigration documents or processes.
One of these changes is that asylum claims made more than a year after the applicant arrives in Canada are not referred to Canada’s immigration and refugee board, but are instead sent to an immigration officer for pre-deportation risk assessment.
According to a recent article, such evaluations rely on a single officer reading the file and are rejected at a high rate. 40 lawyers and legal professionals In the Toronto Star.
Authors argued that The new law evokes some troubling periods in the nation’s history regarding immigration law, including exclusionary policies at the turn of the 20th century that targeted certain racial groups, including South Asians and those from China and Japan.
Audrey Macklin, a professor of immigration and refugee law at the University of Toronto, said there may be a variety of reasons why an individual may not seek asylum immediately; For example, a student who is a member of a persecuted sexual minority may feel unable to return to his or her home country after living openly in Canada.
Some of these individuals may need to seek asylum, as Canada has placed significant restrictions on international student numbers since 2024; but they will face significant obstacles under the new laws.
Toronto Star on Tuesday reported He said Canada is deporting 18,000 people in 2024, the highest number since Stephen Harper’s 2006-2015 government. These deportations reportedly cost $78 million; This means a 50% increase in costs compared to 2019.
He said the risk assessment process before deportation was a process that did not give asylum seekers a fair trial and was really aimed at removing them from the country as quickly as possible.
“Bill C 12 borrowed ideas from the United States on how to make this more difficult,” he said.
Another element of the bill that alarmed civil rights groups across the country was that asylum requests made at the land border with the United States would not be forwarded to the board if they were made after 14 days.
According to the safe third country agreement between Canada and the USA, refugees must seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive at.
But Macklin says the United States has never met the conditions of being a “safe” third country. And now, as ICE raids aim to expedite deportations without due process, the United States is proving to be “demonstrably unsafe for people to seek and obtain refugee protection.” He says it’s unfair to turn people away just because they don’t feel comfortable seeking asylum in the United States.
Syed Hussan, executive director of the Immigrant Workers Alliance for Change, a Canadian immigrant rights advocacy organization, says the law is the result of the Liberal and Conservative parties pushing the narrative that immigrants are responsible for Canada’s affordability crisis.
“Do you blame CEOs or corporations for their misery, which we should do… but we are all being duped into blaming immigrants,” he said.
Atak said the new measures also appear to be an attempt to capitulate to the Trump administration to “secure” the border to appease the president because Canada has yet to reach a trade deal.
But in reality, he said, all it did was erode Canada’s image as a welcoming country and sidestep international agreements to help refugees. “We have an obligation, a moral obligation, to protect refugees.”
