Good morning.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation.
In our brief submitted before the Senate last year, we made five recommendations, which we repeat here. We endorse the concerns highlighted by the CBA and The Refugee Centre. Why the recommendations? Context is always important.
The current law is potent. As the committee knows, the authority to render individuals inadmissible under IRPA for international and human rights sanctions has been in place for over 20 years. Of the thousands of people currently on the sanctions list, we cannot identify anyone who would currently be inadmissible under Canadian immigration law.
What's the harm in adding more sanctions? The bad actors should have no access to Canada. We agree. Yet it is much more complicated. IRPA's jurisdictional integrity, for one, is at stake. Why? Aligning all of subsection 4(1.1) of SEMA with IRPA introduces, to list just a few things, economic sanctions; where recommendations to sanction result in automatic inadmissibility; and where investigations into sanctions could be grounds for detention without legal context and without relief from third party adjudicators like the immigration division. That will now be repealed.
In short, the new law, make no mistake, is too broad. It can impact citizens, permanent residents and foreign nationals guilty of no wrongdoing. This is striking. Applicants and their spouses and children would have few options, if any, left under the IRPA. It would have a generational impact.
Recommendation one is the requirement for legislative clarity. We've heard a lot about it. The word “sanction” remains undefined, but it's also been divorced from “grounds of violating human or international rights”—it's now a stand-alone, undefined ground for inadmissibility—that currently exists in IRPA. Why? Is this not the harm we are targeting—bad actors in violation of human rights or international rights? Proposed section 35.1 must be connected to human or international rights violators. Key terms like “sanction” and “entity” must be defined in IRPA.
This is all very important, because such subject matter experts in the sanctions regime as Dr. Andrea Charron, and a prior Senate study, raised several acute issues. There are too many to recite here, but I'll mention a few about sanctions. These are the need for parliamentary oversight, better coherence and compliance, timely and independent redress avenues, accountability, transparency and other practical challenges.
For example, Canada continued to leave sanctions in place against foreign states like Liberia and Sierra Leone long after the United Nations lifted them, a legal purgatory under Bill S-8. This committee should address that regime—I understand that it's going to study it—before the passage of Bill S-8.
Put plainly, individuals' lives could be significantly altered by a law that potentially should not apply to them. Equally troubling is that it may not exclude some of the bad actors, because the law becomes immersed in legislative ambiguity and applicatory limitations, resulting in procedural and fairness concerns possibly rising to the level of constitutional issues.
Recommendation two is that legislative clarity is also required for the Citizenship Act and the Emergencies Act. That has not been discussed thus far. Canadians should not be at risk of losing their Canadian citizenship on a precarious legal foundation.
It's the same for recommendation three with respect to independence. IRPA cannot lose its jurisdictional integrity by being restricted in providing relief where justified in the confines of its own act. Ironically, in the sanctions regime there are legislated exemptions, but really, none remain for those involved in navigating IRPA.
Recommendation four underscores the need for overbreadth and excluding those with no personal wrongdoing or any connection to transgressions.
For recommendation five, we rely on David Matas's brief before the Senate. The granting of refugee status should result in immediate delisting. Access to refugee status should be uniform in and outside of Canada.
We propose calling David Matas and Dr. Charron to testify. It is critical that we maintain the jurisdictional independence of the IRPA and its harmonious intersection with other domestic and international legislation for the objects of the act and the clear intention of Parliament to be realized. To get there, Bill S-8 needs further study and amending.
Thank you.