Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. My name is Mary Jo Leddy, and I've been a member of the Ontario Sanctuary Coalition for fifteen years. My remarks will be general, and they will be followed by some very specific remarks by other people.
The offer of sanctuary begins as a moment of conscience. Someone—a mother, a father, a person who is alone—knocks at the door of the church and asks for help. The minister, the priest, or a member of the congregation, sometimes a secretary, is then faced by another desperate human being, and these Christians are then forced to face themselves and to respond to the summons that this refugee presents.
This is the ethical moment, and it has been repeated many times over in this country. It is indeed remarkable how many modest, middle-class congregations have opened their doors to provide sanctuary to a refugee whose life is in danger. It is a fearsome commitment for these congregations. It places the congregations at legal risk and it demands incredible daily fidelity.
Those of us who have been involved in providing sanctuary are not more caring or more moral than any of you. We simply see the refugee from a different point of view. We do not see a case. We do not see a file number. We do not see a political issue. We simply see the person who faces us and searches us out as Christians.
No church leader tells congregations to offer sanctuary. No church leader can make us stop. I mention this because I was part of a delegation of church leaders who met with former immigration minister Judy Sgro. They were the leaders of churches where congregations had offered sanctuary, and the minister was disturbed by the growing number of churches that were offering sanctuary. At that meeting, she asked the church leaders to tell the congregations to stop, and offered them a back channel for resolving their difficulties.
The minister said the church leaders could come to her in private once a year with twenty cases that would be dealt with in that quiet, private way. The church leaders refused this option, and quite wisely so, certainly for the simple reason that they did not want a private process that was available to them and not to other religious groups, that was available to them and not to other advocacy groups. Secondly and more importantly, they acknowledged that we did not ask these congregations to do this and that we cannot make them stop, because this is a question of conscience.
This movement of conscience will continue—I want to assure you of that—as long as there is no effective mechanism of appeal in the refugee determination process. As I see it—and I see it daily—the present Immigration Act gives enormous power, the power of life and death, to single immigration officers, and this act is based on the premise that those officers do not make mistakes. Within the act, there is provision for an appeal on the merits, but it has never been implemented.
What we have now is a labyrinth of partial appeals, which do not add up to a single, whole consideration. It has been argued that to implement an appeal process would be costly, but from where I sit, it would be far less costly and less expensive than the inefficient morass that swamps the refugee determination process.
For the last year, a family from Costa Rica has been living in the church of St. Philip Neri in Toronto. I have met with them; I have met with their pastor, Father John Juhl. The family is disintegrating, haunted by depression.
It is argued that there are no refugees from Costa Rica. This father was a police officer in a drug enforcement squad. He learned too much about the drug cartel, which is overwhelming that country. The police have now admitted they could not protect him. Evidence accumulates every day, and it becomes clear why he cannot return to Costa Rica.
It seems now as if everyone has washed their hands of this family and others. Bureaucrats within the department are not willing to admit that sometimes, maybe a mistake is made. Sometimes, probably often, it is simply because they have a workload that is overwhelming. They do not have the resources with which to resolve cases. The minister could; ministerial discretion was made for moments such as this.
We in the sanctuary movement, the group I belong to, believe that Canada has signed international agreements that oblige it to protect refugees whose lives are in danger. When the government will not do that, citizens are obliged to take a civil initiative to do so, so that we honour the laws of our country.
Thank you.