My name is Meagan Johnston. I'm a staff immigration lawyer at HALCO, the HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario. We serve people who are living with HIV in the province of Ontario.
At HALCO I witness my clients' pain and frustration caused by the discriminatory excessive demand regime on a daily basis. Even for people who are ultimately accepted after all the paperwork, dealing with excessive demand is a terrible way for someone to start their new life in Canada, and the sense of exclusion that it creates stays with my clients for years afterwards. I want to illustrate this with some examples from my practice.
First, I routinely advise international students who have contracted HIV here in Canada during their studies. These students had planned to pursue their studies, gain work experience, and then apply for permanent residence. Their futures are now turned upside down because their application to stay in Canada can now be refused because of excessive demand. This threat of refusal is particularly ironic since international students represent a group of immigrants that Canada states it most wants to attract.
Second, at HALCO we often represent clients in their humanitarian and compassionate applications, H and Cs. Our clients' H and C applications take years longer to process than those of other applicants because they have to request waivers for medical inadmissibility due to their HIV before they are granted approval in principle. During this time, my clients remain in limbo, unsure of whether their application will be approved and they will get to stay in Canada. It's harder to successfully integrate when you spend years here not knowing if you'll be able to stay. One client's child aged out of the definition of dependant while her H and C application was being processed. This meant the child could no longer be sponsored after my client got her permanent residency.
Third, the excessive demand regime creates a climate of fear for people living with HIV. New clients regularly ask me on the phone or in person if their HIV status will be a problem for immigration, or even for citizenship, where it's completely irrelevant. Even people who are exempt from excessive demand still get the message that someone's HIV status can be, as so many of my clients put it, “a problem” for Canada.
The discrimination inherent to the excessive demand regime isn't just in the refusals. It's in the way the excessive demand regime forces people living with HIV and people with other disabilities into a different process with more hoops and longer wait times because of their disability. That is discriminatory.
Excessive demand is still discriminatory even if it focuses on the cost of health or social services and not the medical condition itself. This is a false distinction. It doesn't make a difference to my clients to know they're not begin refused because of their HIV status but because of the cost of their life-saving HIV medications. They're still being refused.
The department justifies excessive demand on the grounds of cost savings, but there are many costs associated with immigration, such as settlement services, language classes, and the costs of educating newcomer children. These costs, however, are not considered in the immigration application process. By only considering the costs of health and social services, and by using these costs as grounds for exclusion, the excessive demand regime relies on outdated and discriminatory stereotypes that people with disabilities are a burden, and it erases the important contributions that people living with HIV and other disabilities make to Canadian society every day.
We urge this committee to show leadership and recommend removing excessive demand inadmissibility by repealing paragraph 38(1)(c) of the IRPA.
Thank you.