Okay. Perfect.
Starting with the refugee exclusions project, last year I published the results of a study of 11 years of Canadian refugee decision-making. The focus of the study was the data available from both CIC and CBSA as well as Federal Court decisions about refugees.
The central questions in this study were, first, how many people have been excluded because of concerns about terrorism, and has the exclusion because of concerns about terrorism changed given heightened enforcement effort and heightened enforcement dollars since 9/11?
There are really two main findings of this study. One, the numbers of potential refugees who are excluded because of terrorist concerns are infinitesimally small—less than 0.01%—given the high number of claimants who come into the country every year. We did find, however, that the understanding of what counts as terrorism has grown considerably since 2001, so that a number of people may now be captured in the category of a potential terrorist when they are not involved in any activity or in any formal membership.
So despite growth in the category, the growth in numbers is very small. The highest number of exclusions in any year was in 2004, with 114 exclusions, and only a smaller number of those were related to terrorism.
One of the inferences that comes out of this study is that a relatively easy-to-access refugee claims system like Canada's enhances our security because it provides an incentive for people to come forward and identify themselves to the state. In Canada we have a comparatively small amount of clandestine migration compared with the United States and the United Kingdom. One reason for this is that many people who might otherwise go underground or disappear in the country because they don't have immigration status are attracted to the possibility of having a successful refugee claim. So this provides an opportunity to have a very clear identity picture of those individuals and to perform security checks upon them. That was not directly a focus of the terrorism study, but was one of the points that was made as we conducted the study over a two-year period.
I have, as part of my speaking notes, some of the precise figures from that study. If committee members are interested and would like to follow up during the question period, those are available. I can also make the study available to you later.
The next topic that I thought I would touch on, because of the strong security linkages, is the role of immigration detention in Canada. Immigration detention in Canada is an area where, I think it's reasonable to say, we simply do not have granular-enough data to have a clear picture of how immigration detention here is used.
For example, while we know the numbers of people who are detained and the average length of detention, which is not terribly long at around 20 days, we don't know, for the most part, and can't differentiate in those statistics at present whether those people are asylum seekers, whether they're failed refugee claimants, whether they're people slated for removal from the country, and, if they're slated for removal, which category they're being removed under. So there's quite a lot about immigration detention that we simply don't know, and it would be very useful to instruct the CBSA to enhance its data collection in these areas.
One of the things that is recorded in our current data is the reason for people being detained. We know that just under 6% of all people in immigration detention are there because of some kind of security concern. What accounts for the other 94%? Well, the two main reasons for detention are that people don't have proper identity documents when coming into the country or they are considered a flight risk. In other words, they are considered not likely to want to show up for the next immigration proceeding they are facing, whether that's a hearing or a removal proceeding. So the majority of people in immigration detention are not convicted or suspected criminals in any way.
We do have some children in immigration detention in Canada. Just over 500 children were detained last year, mostly with their parents.
There are specific immigration lock-ups in major Canadian cities, but a significant number of people in immigration detention are actually just in provincial jails.
We also know that detention of refugee claimants is not authorized by international laws, so just because somebody is making an asylum claim doesn't provide any legal basis to detain them, either in international law or in Canadian law at this point. Another basis is needed.
We do have quite stark data on people who arrive on boats. The people who are boat arrivals tend to be detained for about 15 times longer in terms of days than are people who arrive in the country any other way. So whether they're regular or irregular arrivals, boat arrivals attract the highest rates and length of detention. This is despite the fact that there is very little to differentiate those arrivals in terms of the eventual outcomes. That is, when we have gone through an episode of a boat arrival, and all the processing is done, those people do not necessarily raise any greater number of security concerns than do people who arrive in the country in other ways.
On the whole, I have to say the detention review scheme operated by the Immigration and Refugee Board at present is a very good and successful scheme. It tends to have clear priorities and a very clear and effective regulatory mandate, and it tends to work very well to ensure that immigration detention does not continue for an unduly long time.
There are two areas of immigration detention that are probably appropriate for attention in your study. One is that our detention system doesn't cope very well with mass arrivals. Certainly on the legal representation side it is very hard to get people appropriate legal representation when 200 or 300 people arrive at once. So the question of the appropriate response to a mass surge is a live question that needs study.
There's also another pocket, a very small pocket, which is what to do when people are found to be unremovable from the country for whatever reason. There's only a handful of these people, but Canada doesn't have a very good record in comparison with relative countries like the United Kingdom or the United States. We are still prepared to keep people in detention indefinitely, whereas both the United Kingdom and the U.S., with the exception of Guantanamo Bay, have found ways to release people from this kind of immigration detention.
I think I have about three minutes left.