Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Dec. 4th, 2018

[The Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant (Don Valley West, Lib.)), Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'm going to call this meeting to order, the 138th meeting of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming.

Thank you, Mr. Stewart, for joining us. We understand there is a problem in our communication, but we're glad that you're able to join us for this first panel.

We're still trying to work out a few technical difficulties with respect to our second panel. We are having some connection difficulties. We will be working on that during this hour.

I wanted to mention that yesterday the foreign affairs committee was looking at Venezuela. You might want to draw your eyes to their meeting notes when they're out. I also noticed a media release by the committee yesterday afternoon on the issue of Venezuela, which I found interesting.

Today, we're going to continue with our study on migration challenges and opportunities for Canada in the 21st century. We are focusing today again for our second time on Latin America, and trying to understand some of the emerging issues that are happening there, particularly how they may impact in Canada.

We'll give Mr. Stewart time to collect his thoughts. Thanks to Professor Smith for joining us a second time. This time you'll be able to focus a little more on your area of work with respect to Latin America.

Professor Smith.

[Craig Damian Smith, Associate Director, Global Migration Lab, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

Yes. Thank you, sir.

I'm just going to start my timer here. I don't want to make the same mistake as last time.

Thanks for having me again. I'm going to speak mostly from the report that I shared with the committee last week about displacement drivers in the NTCA countries, the northern triangle of Central America.

This is a project idea that started when I was in Geneva last summer, talking to people from the UNHCR and IOM about what could be done to ensure that the migration and refugee compacts were successful in addressing migration crises. The main thrust of my argument in that report is that focusing on the expanding displacement crises in our own backyard is not only a humanitarian imperative, but is very much in Canada's national self-interest, and further, that the refugee compacts offer a clear framework for doing so.

I'll just briefly talk about displacement in the NTCA countries, which are El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. They have witnessed a tenfold increase in refugee and asylum seekers from 2011 to 2016, with an estimated 180,000 people displaced in neighbouring states. Over 350,000 people claimed asylum globally from the region from 2011 to 2017, with 130,500 of those 350,000 in 2017 alone. If you imagine a graph, it would be a pretty significant uptick. Women, families and unaccompanied minors are vastly overrepresented in those migration flows.

In addition to that, there are an estimated 715,000 IDPs, internally displaced people, in the region. The fact that governments don't have the capacity and political willingness to address that problem leads some people to estimate that the number of IDPs could be actually twice as high as that.

There are some particularities about displacement in the region that are worth noting as well. Refugees and IDPs in the region are displaced at least twice, on average. The region also has the world's most urbanized displaced population, where about 95% of people there live in urban areas. To put that in context, the next most urbanized refugee and displaced population is in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 68% are in urban and peri-urban areas.

That is important because urban populations make traditional camp-based humanitarian aid for displaced people increasingly challenging. I'm fairly sure I said as much last week, but it's really important to know that we have adequately addressed and diagnosed the problems in the NTCA countries enough to start doing the work. Canada has the expertise and resources to make a significant difference if it makes the decision to do so.

What is driving displacement from the region? We have endemic poverty, corruption, criminality, lack of access to education and services, gender and sexual identity-based violence and discrimination, and weak states.

Violence in the region is really staggering. If you look at the whole Latin American-Caribbean region, it accounts for only 8% of the world's population, but 33% of the world's homicides. That violence is particularly acute in cities. The homicide rate there for young men is 10 times higher than it is for women. It's at 94 in 100,000, on average. That's a homicide rate of one in 1,000 people for young men.

To illustrate how impactful that is, the global peace index estimates that El Salvador lost 49% of its GDP to violence in 2017, making it the fourth worst affected country, on par with South Sudan and behind only Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, that is loss of GDP to violence.

That violence doesn't even tell the whole story. There are 3.5 million people in the region who require HAP humanitarian assistance because of ecological and climatic degradation. As of 2018, the NTCA governments reported losses of 208,000 hectares of agricultural land, leaving 2.2 million people at risk of food insecurity in an area that we call the “dry corridor”, which stretches from the south of Mexico down to Panama.

My research looks at migration from an international relations perspective. The kind of knock-ons that we have from this type of displacement are really important. The images that we're seeing on the border with Guatemala and Mexico, but also Mexico and the U.S., are precisely the kinds of images that gave wind to the Brexit campaign and to far-right victories across Europe.

Not coincidentally, the countries that made the most hay over those migration crises also suffered the least. These are also the same states that are now using the migration compact to whip up fear for electoral gains, which is also a trend that has begun to emerge in Canada.

Containing displacement in a region without a plan can mean a downward spiral as well. Displacement dynamics stress host-state institutions and social cohesion. The impacts are particularly acute because people are moving from low-income countries to low-income countries, so we don't see the complementarian labour skills and labour market that we see when refugees move from poor countries to rich countries with needs in the low- and medium-skilled parts of the labour market.

It also has significant knock-on effects for housing markets, rents and wages at the lowest rungs of the economy.

I'm going to go a couple of minutes over time. Are you going to cut me off?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Plow on.

[Craig Damian Smith]

Okay.

As we discussed last week, the content of the global compacts reflects the various elements of the 2030 sustainable development goals around inclusive and sustainable development. The kind of burden sharing that we need to address root causes in the region is encapsulated in the comprehensive refugee response framework, CRRF.

In the NTCA countries and Central America in general, it's through a regional process called MIRPS, which is a Spanish acronym. Really importantly, the CRRF and MIRPS call for new and additional funding mechanisms over and above regular development assistance, and there is a call to link humanitarian and development aid. The CRRF offers a novel avenue for responsibility sharing at a unique historical moment to do this.

This falls under what academics and practitioners call the humanitarian development nexus, or the new way of working.

I can talk about the obstacles to supporting MIRPS in a second, but I want to add that there are at least four reasons why Canada should really consider supporting MIRPS and stop talking about it and doing studies about what's going on there. We should instead focus on how we can address the situation.

First, it will improve human rights and protections in the region.

Second, it offers a framework for Global Affairs Canada to do a proof-of-concept of the comprehensive refugee response framework and do pilot tests around the humanitarian development nexus, which is something that Global Affairs and the international community really need to do if the global compacts are going to make a difference.

Third, it can help bolster Canada's soft power on the international stage.

Fourth, unfortunately and maybe most importantly, it can help forestall irregular migration dynamics from the region and prevent the kind of political knock-on effects we see in Canada.

This matters for domestic stability in Canada, but all of these things are of a piece, because domestic stability and the lack of pressure from irregular migration in Canada are among the reasons why we have such a high approval rate for all categories of immigration. In turn, our soft power role on the international stage and international prestige and capacity to act as a norm entrepreneur and policy entrepreneur are predicated on that domestic support.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I do need to have you wrap it up, please.

Thanks.

[Craig Damian Smith]

I have one more sentence.

Again, as I argued last week, focusing on whether or not we should sign the compacts not only misconstrues how they work, but it misses the whole point. We should be focusing on leveraging this unique moment in international migration governance to start to fix the system for the safety and dignity of displaced people, and for the stability of the rules-based international order, which is in all states' rational self-interest.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you, very much.

We now turn to Mr. Stewart from Vancouver.

[Steve Stewart, Co-Chair, Americas Policy Group, Canadian Council for International Co-operation]

Thank you.

I'll first tell you very briefly about our organization. I'm here as the co-chair of the Americas policy group. It's a national coalition of 32 Canadian organizations that work on human rights and development in the Americas.

While some of our member organizations, such as Amnesty International, work directly on migration, most of our work is done directly in the countries of Latin America. The majority of our members focus on three regions: Mexico, Central America and Colombia.

Given that we have a fairly limited time for the presentation, I'm only going to touch very briefly on Colombia and Mexico and focus primarily on the Central American countries, particularly Guatemala and Honduras, because I believe that's the area where Canadian policy can play a role.

The focus in this presentation is primarily on the conditions that lead to migration. I think the speaker who preceded me did an excellent job of covering that, so I may jump over some of my points.

Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced people in the world after Syria, with 6.5 million people who are displaced. Despite the demobilization of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia last year and an end to that part of the war, violence and displacement continue. In 2017, violence in the country generated another 139,000 displacements, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Although sometimes we have the impression that there is peace in Colombia, violence is still generating large numbers of internally displaced people.

There are a number of factors behind these displacements. They're common through all of the countries I'm referring to here. They are the impacts of free trade, extractivism, the drug trade, corruption and organized crime. It's exacerbated, as the previous speaker mentioned, by climate change.

In Mexico—and I think you've probably heard these statistics before—large numbers of displacement and violence coincided with the launching of the drug war in 2006, with a total of some 250,000 people believed to have been killed between the launching of the war and last year, while another 37,000 people have been forcibly disappeared.

In Colombia and Mexico, it's not uncommon for local government and security forces to act in collusion with organized crime, but it's in the Central American countries, in particular Guatemala and Honduras, where these networks have also deeply penetrated the national state. Organized crime operates on a number of levels in Honduras and Guatemala, ranging up from the street gangs that you've heard about in earlier testimonies, such as the Mara 18 and the Salvatruchas, who control both urban neighbourhoods and also a number of rural areas in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, often serving as the foot soldiers for more sophisticated criminal networks involved with drug trafficking, but also involved with graft in a large scale at the state level, and sometimes providing security to transnational corporations operating in these countries.

I'm not going to go in depth on statistics, but some rather stark examples have come up recently with the arrest last week of the brother of the Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández on cocaine smuggling charges, and then just last year Fabio Lobo, the son of the former president, Porfirio Lobo, was sentenced to 24 years after being convicted in U.S. courts on similar charges. In both of these cases, testimony indicates that the Honduran presidents were aware of these activities and, at the very least, did nothing.

However, the Honduran government's involvement in organized crime goes beyond links to drug smuggling. De facto President Juan Orlando Hernández, in his previous term, was forced to admit that his party looted the national public health and social security system to fund his 2013 electoral campaign.

We find similar cases in neighbouring Guatemala. In 2015, the president, vice-president and most of his cabinet were forced to resign and were indicted on corruption charges after investigations by the United Nations' international commission against impunity, CICIG, revealed a vast organized crime network within the Guatemalan state.

The president that succeeded him, current president Jimmy Morales, is now also under investigation. In recent times, though, his administration has taken steps to block the effective work of the UN body by preventing its director from entering the country.

The penetration of organized crime into government and state institutions takes place in the context of economic and ecological shifts in the region that are generating significant internal displacement. There are many different factors linked to that, which I mentioned previously.

In the Colombian case, the influx of low-priced basic grains that followed the signing of free trade agreements with North America and Europe in the past 25 years has reduced local food production and made it much more difficult for rural families to earn a living growing basic foods. This is combined with new unpredictability related to climate change, and pressure on farming communities from the expanding agro-industrial frontier—primarily sugar cane and African palm, which is, ironically, often used for the creation of biofuels.

These serve to drive the farmers from the land, either to marginalized communities in surrounding urban areas, or to take the long and dangerous migrant trek.

I know I'm running out of time already—

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Because I have your text, I'm just going to suggest you jump forward, particularly from “the combination of the factors”, to the end. That may be helpful for the committee.

[Steve Stewart]

I think you've probably heard a lot of testimony on the sort of generators of forced migration from the region, so I'll jump ahead to some of the suggestions coming from the Americas policy group on what Canada can do.

Unfortunately, we received the invitation fairly late, so we weren't able to carry out widespread consultation. These are based on input I received over the weekend from member groups.

Some of the things Canada can do are to continue its already important work in providing financial and diplomatic support for CICIG in Guatemala, and the less effective—but still important—mission against corruption and impunity in Honduras, which is sponsored by the Organization of American States. Those are among the few things that still provide hope to people that there can be change within their countries.

It would be important to implement the legislation enacted by the Canadian government earlier this year to create an ombudsperson for responsible enterprises who can monitor the behaviour of Canadian extractive nationals in the region, which make up the majority of extractive corporations operating in these areas.

Then, finally, refrain from endorsing governments that are linked to corruption and organized crime. Canada has positioned itself as a constant ally of the regimes in Honduras that took power following the June 2009 coup. Canada was one of the first countries to endorse the November 2009 elections that whitewashed the coup, and soon after pursued a free trade agreement and extensive mining concessions with the de facto regime of Porfirio Lobo. Under Lobo, the murder rate in Honduras skyrocketed to the highest in the world.

Similarly, in the midst of the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests last year that followed the questionable re-election of Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, with even the Organization of American States calling for the elections to be annulled and held again, Canada was once again among the first nations of the world to recognize the re-election of Hernández.

Rather than lending quick support, Canada needs to distance itself from regimes that are so deeply linked to organized crime and corruption.

The final point is to suspend the current safe third country agreement on refugees that Canada has between our government and the government of the United States of America, recognizing that the U.S. currently is not a safe third country for refugees. It's a call I'm sure you've heard in numerous other testimonies.

Those are our quickly cobbled together recommendations.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much.

With your permission, I will have the clerk circulate your complete comments, including the part you left out, if you would like. We could have that translated and available to the committee.

For questions, we're going to begin with Mr. Sarai, who will share some of his time with Mr. DeCourcey.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you to both of you, especially Mr. Stewart from British Columbia. Welcome. It's nice to see you here.

I have a couple of questions. First, in your testimony, both of you spoke of the level of violence in Guatemala and El Salvador. Organized crime is probably at its worst, and the violence is at high levels. Is this more government sponsored—or sanctioned, as you might want to call it—or is it because the governments have lost control in both of these countries?

If you can answer quickly, I'll start with you, Mr. Smith. Mr. Stewart can answer after that.

[Craig Damian Smith]

I think I'll give most of my time to Mr. Stewart, as he's the expert on the region. I just want to say it's never that clear-cut and very unfortunately I think what we're seeing in a lot of these regions is the beginnings or some of the indicators of failing or weak states.

One thing to note as well is that from the migration perspective, what we're seeing in El Salvador and seeing around the region is the fact that the deportation policies from the U.S. under the previous administrations are coming home to roost. When we're thinking about these things, the knock-on effects of immigration policies can have not only wide-ranging but quite long-term effects.

[Steve Stewart]

Yes, I think it is hard to give a cut and dried answer because, particularly in Honduras and Guatemala, less so in El Salvador, the organized crime has penetrated the state so deeply it's often hard to distinguish whether violence is what you might call political violence, or common crime. This was starkly revealed by the investigations that CICIG has carried out in Guatemala, where we discovered that the running of the organized crime networks went all the way up to the president. Often security forces are involved. High-level officers within the military in Guatemala, for example, have been involved in commanding the street gangs that carry out what seems to be common crime. It's very difficult to disentangle common crime from political or state violence.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

In contrast, the other state that has a serious outflow of forced migrants is Venezuela, specifically since 2017, most of whom are fleeing threats from armed groups or fear of prosecution based on their political opinions. There's obviously a very severe economic downturn in the country and a lack of essential services, food, medicine, including hospitals. There were over 1.5 million, I understand, displaced Venezuelans throughout the region between 2014 and currently. Has the increase in migration in recent years affected states in Latin and Central America? Would that have displaced a lot of the other needs of neighbouring states?

[Steve Stewart]

None of our organizations actually work in Venezuela, so we're not as well-versed in that, but from my limited knowledge, the neighbouring state that has been most affected is Colombia, which, ironically has even higher numbers of displaced people, but gets less focus, with 6.5 million displaced. There is a large influx of Venezuelans crossing into Colombia, which has an impact on the situation within that country as well. I have heard nothing about that impact in Central America.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Many of the migrants who are coming from that region have now arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in hopes of seeking asylum and settling in the United States, despite warnings that they would be deported from the U.S. How do you think the U.S.'s policy with regard to this migrant caravan will end up affecting Canada?

[Steve Stewart]

I'll let Mr. Smith answer.

You have the expertise.

[Craig Damian Smith]

Sure. One of the things that we need to think about with the migrant caravan is people's decision-making in the face of the fact that they know they're going to face violence from Mexican authorities at the border with Guatemala, and it was well-publicized that they knew it was going to happen at the border with the U.S. and they nonetheless made the decision. They weren't using smugglers either. They were banding together for self-protection. That tells you that the push factors, the things making them leave, are more powerful than the control measures or the obstacles in their way.

How that might affect—

Sorry, I'm hearing feedback, is that somebody speaking?

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

No, we're fine. We can hear you.

[Craig Damian Smith]

In terms of how that might affect Canada, right now, there are very few people from NTCA countries arriving in Canada, and that's because it's difficult to make it into the U.S., and difficult to make it through the U.S. Where it might start impacting Canada—and that's something that people, the current government especially, needs to keep on their radar—is when the U.S. will end temporary protected status for people from the region, which will coincide almost directly with the next federal election in Canada.

When the Trump government announced it was ending TPS for Haitians, roughly 10% from the U.S. decided to come to Canada. If the same number of people from El Salvador and Guatemala who have TPS now in the U.S. did that, it would double the asylum claims in Canada overnight, or in very short order, which is something that we should keep in mind.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Thank you. I'm going to cede the rest.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Mr. DeCourcey.

[Matt DeCourcey, Fredericton, Lib.]

Craig, it's Matt DeCourcey here. Thanks for being back in front of the committee.

When you were here last week you spoke about the role of ODA in helping to address some of these protracted refugee and migrant situations. Could you share your view on the role that unlocking or activating international private capital might have in helping to address some of these situations?

Obviously, a number of different elements go into dealing with these situations, but money is certainly one of them. Money from government is certainly a part of it, but what role could unlocking private capital have in helping to address these situations?

[Craig Damian Smith]

I'm only now starting to have proper conversations with people at international financial institutions about using leveraged funding to unlock other development financing. What Canada has done with the special trust fund for Bangladesh through the World Bank's IDA18 refugee sub-window and what Canada and the EU have done for unlocking private capital for the trust funds in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon offer some examples. I would be happy to do some research on this subject.