Montreal Gazette, July 31, 2009

Ottawa seems determined to gut our refugee system

The system would not be 'broken' had it been given enough resources

By PAULA KLINE and RICK GOLDMAN

In a series of recent announcements, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has moved to severely restrict access to Canada's asylum system.

Canadians, who can be rightfully proud of our strong humanitarian tradition regarding refugees (we were awarded the UN's Nansen Medal in 1986 for the "sustained contribution of the people of Canada to the cause of refugees"), might legitimately ask: Why the flurry of announcements in the dog days of summer? Were we really being overly generous toward refugees?

The current government certainly thinks so.

This month, the government began requiring visitors from the Czech Republic and Mexico to obtain visas in an effort to reduce refugee claims. A week ago, it  tightened the U.S.-Canada Safe Third Country Agreement, thereby closing the U.S.-Canada border to claimants from some of the most dangerous and unstable countries in the world (Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Iraq and Zimbabwe). In justifying this latest measure, Kenney stated, in his official communiqué:

"It is important that we don't create a two-tier immigration system: one tier for immigrants who wait patiently in line to come to Canada, frequently for years; and another tier for those who jump the immigration queue and make refugee claims in Canada after they've already had the opportunity to do so in a safe, democratic country."

However, a high percentage of claimants from the countries in question have been accepted as legitimate refugees after claiming asylum in Canada. After all, they fled some of the most repressive situations in the world. They were coming to Canada because the U.S. system is much less fair to refugees, for example, detaining claimants for lengthy periods with limited access to legal representation. In depicting these persons as "immigration queue-jumpers," Kenney is doing them a grave disservice and perpetuating a negative stereotype of refugee claimants.

Although human beings should never be reduced to mere statistics, numbers do provide another way of looking at whether we have been overly-generous to refugees. Out of about 10 million refugees roaming the globe in 2008, Canada received about 37,000 claimants last year - a fraction of one per cent. In this era of high security and biometric travel documents, few refugees ever make it far from the troubled countries they are fleeing - however genuine their claims might be. Yet this series of mid-summer announcements is likely to reduce the number of claimants arriving in Canada each year by about 40 per cent.

And these measures appear to be just the lead-in to a much more radical "reform" of our refugee system. Kenney has mused openly about a model in which an initial decision is rendered swiftly by a civil servant at the point of entry, rather than at a full hearing before an independent expert tribunal, as is the case in Canada today.

Such a model has been tried in Britain and found wanting in terms of the number of faulty decisions overturned on appeal. Ironically, some British refugee law experts are now saying that their country should look to Canada as a model.

As law professor and author Colin Harvey of Queen's University Belfast has expressed it:

"The Canadian government would be best advised to have the self-confidence to continue to develop a Canadian model of refugee protection anchored in humanitarian principles of fairness, effectiveness and respect for the human rights of all. This is the type of model that stands the best chance of securing efficiency and effectiveness in the longer term. I hope Canada will have the good sense not to follow the U.K.'s lead in this area of law and policy."

The hard truth is that refugee determinations are among the most complex and high-stakes decisions in our legal system. Haste makes waste and, in the case of refugees, costs lives. Whatever its shortcomings, the Canadian refugee system is fundamentally sound and among the best in the world. We should be building on its strengths, not gutting it.

Had the present government not starved it of vital resources, notably by failing to appoint a sufficient number of members to the Immigration and Refugee Board in recent years, the system would not be "broken" today, as Kenney has put it.

Paula Kline is executive director of the Montreal City Mission and Rick Goldman is co-ordinator of the Montreal-based Committee to Aid Refugees.