That is no problem.
We mobilize immigrants, refugees, workers, trade unionists, students, activists, and community members to demand justice and dignity for all immigrants, migrants, and refugees.
We continue to fight against the Conservative government's ongoing attacks on migrant communities. The last year has seen unprecedented targeting of refugees in sanctuary. Asylum seekers have been arrested in schools, workplaces, and even hospital beds. Families have been torn apart. Over 12,000 friends, family, and community members have been deported in the last year.
We continue to mobilize against deportations. We outreach to students, workers, and community members about the need for a full, inclusive regularization program. And we join in solidarity with our allies to fight against poverty, the exploitation of workers, and the conditions that cause displacement, such as war and occupation, corporate terrorism, plundering, and economic market hijacking.
We have forced immigration enforcement out of Toronto district schools and inspired front-line community workers to take up the struggle for access without fear. We have fought for and won a full “don't ask, don't tell” policy in many community agencies.
Today I'm here to speak on the alarming discriminatory, racist, and violent amendments being made to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act through Bill C-50. As Eva Mackey has stated in The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada:
Nationalism often depends upon mythological narratives of a unified nation moving progressively through time--a continuum beginning with a glorious past leading to the present and then onward to an even better future. These mythical stories require that specific versions of history are highlighted, versions that reaffirm the particular characteristics ascribed to the nation. In Canada, nationalist myth makers draw upon particular versions of national history to explain the nation's “fairness” and “justice” today.
It is the responsibility of the decision-makers of the present--that's you--to reflect insightfully upon Canadian history and make sure that mistakes are not made again.
The series of amendments being made through the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in Bill C-50 will allow the immigration minister absolute, subjective, and arbitrary power to reject and/or deny any migrant applications. Currently, the act states that anyone who meets the myriad discriminatory and class requirements shall be granted status. However, under the proposed changes, regardless of whether or not you meet the requirements, you can be rejected, no questions asked, and have no appeal. I am speaking here to proposed subsection 11(1).
Further, the bill will allow for official quotas to be implemented on how many migrants Canada wants, from which category of application, and from which country. The stats since the 1970s, since the implementation of the NIEAP, the non-immigrant employment authorization program, already show that there have been fewer and fewer migrants granted immigration status versus increasing temporary worker status or no status at all. Now with official quotas being put in place, this legitimizes this process. So instead of a system in which we have each and every individual application regarded within an unbiased and humane framework, we'll be looking first at which country this person is applying from, checking then that they make the cut-off line, and then cross-checking that they are not one too many in the category in which they are applying for status. This process allows for racism and classism to be organized under the neat titles of logistics and economic strategy.
As has been stated in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees handbook, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, it is important to note that most people who are seeking to migrate from around the world today are doing so because they are being pushed to leave their homes for survival. They leave their communities, families, histories, friends, and lives behind not in pursuit of more opportunities but of an opportunity.
For many and most, it is a matter of simple survival, and this situation, ladies and gentlemen, is inherently tied to the reality that it is our Canadian corporate companies that are forcing themselves upon the lands and homes and economies of these people. We do house the greatest and largest mining firms in the world. If they are leaving their homes, it is because of us.
It is in the case of war that millions of refugees have had to flee countries, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti. These are just three recent examples of the Canadian hand in displacement.