Evidence of meeting #123 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was irb.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Richard Wex  Chairperson, Immigration and Refugee Board
Salma Zahid  Scarborough Centre, Lib.
Ramez Ayoub  Thérèse-De Blainville, Lib.
Megan Bradley  Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University, As an Individual
Doug Saunders  Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

5:05 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

Thank you for that question. I think your colleague, Ms. Rempel, actually raised the key to this problem in the first half of this meeting, in that the delay times and the understaffing of the IRB drive the demand for these irregular crossings. I addressed earlier the problem of irregular crossings. There should be no need for irregular crossings. We should create legal pathways. There would not be public outrage if people were presenting themselves at legal crossings.

Yet we know, from work in Europe and from anecdotal evidence in Canada, that one of the factors that attracts people to present themselves for asylum, even if they are part of the 50% who are not legitimate asylum cases, is the knowledge that, due to understaffing, there's enough time to earn back their investment in this return. We know from the experience of other countries that staffing up our authorities enough to reduce the delay times—because the backlog is entirely due, as far as I can tell, to understaffing—would reduce the demand.

That would lead me to suggest that if this was approached as an emergency issue, it could be approached as a temporary emergency issue. If we could have a sudden five-year period of massive restaffing of these administrations, it might not be necessary in the future to have them staffed at that level. The emergency restaffing would reduce delay times enough to push the demand back down, if I can put it so crudely.

Rather than look at this as an incremental systemic change to institutions, maybe it should be approached as a one-time crisis measure.

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON

It's not going to stop.

5:05 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

No, absolutely it's going to stop. This is a temporary instance. One thing we know about—

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON

It's not going to stop. This problem of the illegal border crossings, it's going to continue.

5:05 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

Every experience of every country on this is that it won't.

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON

Well, what do you mean? It's still going on in Europe and that's for the last 15 years.

5:05 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

No, as I said, Europe had a problem with Mediterranean crossings, from 2004 to 2006. Then it basically disappeared for a number of years because European countries made policy choices that shifted that movement from irregular to regular channels. Then it re-emerged in 2011 and thereabouts, during the Arab Spring years, because the agreements with the sending countries had fallen apart. Then it diminished again, only to reappear as a spike in 2015-16.

It has now fallen to regular levels and hopefully will fall to negligible levels again. Refugee crises are periodic. They are not constant. There's not a constant supply. We had big refugee crises in the 1980s caused by the Lebanon war, and in the 1990s by the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia. We have them now, caused by the Syrian war. There are fewer countries at war right now than at any other time in human history. There are fewer drivers of asylum seekers. So we have a problem right now.

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON

Dr. Bradley, I have a question for you, which you touched on.

Canada's ability to help those people in distress is well known. We're well regarded for that and I think it's something we should be proud of. However, we can't help everyone. We don't have the resources to help everyone, nor does anyone else, really.

I think you've already touched on my question: How should we prioritize people in distress who want to come here?

5:10 p.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University, As an Individual

Megan Bradley

Do you mean people who want to enter Canada?

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON

Yes. What policies should Canada have to prioritize people coming to this country?

5:10 p.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University, As an Individual

Megan Bradley

We have clear legal commitments, and as a matter of first priority, we need to understand what those commitments are and stand by them. From that perspective, I think it's important to recognize that seeking asylum is not illegal. People do cross irregularly but there's a significant difference—

5:10 p.m.

Conservative

David Tilson Conservative Dufferin—Caledon, ON

No, I don't want to get into that. I'm asking the question. There are people all over the planet who are having very serious problems, millions of them, and we want to continue helping people, within our means. Obviously we can't help everyone, nor can anyone else. So how should we prioritize all these different areas around the planet?

5:10 p.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University, As an Individual

Megan Bradley

I would argue that we should be thinking about areas where people do want to stay closer to home and making it viable for them to do so. This is really central to thinking about the issue of internal displacement and also support for refugees within regions of origin.

We sometimes want to talk about these populations in a way that separates them out from one another. We need to think more holistically and recognize that if strategic support, for example, is provided to people who are looking to return to their communities, which is going on right now in Iraq and Syria.... They have little to no support from the international community. It's seen as a high-risk investment because the region is still unstable. That is going to be a never-ending cycle unless we provide some support, take some risks to make it possible for people to go back and rebuild their homes, restart their businesses.

5:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

I'm afraid I need to end it there, Mr. Tilson.

Ms. Kwan.

5:10 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and I thank both of our witnesses today for their presentations.

I'm particularly interested in your comments about finding a way in which we can better manage the situation. I agree that it is not a crisis, and what is necessary is for us to properly manage it. Right now, as Mr. Saunders has indicated, where Canadians take offence is with the idea that somehow people are—quote, unquote—“jumping the queue”.

In order to address this issue effectively, some, including me, have called for the suspension of the safe third country agreement, because that agreement forces people to enter Canada irregularly. Therefore, it creates this situation that we now face. People much smarter than me have called for this as well, particularly those in the legal profession and human rights activists.

My question for both of you is whether you think part of the management of the situation today would be for the government to suspend the safe third country agreement, exercising our authority to do so, to give notice, which we can suspend for 90 days.

Ms. Bradley, I'll go to you first.

5:10 p.m.

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University, As an Individual

Megan Bradley

Thank you.

I would agree with you that the safe third country agreement is not appropriate in the current context, particularly because of the dramatically different ways in which Canada and the United States assess the same refugee claims at the present moment.

What we've seen in the United States is an increasing politicization of the refugee status determination process, which is something we've really tried to avoid in Canada. Given that reality in the United States, I think it's incumbent on Canada to assess these claims fairly, and that's a matter of doing it independently now. I don't think we can count on a fair determination from the U.S., and for that reason, I would agree with you that the safe third country agreement should be suspended.

5:10 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

Thank you.

5:10 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

The safe third country agreement is what is causing irregular crossings between entry points on the Canada-U.S. border. There is no other factor. If people could present themselves at a legal crossing point for an asylum claim, they would do so. As I've said before, people are not crossing at irregular points because it's an easy way into Canada; they're crossing in the hardest and most expensive way into Canada because it's the only way under the safe third country.

I think there's a belief in government that it would be dangerous to suspend the safe third country agreement, not just because it involves suspending an agreement with the United States at a moment when we're trying to get some agreements with the United States, but because there's a fear that it would cause an increase in numbers, that if you suddenly eliminated it, you would have a rush to the border and numbers would increase.

I would suggest that in the medium term, that may not be the case, because of what I was speaking about earlier, the market demand for migration pathways. Doing so would shift an irregular crossing that is a gamble but is known and relies upon the delays in the system to allow people to stay in Canada for a long time into a legal pathway with known probabilities of acceptance and so on. The fact is that a lot of this crisis, aside from being caused by these policies, is caused by a lack of information among the migrants and putative migrants themselves.

Some correct information, some mythology that circulates among them.... There has been a track record, including in Canada, that making information about legal pathways known can reduce demand for illegal pathways.

I should say that some of the reduction in demand for irregular crossings among some populations.... Haitians were highly dominant in the first year of this problem, and now they've been reduced to something like 5% of the numbers. I think that's partly because the information has been circulated among those communities that there are legal pathways that are less risky and expensive that they can take.

This leads me to suggest that suspending the safe third country agreement would not necessarily cause a rush to the border, and in fact, it could be part of a managed solution that could reduce the numbers.

5:15 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

Thank you very much for that answer.

I think it's particularly important to note, as well, that under article 10 of the safe third country agreement, Canada can in fact give notice that we want to suspend the agreement for 90 days. If we are worried about the big rush of suddenly a million people showing up at our borders, we can see how that works and how well we can manage it.

The government is thinking they can solve the entire issue by going out there, flying to the United States and telling people, “Don't come anymore, because you're really not welcome, even though we say you are.” It won't manage the situation in and of itself. You need a host of approaches to it.

Keep in mind that Canada has an obligation under the UN convention—unless you want to shut down the borders, as our Conservative colleagues are suggesting—to apply the safe third country agreement to the entire border in Canada. If you don't want to go down that route, I think it's incumbent on us to try that, so thank you very much for that answer.

The situation we have where everybody comes through one point or a couple of points of entry creates challenges for the border communities. By allowing different points of entry across different parts of the border, wouldn't that also mitigate the challenges that the border communities face today, where everybody is centred around Roxham Road, for example?

5:15 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

Potentially. It would reduce a load on the policing system, on the immigration and refugee systems. Certainly dispersing these obligations across a number of border crossing points....

I mean, it's not just Roxham Road. It's—

5:15 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

It's Manitoba, as well.

5:15 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

It's Manitoba as well.

5:15 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

There are some in British Columbia.

5:15 p.m.

Writer, International Affairs, The Globe and Mail, As an Individual

Doug Saunders

The other day, I met a young, 17-year-old Syrian man who said he walked across in British Columbia. Now he's been admitted to an exclusive private school and that sort of thing.

It's a big load to have to police the border in that way. I mean, everybody gets arrested when they cross.

I'm pretty sure the RCMP would tell you they'd rather not try to be immigration processors along the entire length of the border. It's a waste of resources.

5:15 p.m.

NDP

Jenny Kwan NDP Vancouver East, BC

Thank you for that.

In fact, British Columbia has higher numbers. It's the second highest in terms of irregular border crossings.

That said—