Kathryn Tomko Dennler, York University, Canada and Brianna Garneau, York University, Canada

Refugee advocates have long known about systemic problems with immigration enforcement in Canada, resulting in wrongful detentions and deportations, as well as people being tortured upon return to their countries of origin.

Our new research explains why these problems exist.

Flaws in Canada Border Services Agency’s (CBSA) structure and mandate mean that misconduct is tolerated and even incentivized. Independent oversight of CBSA and legislative changes are needed to protect refugee rights.

Deportation affects refugee rights

Our findings show that more than half the people deported from Canada each year made refugee claims. While some people are ready to return home, others still fear persecution.

Decisions on a refugee claim can be wrong. Outcomes of refugee claims depend on the Immigration and Refugee Board member who hears the claim, the quality of legal representation and subjective credibility determinations made by those hearing claims.

People who are at risk of persecution, torture or worse can be denied refugee status and face imminent deportation. For these reasons, deportation is closely linked to refugee rights.

How someone is treated during the deportation process matters. CBSA places an emphasis on “timely removals” at the expense of respecting rights. And although Canada prides itself on its safeguards, they are insufficient.

For example, people can apply for a pre-removal risk assessment to demonstrate the risk they face prior to being deported. The risk assessment was created to meet Canada’s obligations to protect people from persecution.

But in 2012, the government introduced legislation that limits access to the pre-removal risk assessment. Since then, people can only apply for it if they remain in Canada for at least a year after their refugee claim was refused.

Our research found that whether someone is deported before the end of that year comes down to chance, defeating the very purpose of the risk assessment.

CBSA not equipped for sensitive work

Deportation is sensitive work. Yet the CBSA lacks the structure and management controls to carry out activities with human rights implications.

We obtained job descriptions for senior leaders in CBSA who oversee enforcement. They do not mention human rights treaties or obligations. There is no evidence that performance measures for leaders, front-line staff or the agency as a whole include compliance with international human rights obligations.

Instead, CBSA documents emphasize the need for timely removals, specifically enforcing a deportation within one year of a refused refugee claim. Such fast deportations, as mentioned, may not leave refugee claimants with enough time to apply for the risk assessment.

Legal representatives we interviewed reported many instances of misconduct by CBSA officials, such as lying, abuse of power, concocting documents and baseless detentions to enforce a deportation. These tactics advance, rather than violate, CBSA’s mandate in the absence of requiring its employees to honour human rights obligations.

The CBSA also lacks an independent oversight body to review its work, investigate complaints and make binding recommendations. That means complaints about the conduct of CBSA officers must be made to CBSA.

A complaint can work against the person being deported. Many refugee lawyers told us they don’t bother reporting misconduct.

Lydia, a refugee lawyer, told us:

“I’ve complained about CBSA officers over the years with absolutely no effect. In fact, several officers who lied under oath were promoted after they had engaged in really disreputable conduct. Why waste your time?”

Legal help beyond reach

The deportation process is complex and unpredictable. Delaying or preventing a deportation requires expert legal advice. But it’s not easy to get legal representation for deportation cases, especially on a tight timeline.

Deportation cases require intense effort over a short period of time. Many experienced refugee lawyers rarely take a deportation case unless it’s a pre-existing client.

While refugees in Ontario may be eligible for legal aid, it doesn’t cover the real number of hours it takes to vigorously pursue the case. Sathya, a refugee lawyer, told us:

“It’s literally the worst work in this field …. It wipes every single thing off your desk. You have to put aside everything, cancel all your evening plans because you’re going to be pulling all-nighters. It is very, very difficult.”

What’s more, legal fees for deportation cases are often thousands of dollars, which is unaffordable for many refugee claimants.

Addressing injustice in deportations

An agency that conducts deportations must respect human rights obligations and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. CBSA job descriptions should be revised to require compliance, which should be measured in performance evaluations.

To further address bias, CBSA needs to institute an anti-racism strategy, like the Anti-racism Strategy 2.0 being implemented within Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada.

The Canadian government should repeal the one-year bar on a refugee claimant seeking a pre-removal risk assessment to ensure that people at risk of persecution are not deported.

Finally, given the life-or-death implications of their work, the CBSA needs independent oversight. The Liberal government has proposed a bill to introduce such a watchdog. That bill must be passed to ensure respect for refugee rights.

Kathryn Tomko Dennler, Immigration Researcher, York University, Canada and Brianna Garneau, PhD Candidate, Socio-legal Studies, York University, Canada

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rupa Banerjee, Toronto Metropolitan University

Immigration is largely accepted as one of the best strategic responses to Canada’s declining birth rates, aging population and labour market shortages. In many ways, immigrants are now positioned to be the saviours of Canada’s post-pandemic recovery.

Even with steadily rising numbers and the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians are more favourable towards immigration than ever before.

Canada’s new immigration targets are unprecedented — more than 1.4 million new permanent residents will be admitted by 2025. Setting targets, however, is the easy part. More difficult is ensuring Canada is up to the task of selecting and welcoming the influx of newcomers that will be arriving over the next few years.

But if immigrants are going to be a panacea for our demographic and economic challenges, they must be able to find skills-appropriate employment and settle into communities. Selecting the right mix of newcomers is the first crucial element to consider.

Barriers for immigrant workers

Employers across Canada have reported labour shortages in a range of skill levels and sectors, including accommodation, food services, skilled trades and health care.

The current economic immigrant selection system, Express Entry, prioritizes “high-skilled” immigrants — those with post-secondary education — in fields like information technology and finance. However, many of these individuals face significant underemployment, with foreign credentials discounted and the requirement to have Canadian experience preventing many from finding skills-appropriate work.

The new immigration plan will expand the eligible skill levels and ease access to permanent resident status for essential workers who were previously excluded from the selection system, like transport truck drivers, nurse assistants and heavy equipment operators.

Although this is a positive development, it is an open question whether so-called “lower-skilled” newcomers — those without post-secondary education — will find work and stay in their intended occupations. Canada’s focus on high-skilled immigration thus far has been based on research that shows that higher-skilled newcomers have better labour market outcomes in the long term than those with lower skills.

In general, less educated workers tend to be more susceptible to unemployment and poverty.

However, given the rampant devaluation of foreign credentials and the oversupply of high-skilled workers, it is possible that lower-skilled immigrants in essential sectors will actually face less relative labour market disparity than their high-skilled counterparts.

Changes to Express Entry

Another significant change is the introduction of targeted invitations within Express Entry. Currently, Express Entry applicants are evaluated by a comprehensive ranking system. Candidates that meet a certain cutoff score are invited to apply in biweekly draws.

Applicants know their chance of being invited based on their ranking system score. However, with targeted invitations, it will be up to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to determine which characteristics are valued in each draw. This adds significant uncertainty for applicants who may be overlooked even with a high ranking system score.

Government officials have stated that targeted draws will allow for the prioritization of high demand occupations. While occupation-specific admission has the advantage of potentially addressing talent shortages in certain fields, it may also result in an oversupply of workers in some areas.

If labour demand shifts due to economic downturn, these workers may be left out in the cold, as was the case for tech workers after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s.

Investing in supports

For the immigration plan to be successful, the selection system is just one side of the equation. The government must also invest in the infrastructure needed to accommodate the population growth, including affordable housing, access to health care and schooling supports.

Labour market integration policies and practices are equally important to ensure that immigrants’ skills are recognized and properly utilized. For example, immigrants trained in regulated occupations, like nursing, struggle to enter their professions, even though many of these fields have severe labour shortages.

Although several provinces now have fairness commissioners whose mandate is to enhance transparency in occupational licensing processes, significant barriers remain.

The experience is not much better for immigrants seeking employment in unregulated fields. Currently, the burden of integration is placed disproportionately on individual immigrants themselves. However, all stakeholders — including policymakers, occupational regulatory bodies, educational institutions and employers — should play a role in this process.

Everyone has a role to play

Settlement services and occupationally relevant language training must be made more accessible for newcomers with lower levels of education, since official language fluency is among the most important determinants of success and lower-skilled immigrants tend to be less fluent.

It is also more crucial than ever before to implement active labour market policies (ALMPs) that prioritize upskilling, reskilling and on-the-job training for essential workers.

Lastly, employer engagement is vital. Although Canadian employers demand more immigration, they tend not to hire permanent immigrants into high quality positions. Instead, they often prefer to recruit temporary foreign workers into low wage, precarious roles.

This is short sighted, particularly in a labour shortage, since decent working conditions and fair treatment improve productivity and competitiveness. Employers should work with immigrant-serving organizations, like the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, to better understand foreign qualifications and experience so they can leverage the skills of immigrant workers more effectively.

Finally, it is important for managers and other decision-makers to recognize unconscious bias and improve their own intercultural competence. Without the active participation of employers, even the most enlightened selection policies will fall flat. Canadians currently have a positive view of immigration, and we are seen as a global leader, but there is no guarantee that this will remain if immigrant integration isn’t adequately supported.

Rupa Banerjee, Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behaviour, Toronto Metropolitan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Constantin Colonescu, MacEwan University and Andrea Wagner, MacEwan University

Hostility towards immigrants has become a powerful component of right-wing populism in several western countries. But for the time being, Canada has not succumbed to this wave.

In Canada, attitudes towards immigration have never been a particularly divisive or salient election issue. Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada is the only federal party whose platform includes radical reform of Canada’s immigration system. Nonetheless, the party has twice failed to gain any seats in parliament.

Reinforcing the idea that multiculturalism lies at the centre of Canadian identity, a recent Focus Canada report finds that the public “has never been more supportive” of immigrants.

Our ongoing research into anti-immigration attitudes is primarily motivated by recent xenophobic attacks which expose a resurgence in anti-immigrant feelings. For instance, the 2021 London, Ont. hit-and-run, described by the prime minister as a “terrorist attack,” which killed four members of a Muslim family, shocked many Canadians. A man facing terror-related murder charges is scheduled to stand trial in September 2023.

In 2020, Canadian police reported 2,669 criminal acts motivated by hatred —the largest number recorded since 2009.

Anti-immigrant sentiments exist, but no province stands out

We conducted a survey in September 2022 with Canadian polling firm Abacus Data on a sample of 1,000 respondents across Canada. We asked four questions:

1) Whether immigration hurts the economy.

2) Whether the number of immigrants should be reduced.

3) Whether immigrants increase crime.

4) Whether cultural diversity limits opportunities for Canadians. By “opportunities,” we mean in areas such as jobs, education and housing.

Previous studies revealed that some provinces were less welcoming to immigrants than others. In 2019, pollsters EKOS politics found that 40 per cent of Canadians were apprehensive about “visible minority” immigrants.

EKOS reported that 56 per cent of Albertans, 46 per cent of Ontarians and 31 per cent of British Columbians echoed this sentiment. Only residents of Atlantic Canada were more immigrant friendly. Similarly, a 2021 report by Maru Public Opinion found that only half of Canadians believed that Alberta was a welcoming place for immigrants.

However, we found no significant differences across Canadian provinces in anti-immigrant sentiments. Furthermore, our research suggests that the majority of respondents do not hold strong anti-immigrant views.

When asked whether “immigration hurts the economy,” 53 per cent disagreed. While Canadians do not reveal strong anti-immigrant sentiments, they are less immigrant-friendly than we expected. We found that 24 per cent of the respondents do not have an opinion on immigration, while 23 per cent agree that immigration hurts the economy.

Moreover, 34 per cent of Canadians agreed that “immigration should be reduced.” Twenty-four per cent agree that “immigrants increase crime” and 20 per cent agree that “cultural diversity limits their opportunities.”

Attitudes within the immigrant population

Our study shows that recent immigrants to Canada are more tolerant to immigration than those who immigrated in the distant past, but the differences are rather small. Other researchers have arrived at a similar conclusion when examining immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration.

Those who have acquired citizenship in their host countries tend to be more skeptical about immigration than newer non-citizen immigrants. There could be several hypotheses that explain this trend, however, more research is needed to shed light on why that might be.

Anti-immigrant attitudes stronger among convoy supporters

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the truckers’ protest in Ottawa in early 2022 as imbued with “symbols of hatred and division” and accused protesters of “abuse and racism.” In contrast, the convoy was endorsed by prominent American right-wing figures including Donald Trump and Fox News commentators.

We found that stronger support for the convoy movement is associated with stronger anti-immigrant feelings. This finding lends some credence to Trudeau’s sentiment that racism and xenophobia were present among the convoy protesters.

We found that moderate anti-immigrant sentiments exist in Canada, but without noticeable differences between provinces. The trucker Convoy protest supporters showcased stronger anti-immigrant attitudes than those who opposed these protests. This might challenge Canada’s all-encompassing tradition of diversity and tolerance.

Constantin Colonescu, Associate Professor of Economics, MacEwan University and Andrea Wagner, Assistant Professor, Political Science, MacEwan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Karandeep Sonu Gaind, University of Toronto

The federal government admitted Thursday it needs more time before expanding Canada’s controversial medical assistance in dying (MAID) policy to enable MAID solely for mental illness.

Although the government had recently announced its intention to proceed with expanding MAID for those with mental health disorders by next March, Justice Minister David Lametti said he had heard from medical experts that the health-care system wasn’t prepared to deal with patients who want to end their lives for mental health reasons. He did not commit to a new deadline.

But the justice minister said Ottawa was only seeking to delay implementation of the MAID changes — it’s still clear the government remains intent on further expanding its legislation to include mentally ill people who are suicidal and could get better.

It’s one of many controversial elements of the proposed changes to the MAID legislation, and remains cause for concern.

Canada’s federal minister of disability inclusion recently expressed feeling devastated about Canadians being driven to seek assisted death through MAID — medical assistance in dying — due to lack of social supports.

Some are pushing for MAID for infants, while others think non-dying disabled people on wait lists should receive MAID. When the minister of justice suggests we should make it easier for those ambivalent about suicide to die, that is bone chilling.

When Canada embarked on this journey years ago, I cautioned about the importance of ensuring we “do the least harm” with our expanding laws. As physician chair of my hospital MAID team, I have seen the myths and realities that have fuelled our MAID expansion.

False autonomy and false compassion

As a society, we take comfort that MAID is provided for compassionate relief from suffering. Individually, MAID has been sold to Canadians as an autonomous choice, and framed as a right. When MAID was introduced in 2016, for those whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable, these principles may have been true. In contrast, our MAID expansion to non-dying disabled people has been misled by the fallacies of false autonomy and false compassion.

True autonomy requires true choice. For those of us fortunate enough to live lives with privilege, choosing “death with dignity” can be sold as an autonomous choice. Yet we have now had marginalized Canadians living in poverty be given state-supported suicide who have openly said they chose MAID not to avoid suffering from illness, but because society had failed to provide them a chance to live with dignity.

Most would be hard-pressed to argue it reflects true autonomy with a range of choices when the marginalized poor are enticed toward “painless” death to escape a painful life of poverty.

Canadians have rationalized that non-dying disabled people are being provided MAID in the name of compassion. However, it is not compassionate to provide death for one reason while pretending it is for another. We have reassured ourselves that MAID is for medical conditions that will not improve, or are irremediable. In the court cases that originally established MAID — which involved conditions like ALS and spinal stenosis — or for medical conditions like cancers, that can be true.

However, evidence shows it is impossible to predict that a mental illness will not improve in any individual. Yet expansion activists mistakenly believe they can make such predictions. Science tells us their chance of being right amounts to chance or less, with precision modelling showing only 47 per cent of “irremediability” predictions end up being correct — which is worse than flipping a coin.

False safety

Perhaps most tragically, the twin pillars of false autonomy and false compassion fuelling the expansion agenda have been propped up by the third myth of false safety.

Until now, expansion activists have reassured that “MAID is not suicide.” When provided to help avoid a painful death for those who are dying, we can distinguish MAID from suicide. Yet when expanded to those seeking death for mental illness, evidence shows MAID becomes indistinguishable from suicide. We cannot differentiate those seeking psychiatric euthanasia from suicidal individuals who resume fulfilling lives after being provided suicide prevention, rather than facilitated death.

All this sobering evidence is sadly borne out by our now common headlines of assisted suicide being provided to marginalized Canadians seeking escape from life suffering and poverty.

The government-appointed federal panel, chaired by an expansionist in favour of MAID for mental illness, was responsible for providing safeguards, standards and guidelines for how to implement MAID for mental illness. Instead, the panel recommended that no further legislative safeguards be required before providing death for mental illness, and did not provide any specific standards for the length, type or number of treatments that should be tried before providing MAID. Its report even suggested society had made an “ethical choice” that MAID should be provided even if suicide and MAID were the same.

Two members of the initial 12-member panel resigned, including the health-care ethicist and a mental health advocate panelist with lived experience.

Suicide prevention

The whole issue of suicide prevention has been shockingly absent from many of these discussions, including those with key medical associations. In all of its consultations on Bill C-7 leading up to the sunset clause, the Canadian Psychiatric Association (of which I am a former past president) inexplicably never once presented known evidence about suicide risks associated with mental illness.

While some organizations such as the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention discussed the importance of preventing suicide, CPA never raised this crucial topic — indeed they avoided using any variant of the word “suicide.”

With this vacuum of national leadership and evidence-based guidance, perhaps it is not surprising that our minister of justice recently suggested that MAID “provides a more humane way for [people with mental illness] to make a decision” when “for physical reasons and possibly mental reasons, [they] can’t make that choice themselves to do it themselves.”

This remarkable statement, coming from the person entrusted with responsibly implementing Canada’s assisted dying laws, will keep me and many of my colleagues up at night.

The need to pause

I am not a conscientious objector. However it is clear to me that Canada’s planned expansion of MAID to mental illness is based on ignorance — if not outright disregard — of fundamental suicide prevention principles. It appears to ignore what drives the most marginalized people to consider death as an alternative to life suffering. Perhaps, though, it does not ignore the cost savings of providing MAID rather than treatment and community support for dignified living.

The Carter v. Canada and Truchon v. Canada court cases shaping MAID laws did not review or rule on MAID for mental illness. Expanding MAID within three months would have meant providing facilitated suicide for the mentally ill without any standards, or any consideration of the role of suicide prevention.

Postponing the March 2023 expansion of euthanasia for mental illness is the only responsible course. Canadians and mental health organizations recognized this and called for it, with the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention and over 200 individual psychiatrists so far signing a petition to this effect, and the academic chairs of the departments of psychiatry across Canada joining this call for delay.

To proceed with the planned changes would have been morally, medically and politically irresponsible. Moving forward, it will be important to ensure our future policies are evidence-based. Fortunately, the situation is not yet irremediable.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, you need to know you’re not alone. If your life or someone else’s is in danger, call 911 for emergency services. For support, call Canada Suicide Prevention Service (CSPS) at 1-833-456-4566. Visit Crisis Services Canada for more resources.

Karandeep Sonu Gaind, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.