Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Thank you.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much. It's really an honour and a privilege to have this invitation. I'm grateful for it. Given the ambit of the study, I would like to use my opening statement to talk about five points in the hopes that these points will cover some areas that will be of interest

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay. Perfect. Starting with the refugee exclusions project, last year I published the results of a study of 11 years of Canadian refugee decision-making. The focus of the study was the data available from both CIC and CBSA as well as Federal Court decisions about refugees. Th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay, so I'll tell you a few things about women in the Canadian immigration system. About one-third of refugee claimants are women, but women are 5% more likely to be successful than men are at making a refugee claim. Women are more likely than men are to be excluded under the s

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Opitz?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I totally agree with my colleague in Winnipeg about arranged marriage, but there is an issue of forced marriage, which is something that has received increasing attention in a number of European countries. The U.K. and Scandinavian countries have really taken quite stringent step

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much for your question. Australia has had a mandatory detention scheme in place since 1992 for anybody who arrives without a visa. It has been incredibly politically contentious, and exceptionally costly, but in terms of asylum seeker outcomes, I think probably th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There's no difference at international law between the entitlements that are available for both those categories of refugees. Indeed, the international refugee convention quite explicitly, of course, understood that there was not going to be a way for refugees fleeing persecution

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think I understand what you mean. You're asking how many people actually disappear and go underground. You know, that's really an area in which it would be great to encourage CBSA to collect that kind of data for. You can, of course, get data from the IRB about the number of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the most important concern for parliamentarians here, at this juncture, is that it's really important to incorporate human rights considerations into up-front planning of security regulation. The main reason for this is that by incorporating human rights concerns at the f

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Both international law and the Supreme Court of Canada have made it very clear that if people are going to be detained in an administrative context, that is, if we're detaining people who have not been tried or convicted of anything at all, that detention needs to be narrowly tar

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the question of entry-exit data exchange is one that needs to be dealt with very carefully. I think it's important to develop a regulatory framework to ensure that data collected for the purposes of entering the country are not put into a generally accessible databank. I

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In the interests of time, I think the Maher Arar report is directly on the point of how we decide which information to exchange about. Now, keep in mind that entry and exit information will predominantly be information about people who already have a right to live in Canada—Can

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Anybody who is crossing at an organized port of entry is probably coming legally or they'll be turned back at that point, so I guess your question is about clandestine border crossings...?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay. That's helpful. I think a lot of countries around the world have gone to some sort of biometric screening. The real issue that concerns me there is what we do with that data once we get it. I think Canada has done an excellent job of reducing its clandestine population.