Thank you for this opportunity to appear.
I have been asked to represent the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, and I will be making some submissions relevant to their position. I am open to discussing larger issues with immigration, as well, in response to questions.
It is my understanding that a significant issue before the community relates to the safe third country agreement, forced migration, irregular entrants and so on. I think that I will begin by reminding this committee that in 2002, this very Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration addressed two issues that are relevant to current concerns and proposals about the safe third country agreement. This was in anticipation of signing that agreement.
The first question that the committee addressed was this: Why not have the safe third country agreement apply inland, that is, at inland offices and so on? That issue was discussed at some length in the committee's proceedings. Here is what the committee said:
The fact that inland claims are not covered is due, in part, to lessons that have been learned from the European experience. In implementing safe third country regimes, some countries had to establish time-consuming and costly processes for inland claims. It is understandable that the government would like to avoid diverting resources to a procedure intended to establish the inland claimants’ route to Canada, rather than using that time and money to actually decide their refugee claims.
That is a quote from the committee's report in 2002.
I would suggest to you that there is nothing about the current state of affairs that warrants a different answer to the question of whether one should attempt to apply the safe third country agreement inland or, indeed, along the full length of the Canadian border, which I understand has also been a subject of discussion. It was not feasible then. The committee recognized it, and it's not feasible now.
Secondly, the committee also addressed a concern raised by some experts who testified before it in December 2002 that implementing the safe third country agreement at ports of entry along the land border would simply lead to more people trying to enter irregularly between designated border ports and possibly with the assistance of smugglers.
I should say that this fear didn't seem to come to be realized, at least not until the last couple of years, although there is no evidence that I know of that suggests that there is any significant involvement of smugglers. However, there certainly has been, in the last couple of years, a rise in irregular crossings. Here is what the committee had to say about the risk that the safe third country agreement might, in fact, generate irregular crossings between border posts:
The Committee recommends that, as part of the monitoring of the implementation of the Agreement, the issues of “irregular migration” and people-smuggling be closely watched. Should the Agreement fail to decrease the number of claims being referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board, and should an increase in the number of illegal—
It called it illegal. I'll call it irregular.
—entries to Canada be apparent, the government must be prepared to exercise its authority to suspend or terminate the Agreement.
That is what the committee had to say in 2002. If, in fact, there was an increase in the number of irregular entries because of the agreement, the committee should be prepared to recommend to the government that it suspend or terminate the agreement. Really, I would just encourage this committee to consider heeding the recommendations of its predecessors.
In the debates around this issue, I think it's important to think about what kind of problem one wants to solve here. Is the problem that one identifies irregular entries across the border, or is the problem the arrival of people seeking refugee protection? If the problem is irregular entry, then I think everybody knows that irregular entry would pretty much evaporate overnight if the agreement was suspended, and that the obstacles to doing that, as I understand it, are political, if I can put it that way, not principled.
If the objective is to stop refugee claimants from reaching Canada, I understand then that the fear is that suspending the safe third country agreement will not achieve that goal because more people will show up at designated ports of entry to enter Canada as refugee claimants than currently cross irregularly. I have two responses to that.
First, as an empirical matter, that's not obvious to me, given how well-known, in particular, the Roxham Road crossing has become. If people want to enter Canada to claim refugee status from the United States, I think the publicity around Roxham Road is pretty clear. It's not obvious that suspending the agreement so that people could enter through regular ports of entry would lead to a significant spike in the number of entries.
Second and more importantly, I think, deterring refugee claimants from claiming refugee status in Canada is not a valid policy objective. Canada signed on to the refugee convention in 1969, and it did so voluntarily. No one twisted Canada's arm. Nobody forced Canada to sign the refugee convention.
When it did sign, it promised the international community that, if people reached our borders and met the refugee definition, then they would be protected. When people ask for refugee protection, they're simply asking Canada to fulfill its promise, which is a promise that's not contained in a tweet by the Prime Minister or anything like that. It's a promise contained in an international convention: if you reach our borders and you meet the refugee definition, we won't return you to a place where you might fear persecution.
That's really what I'd like to start with with respect to this debate around irregular entries. There's more to say, and I'm happy to answer questions.
In respect of the difficulties processing refugee claims now and the additional resource demands that imposes, I acknowledge that there are increased resource demands. Not all of them are due to events in the last couple of years around irregular entries. Some of them are the result of prior policy changes under an earlier government that led to thousands of cases being in a backlog that could not be addressed because, effectively, the Immigration and Refugee Board was starved of resources. Those legacy cases are a problem, but not a problem because of irregular border crossings.
Perhaps in closing I'll just shift course a little, knowing that your mandate is broader than refugees, to just say this. A recent report indicated that refugees over time perform as well or better than native-born Canadians as economic actors. That is to say, after about 25 years, their income earnings actually surpass those of native-born Canadians.
Why do I mention this? I think it's important to consider in the way we talk about refugees and other immigrant classes that there's an implicit hierarchy, that people who are admitted because they have a well-founded fear of persecution are in some sense going to be inferior as immigrants to others, that people admitted as economic immigrants are the better immigrants, and that family class lies somewhere in between.
I only want to point out that the empirical evidence about economic attainment does not seem to sustain that, and frankly, even if there were a slight difference in the economic performance over time, what is remarkable is how little difference there is. That is to say, despite the extraordinary efforts that are put into our immigration system to sift through who we think will be the best economic actors and to admit refugees out of a sense of humanitarianism, if not a sense of rectifying injustice, they all do just fine.
Maybe that's an important message to take forward in thinking about how to improve our immigration and refugee policies going forward, to recognize that the categories that we put people into do not fully comprehend who they are. Refugees are also people who work hard, family class members might have also been fleeing persecution, and economic actors might also have relatives here. The categories into which we put them don't comprehend who they are and certainly don't exhaust or predict the contributions that they make.
Thank you.