Thank you.
I want to applaud the committee for undertaking this study. Thank you for your invitation.
My name is Jamie Liew. I am a refugee lawyer and an associate professor from the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa. In my limited time today, I am submitting three recommendations for your consideration.
The first is to repeal section 117(9)(d) of the regulations. I am providing to the committee a written copy of research co-authored with two other lawyers that calls for this repeal. It is a regulation that excludes a member of the family class—a family member—who was not disclosed or examined before the sponsor came to Canada. The regulation imposes a lifetime bar to refugees and other migrants from sponsoring their family due to non-disclosure of a family member. That has nothing to do with fraud in 90% of the cases that we examined. Tragic reasons like an assumed death of a child leads to permanent family separation.
This regulation is overly broad and unnecessary given other tools in the immigration legislation. I invite the members to review this paper and consider this impact on refugees and Canada's long-standing commitment to family reunification.
My second recommendation deals with the refugee protection framework and what it should look like. It should not look at its overseas activities as separate from the inland protection scheme. Canada's focus should not be so much on how the requests for refugee protection come to Canada. Much of the public discussion surrounding the issue of managing our border has been to cast resettled refugees as good, law-abiding people waiting in line, while those coming to our borders are queue jumpers, law breakers and less deserving. The government has a role in shaping the way that migrants are seen in public, through policy and laws. Rather, talking about refugee protection in the resettlement context as the legitimate way and those coming inland as a means to discourage, we are sending a damaging message that is not aligned with our international legal obligations, as Professor Macklin outlined.
I encourage the committee to think about refugee protection, and the effects and links that the resettlement process has with the inland protection system. I am therefore recommending that reforms would allow migrants to go to official ports of entry, putting trust in our well-oiled system rather than crafting makeshift border posts. I have recommended this to the committee in the past, and I have again provided the written submissions to the committee that I provided in July.
My third recommendation is around the issue of statelessness. I want to draw the committee's attention to the fact that the UNHCR states that there are over 10 million stateless people all over the world. Recognizing this as a global problem, the UNHCR commenced a 10-year campaign in 2014 called #IBELONG, to end statelessness by 2024.
Stateless persons have difficulty accessing health care, education and social services. Without status, stateless persons cannot work. They are at risk of being detained, and because there are sometimes no prospects of removing the person to another country, they can be indefinitely held in immigration detention. In other cases, they are removed to a place where they suffer further hardship because they are stateless.
I want to discuss how the lack of citizenship may be the cause of displacement and forced migration. Indeed, the denial or stripping of citizenship is a political tool that encourages discrimination, oppression, and in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar, genocide.
While it may be clear that some stateless persons may be refugees—the Rohingya, for example—in many situations stateless persons do not meet the requirements in law to qualify for refugee protection.
Canada has provided some relief in the form of policy guidelines for permanent resident applications on humanitarian grounds and the ability to apply to the minister to grant citizenship to a stateless person in the Citizenship Act. These two legal mechanisms, however, are an exercise of discretionary power that is seen as an exception to the rule and are avenues that should not be used as a means of circumventing the normal immigration or citizenship process.
While there are potential avenues existing within the citizenship and immigration framework by which some stateless persons may gain status, many simply do not qualify, or are at the whim of pure discretion. As a leader in refugee protection, Canada can also become a leader in providing protection for stateless persons by creating a holistic legal framework by which stateless persons can have a true chance at accessing not only permanent status, but citizenship, as a durable solution.
Canada can begin by legally defining and investigating the depth of statelessness in Canada. My recommendation is to identify and track stateless persons while creating legal mechanisms geared toward providing a pathway for citizenship dedicated to stateless persons.
Second, it is important to understand that Canada is a signatory to the 1961 statelessness convention, but as Professor Purkey mentioned, not a party to the 1954 statelessness convention. The 1961 convention guides us in preventing statelessness, but the 1954 convention establishes positive obligations. Arguably, aspects of both conventions are becoming customary international law.
Canada has a stateless population of its own that it should address. More research needs to be conducted on how indigenous persons who don't have citizenship want to be recognized as citizens. As well, stateless persons who have a dominant and effective link to Canada, for example by being resident in Canada for a significant portion of time, should be given a pathway to citizenship.
I point out Canada's international obligations here because there has been recent talk about eliminating birthright citizenship. I have conducted research in other countries where birthright citizenship is not present and can attest that there are several reasons this policy should not see the light of day. This discussion is fuelled by the fear that migrants may be engaging in birth tourism. Existing data, however, shows that only 0.1% of total births can be characterized as such. This is not a problem worth eliminating birthright citizenship for.
Second, if we're going to talk about efficient management of the administrative processing of citizenship applications, such a policy would demand more tax dollars toward a complicated process, because everybody would have to apply for citizenship. Proving citizenship will be more difficult, and this policy will create greater numbers of stateless persons within our borders.
I leave you with this. My father was stateless before he immigrated to Canada. He was lucky because at the time he qualified as a low-skilled worker. He would not qualify under today's system. I was born on the heels of his obtaining citizenship in Canada. Had the government of the time not changed the residency requirements from five to three years, I would have been born in Canada while my father was stateless. If birthright citizenship did not exist, I might not have been a Canadian. I am living proof that welcoming stateless persons to Canada with the conferral of citizenship is the best way to build a nation.
Thank you.