Canada to scrap one avenue for refugees

Image via WikipediaBY ELIZABETH THOMPSON, IPOLITICS.CA



Refugees from some of the world's most dangerous countries could soon find it more difficult to find refuge in Canada.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has put forward a proposal to eliminate one of the three classes Canada uses to resettle refugees. The source-country class allows residents of designated countries to apply directly to Canada for refugee status from inside those countries.

In its notice of the proposed change, the government says the groups most likely to be affected by the change are Colombians and Eritreans.

The refugee spaces that had been allocated to the source-country class will be reallocated to the larger convention-refugee-abroad class. In the convention class, Canada works with the United Nations human rights commissioner for refugees to resettle refugees located outside their country of origin.

Applications under the source-country class that have been approved in principle will be processed, and candidates who meet the criteria will be issued a visa. Those not already approved in principle will be reassessed under the remaining refugee resettlement classes. Unsuccessful applicants who feel they need protection will be referred to the UN human rights commissioner.

The government says the change is being proposed because the source-country class isn't "effective or efficient."

However, Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, said scrapping the class instead of reforming it will close the door to people who can't easily leave their home countries to apply for refugee status and force them into the arms of human-smugglers.

"They are proposing to close one of the few options Canada has which allows people who face persecution to avoid smugglers."

The source country class, which has existed since 1997, allows prospective refugees from designated countries to apply to Canada for refugee status before they leave the country.

Currently, six countries are designated: Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Sudan, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The last time the list of designated countries was revised was 2001. While Canadian government travel warnings have since been reduced for some countries, such as Guatemala and El Salvador, the Department of Foreign Affairs still warns against any travel to Sudan and parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Colombia.

In its proposal, the government said a review of the source-country class in 2009 found it isn't effective.

"The source country class was intended to be a flexible tool for humanitarian intervention, capable of responding to a variety of populations and situations," the government wrote.

"However, the review found that the class can only be used successfully in a narrow range of humanitarian situations in a small number of countries around the world."

In some countries, the system was being swamped with applications from citizens of other countries located in the designated country.

"Direct access was granted in the six source countries to accommodate applications from source country nationals," the government explained. "However, the provision is also being used by non-nationals residing in the source countries who would normally be required to have a referral or a private sponsor, since Canada cannot restrict the application of direct access based on nationality. As a result, any foreign national living in a source country may use the direct access provision to apply for resettlement without referral."

In some countries, such as Columbia, where the average acceptance rate is 13 per cent, the Canadian embassy was swamped with thousands of applications. In Sierra Leone and Sudan, fewer than 100 applications have been submitted in each country.

Dench said part of the reason that the source-country class hasn't been working as well as it could is that the government hasn't been trying to make it work.

"We're particularly critical of the fact that the program has never really been made to work in Africa."

Dench said improvements are needed, such as not having a published list of countries. However, she said she was shocked to learn the government is proposing to scrap the source country class altogether.

"From our perspective it is a very bad idea."

Liberal immigration critic Justin Trudeau said the government's proposal makes a case for the move and he supports the idea of working with the UN human rights commissioner.

However, Trudeau said he also has concerns about the move and would like to see the House of Commons immigration committee hold hearings into the question.

"Any time we're eliminating an entire class of refugee applicants I get very wary."

elizabeththompson@ipolitics.ca

Twitter.com/LizT1

© Copyright (c) 2011 iPolitics.ca

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/partner/shell/Canada+scrap+avenue+refugees/4476507/story.html#ixzz1HKqyBBjQ

Refugee claimants entering Quebec from U.S.

Image by Robert of Fairfax via Flickr

A legal loophole has would-be refugees in the U.S. coming into Canada through the Quebec border, CBC News has learned.
"Sometimes we get half a dozen of them on a shift, and then you're a week without getting any, said RCMP Sgt. Christian Dubois. "And then, all of a sudden, 'boom.'"
Dubois said since the new RCMP border patrol started, more than half of their time is being spent on would-be refugees.
RCMP Insp. Marc Lacasse said there have been 64 arrests in just two months along the 140 kilometres of the Quebec-Vermont border, representing a 400 per cent increase over the same time period last year.
With immigration laws tightening in the U.S., increasing numbers of people have simply given up on ever getting permanent residency. Spot checks by American authorities have them worried about being caught and deported.
Lacasse believes that people are taking advantage of a loophole created by a document signed between Canada and the U.S. called the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement.
Under the agreement, if a person that is already in the U.S. tries to move further north into Canada to claim refugee status, they will be turned back because both countries are considered safe. But the agreement only applies at organized crossings. Those determined to enter are now simply walking across through the bush.
"Our belief is there are organizations that are trying to use those areas to basically direct people to come over to Canada and gain refugee status," said Lacasse. "Contrary to a point of entry [where] they would be turned back."
Immigration lawyer David Cohen said that once a refugee gets away from an organized border crossing and enters Canada through the brush, Canada is obligated to process them.
"There's no surprise and in fact it was absolutely predictable … and was predicted," he said
"People avoid the Canadian port of entry and somehow make their way into Canada and make the refugee claim," Cohen said.
It's difficult to stop would-be refugees because there are more unprotected roads leading to the Quebec border than that of any other province.
Border services has also confirmed it will close or reduce hours for at least five entry points in Quebec alone, potentially increasing the number of unguarded roads.


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/11/30/refugee-border-canada.html#ixzz17wOzV8ZH

 

 http://www.cbc.ca/video/player.html?category=News&zone=canada&site=cbc.news.ca&clipid=1675345025

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Immigrants Made Canada

Image via Wikipedia

By J.L. Granatstein

October 25, 2010
Source: my towncrier.ca

Let me begin with one simple fact: Toronto’s public schools declare themselves the most multicultural in the world. One school, Thorncliffe Park Public School in Toronto’s east end, has 1,913 students speaking 54 languages. What that means is obvious —  Canada today is a nation of immigrants.

But what we forget too easily is that Canada always was a country of immigrants. Everyone who ever lived here came from someplace else, including the First Nations whose ancestors crossed into North America over a land bridge from Siberia. Everyone. The original European immigrants of Canada were the French followed by the Loyalists, the losers in the American Revolution, who settled in the late 1780s in what is now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec. Most were of British origin, devoted to King George III and Great Britain, but there were also others of German, Dutch and other origins, as well as blacks, most but not all slaves. Those “originals” largely shaped Canada’s population mix for almost two hundred years.
    
Let me demonstrate. The Canada into which I was born in 1939 had a population of some 11.5 million, according to the 1941 Census figures, which was made up of those of British and French origin (50 percent and 30 percent respectively) and the others (20 percent). The others were of German, Ukrainian, Scandinavian, and Dutch origin in the main, with a scattering of other ethnicities. There were few blacks, Chinese, Japanese, or South Asians, the Canadian population almost wholly white.
    
Overwhelmingly the population was Christian with a few hundred thousand Jews and a handful of other denominations. The corporate, cultural, and political leaders in Canada were overwhelmingly drawn from among those of British origin, and French-speaking Quebeckers did not have anything like their fair share of economic or political power.
 
It is certainly fair to say that nation-building, such as it was, aimed to establish a British type of society in Canada. Culturally, this was reflected in Canada’s political, economic and social institutions. In law, all Canadians were defined as British subjects until the passage of the Canadian Citizenship Act in 1947, and a variety of cultural symbols ranging from the monarchy to the flag and to the names of army regiments showed the British underpinnings of English-speaking Canada. By and large, the government either ignored racial and ethnic differences or worked to turn all into British Canadians in attitude if not in ethnic origin.      
    
Obviously, Canada is very different today. In the 2006 Census, the most recent, the “other” category, now with some 200 ethnicities, has reached 50 percent of the 31 million population. For example, there were reported to be 1.35 million Chinese, 962,000 East Indians, and 436,000 Filipinos, and one in six Canadian residents was a visible minority. Christians still predominate (some 70 percent), but as recently as 1951, 96 percent of the population was Christian. Today, there are far more Roman Catholics than Protestants (40 percent of the Canadian population is Catholic, only 30 percent Protestant), and Muslims are approaching one million, far more than those of Jewish belief. Those with no religion number one in six of the population.
   
In Greater Toronto, the nation’s largest city, very close to half of the 5.1 million population were immigrants, an increase of 27 percent in five years, and more than four in 10, or 43 percent of the population, were visible minorities, primarily Chinese, South Asian or black. India and China now provide most of the immigrants to Canada and Toronto, and in an ordinary year at least 250,000 immigrants come to the country, more than four in 10 of them heading to Toronto. At the time I was born and for my first 15 years, by contrast, the British Isles were the main source of immigrants to Canada.
   
So Canada has changed, and certainly much for the better. There are Members of Parliament in turbans, the Chief of Defence Staff is of Ukrainian ethnicity and the previous Governor-General Michaelle Jean is a Haitian woman immigrant who succeeded a Chinese female immigrant, Adrienne Clarkson. Jews hold three of the nine seats on the Supreme Court; a Jamaican-Chinese-Canadian multimillionaire made a huge donation to add a giant extension to the Royal Ontario Museum and a group of Italian-Canadian millionaires matched that with equally grand gifts to the redeveloped Art Gallery of Ontario; the public service is almost as mixed as the nation; and Toronto’s public schools, for example, declare themselves the most multicultural in the world. It may even be true. Mixed-race marriages are increasingly common in the larger cities, and adoptions abroad, especially in China and Africa, have created multiracial families all across the country.
   
There can be no doubt that this is a great success story. Immigration changed the old Canada, and immigration is continuing to do so. What the Canada of 2150 will look like, no one can say — except that it will not look at all like the Canada I grew up in.

Historian J.L. Granatstein is editor of The Canadian Experience. He writes on Canadian political and military and on foreign and defence policy.
 

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Tamils and the difference between immigrants and refugees.

Image by jurvetson via Flickr

A common refrain regarding the arrival of the Tamil refugees aboard the MV Sun Sea is that
they have "jumped the queue" and taken the place of "legitimate" immigrants who await entry to Canada.
The accusation is emotive but it is just plain wrong. Immigrants and refugees are entirely different groups. Each has its own stringent set of rules for admission to Canada.
Immigrants are people who want to come to Canada and have the opportunity to meet with officials at a Canadian embassy and apply under the criteria established by law. They must meet certain requirements and quotas established by Canada's needs and circumstances.
Refugees are desperate people in flight. They have often been forced from their homes, subjected to human rights abuses, persecuted by the very authorities to whom they'd have to apply if they wished to obtain documents required to emigrate.
They often can't travel to a Canadian embassy to apply for immigration because it would put them at great risk from those they are fleeing in the first place. In fact, international law recognizes the reality that refugees often cannot meet the normal legal requirements for entry into a country of safe haven and international agreements signed by Canada prohibit governments from penalizing refugees who enter or remain in a country illegally.
Most have lost all their possessions. What money they do have is often taken from them by smugglers who promise to get them out of immediate danger in exchange for cash. There's no guarantee that they will be taken to safety. Sometimes they just get dumped at sea. Sometimes the boats sink. Sometimes they get killed by pirates. Sometimes they get betrayed to the authorities they flee. This is not a new phenomenon. It happened to United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, it happened to Irish families fleeing the famine, it happened to Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust, it has happened to Vietnamese, Sikhs and North Koreans. So the Tamil refugees are not unusual. But that is why we don't have lineups for people in flight or expect them to travel to a Canadian embassy and apply along with other immigrants seeking to come to Canada from a safe country. The circumstances in Sri Lanka are said by some to be "improving." Here's what the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission said in its last statement this year about conditions there:
"Looking for human rights in Sri Lanka is becoming increasingly like looking for water on the moon or in the desert ... Sri Lanka today is one of the most violent societies where there is great permissiveness of extrajudicial killings. In the recent decades extrajudicial killings have taken the form of disappearances or various kinds of killings after arrest and while in police or military custody."
On Aug. 19, Amnesty International issued the following statement: "Amnesty International recalls the many humanitarian workers who have fallen victim to human rights violations in Sri Lanka and the families of victims who have been frustrated in their pursuit of justice. Amnesty International calls on the UN to independently investigate violations of human rights and humanitarian law in Sri Lanka." Many of the workers slain, it points out, were Tamils.

Canada has a legal obligation under the Conventions Relating to the Status of Refugees and the Convention against Torture towards refugees from such conditions, including these Tamils. The Convention against Torture enjoins Canada -- without exception -- not to return a person to a country where there is such a risk.
Sometimes those seeking asylum don't qualify under the stringent rules for admission. When that's the case, they are denied refugee status and deported. Yet after rigorous hearings and reviews, Canada has been granting recognition of refugee status to most Tamil applicants, even though it turns down almost half of refugee claims overall according to the U.S. independent monitor RSD Watch.
So Canada is no pushover and these Tamils haven't jumped any queue. They've been dealt with as the law requires and have subjected themselves to the appropriate administrative reviews and assessments under Canadian law and which are now taking place.
shume@islandnet.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Tamils+difference+between+immigrants+refugees/3454642/story.html#ixzz0xxG9Nx1I

Convention Refugee Claims in Canada

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Proposed Changes Hope to Streamline Refugee Determination Process

Read more at Suite101: Convention Refugee Claims in Canada: Proposed Changes Hope to Streamline Refugee Determination Process http://news.suite101.com/article.cfm/convention-refugee-claims-in-canada-a220131#ixzz0jzCR1kuQ

On March 30, 2010, the government introduced Bill C-11 that will divide refugee claimants into two streams. The goal is to speed up both determinations and removals.

For years many Canadians including politicians have described Canada’s refugee system as broken. Since the current procedures were enacted in 1989, Bill C-11 constitutes the first major overhaul of Canada’s refugee determination process. The purpose of the bill is to vastly reduce the time that it takes to decide whether or not a claimant is a genuine refugee and to speed up removals of failed claimants.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney told the National Post editorial board that the proposed legislation is an attempt to stop the “gaming of the system” by which people come to Canada and make false refugee claims knowing that the longer they get to stay, the less likelihood they will ever be removed.
Canada’s Current Refugee Determination System

When a foreign national, either at a port of entry or within Canada tells an immigration officer that they want to make a refugee claim, they are given a form to fill out. The claimant then has 28 days to complete the form and file it with the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). After the form is received, a date for a hearing is scheduled to be heard before a member of the Refugee Protection Division of the IRB. Under existing legislation, members of the Refugee Protection Division are appointed for fixed terms by the government of the day.

After the matter is heard and a decision rendered the successful applicant, together with any accompanying spouse and dependants, can apply to become a permanent resident of Canada. Those who are unsuccessful do not have the right to appeal that decision but they can apply for leave to seek judicial review of that decision in the Federal Court of Canada. Failed refugee claimants who apply to Federal Court do not automatically have the right to remain in Canada; however an application can be made to a justice of the Federal Court to stay the removal order until such time as that court decides the matter.

Currently, the average time between a person’s initial claim to be a Convention refugee and the time a determination is made is 19 months. The time that it now takes to remove a failed refugee claimant from Canada is close to five years after their initial claim is made.

The Refugee Protection Division currently has a backlog of 60,000 cases that are scheduled to be heard. Part of the backlog is due the reluctance of the current Conservative government to fill vacant positions on the board.

At the present time there are about 15,000 failed claimants who are waiting to be removed from Canada. It is also estimated that there are 38,000 unsuccessful refugee applicants whose whereabouts are unknown. It is not known whether they have left Canada or remain underground.
The Balanced Refugee Reform Act

Bill C-11 or the Balanced Refugee Reform Act as it will be known if passed will require refugee claimants to be interviewed by an immigration officer within eight days of making their claim. This replaces filling out a form and filing it within 28 days. If the claimant is found by the officer to be eligible to make a refugee claim, the matter will be set down for a hearing before the Refugee Protection Division within 60 days. The proposed legislation will replace government-appointed fixed term members on the board with career public servants.

The most controversial aspect of Bill C-11 is that refugee claimants will be divided into two different streams. The government will be able to designate certain countries as being “safe”. These safe countries will be those that are democratic, seen to have good human rights records, and be characterized as non-refugee producing countries. Examples of countries that the government would designate would be the United States and European Union countries.

Claimants who come from designated safe countries will not be able to appeal negative decisions of the Refugee Protection Division. Other claimants will be able, for the first time, to appeal to the newly created Refugee Appeal Division. The appeal will be based on the record of the Refugee Protection Division and the only evidence that will be allowed will be new evidence of events that happened after the initial hearing.

Failed claimants will still be able to apply for leave for judicial review in Federal Court of their final Immigration and Refugee Board decision. To that end, the bill will increase the number of justices who sit on the Federal Court of Canada.
Criticism of the Proposed Legislation

Although many applaud the government’s attempt to streamline the system; to remove failed claimants more quickly as well as grant speedier landing to those found to be refugees, there has been vocal criticism of some of the bill’s provisions. The main criticism is of the ability of Canada to designate some countries as safe. Many refugee advocates and lawyers feel that each person’s case should be determined solely on its own merits, equally and not according to their country of origin. The two streams could result in unfair hearings to those who have claims from countries that are already presumed not to produce genuine refugees.

Another complaint is that the time periods involved; eight days to be interviewed and another 60 days for the hearing will not allow the claimant sufficient time to obtain competent counsel to assist them and to adequately prepare for the hearing.

It is estimated that, if enacted, the legislation will cost taxpayers $540 million over five years.

Sources:

National Post
The copyright of the article Convention Refugee Claims in Canada in Law, Crime & Justice is owned by Arthur Weinreb. Permission to republish Convention Refugee Claims in Canada in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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