Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to address the committee on this important topic.
I'm a refugee lawyer with the Refugee Law Office, which is a Legal Aid Ontario staff office in Toronto. Before coming to Legal Aid I was in private practice for about seven years with Jackman and Associates. My pre-law background was in public policy research and advocacy with the Maytree Foundation and with Citizens for Public Justice. It's a pleasure to be back before the committee.
I'd like to comment on a few of the issues. You have a wide-ranging study going on right now, but I'd like to comment specifically on security and admissibility, the advanced passenger screening program and interdiction, detention, and overseas decision-making. I will be brief; I know I have ten minutes.
As a Canadian citizen with a family and loved ones here, I am as committed to the safety and security of this country as any of the honourable members of this committee. But as someone who has represented quite a few people who have been suspected or been found to be inadmissible to Canada on security grounds, I believe that I have some insights that few policy-makers share.
One of those insights is that the security provisions of the current act—specifically sections 34 and 35 of IRPA—are far too broad and are applied in a manner that arbitrarily destroys the lives of innocent immigrants and refugees and their children with no benefit to Canada or to our national security.
I would like to give you a couple of examples from my own practice.
John—which is not his real name—grew up in South Sudan in the 1960s and 1970s. As an African Christian, he suffered brutal repression and violent sexual, physical, and emotional abuse throughout his youth, at the hands of soldiers from the local Sudanese army detachment who were Arab Muslims from the north.
In 1984, when he was about 21 years old, John became intrigued by a fledgling movement called the Sudan People's Liberation Movement or Army—the SPLA—which had sprung up to push for autonomy for South Sudan. John spent his summer vacation after the first year of university back home near Juba helping his older brothers to distribute leaflets about this new movement and guiding new recruits to the SPLA from the centre of town in Juba to the riverbank on his family's farm, where the new recruits would be picked up by boats and ferried to training camps for the SPLA, the newly formed organization.
John himself did not go to the camp or get any kind of military training. After that summer, he returned to university and then traveled to the U.S. and Canada, where he sought refugee protection. He has now been in Canada for 25 years and he is still not a permanent resident. The reason for this is his brief participation in the SPLA in that summer of 1984. There are no allegations that he ever carried a gun or received training as a fighter or participated in any act of violence.
There is no allegation that the SPLA itself engaged in human rights violations until several years after John had left the country, came to Canada, and ceased any connection to the group. Yet under the current interpretation of paragraph 34(1)(f) of IRPA, he is a terrorist, he is a member of a terrorist organization.
Then there is Salaam. She is Eritrean. She and her husband were farmers in Eritrea during the bloody 30-year war of independence from Ethiopia and the Red Terror. Her farm, like many in the region, was regularly bombed by the Ethiopian air force, her fields destroyed time and again, her neighbours and her cattle killed.
When fighters with the Eritrean Liberation Front, the ELF, came through her village and demanded food from her farm, she provided it. She did so willingly, although of course she would have been killed if she had refused. She came to be known in the village as “Mama ELF”.
Eventually she came to Canada and was recognized as a refugee here. Today, at the age of 65, she's considered by CIC to be a terrorist; she's inadmissible to Canada. There is no allegation—let's be clear—that Salaam ever engaged in terrorism or war crimes or crimes against humanity or any act of violence. She held no formal position within the ELF and had no involvement in their activities.
Moreover, there is no reliable evidence that the ELF ever engaged in terrorism or international crimes during the liberation war. The ELF is not a designated entity under the Anti-terrorism Act or the Criminal Code.
The problem is that membership is undefined. There is no temporality requirement. There is no danger assessment and no transparency or accountability in the assessment of whether groups are terrorist groups under the act. The result is completely arbitrary and irrational.
I gather there is a technical problem.