Many people in Canada have been watching with horror as the cruelty, violence and excesses of the immigration enforcement crackdown in the US go on and on. Young children, including babies only a few months old, sent to ill-equipped detainment centers. Parents separated from their children. Many, many people too afraid to leave their homes. The deaths at the hands of border and immigration officials.
It’s not a new phenomenon for immigration controls to be enforced brutally against vulnerable people. What’s shifting is the visibility: more people with secure status are being forced to witness what has always been there.
Many people here in Canada have probably comforted themselves with the thought that what is happening in the United States could never happen here. It could never get that bad. It should maybe give us pause that a lot of Americans would have likely said the same thing not so long ago. In Canada, there is a new law quietly making its way through our Parliament, now sitting in the Senate, that would grant dangerous powers when it comes to our government’s treatment of immigrants and refugees in this country.
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Bill C-12 as originally written would give the federal government the power to mass cancel immigration documents and applications, as long as the government deems it in “the public interest” to do so. These powers could be applied to people already living in the country for years who hold permanent residency documents, or those who have been carefully following the steps in our immigration process. The fact that it would only be done if deemed “in the public interest” is dangerously vague and up for interpretation.
One of the Senate committees that reviewed Bill C-12 over the last few weeks has now recommended that these broad “in the public interest” powers be removed from the bill.
Senator Paula Simons summarized the danger of that broad power in clear terms during Senate debate:
“We’re not talking about people having their papers cancelled on a case-by-case basis because of something they’ve done wrong, or even an allegation of something they’ve done wrong, but about whole categories and classes of people having their right to live or work or study in Canada taken away [all at once].”
If that weren’t enough, Bill C-12 also sought to make it much harder for vulnerable people to apply for refugee status and would deny many access to fair consideration of their refugee claims. The intent appears to be to make the refugee process more about turning people away, than about providing protection to people seeking safety. The same Senate committee is also recommending removing these aspects of Bill C-12.
The members of the Senate committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology have clearly recognized the same dangers in Bill C-12 that hundreds of civil society organizations and experts warned about last year when the bill was first introduced. So, why did the Liberals seek such a dangerous level of power, that is so ripe for abuse?
One theory is that the Liberal government intends to use the mass cancel powers of this bill to clear the current backlog of immigration applications. Indeed when the bill was introduced again in the Senate recently, the application backlog was cited as one of the challenges Canada is facing, that Bill C-12 will address. Using the power to mass cancel applications would be a cruel and unnecessary way to deal with challenges in our immigration processing times. The Liberal government so far has avoided making it clear whether or not it would use the mass cancel power to clear the backlog of applications. No doubt they understand the panic and harm even the idea of a mass cancellation is already causing to people waiting on applications or documents.
The Liberal government argues that it needs the “flexibility” that Bill C-12’s vague “in the public interest” language provides to respond to challenges it can’t predict. What some senators, 300 organizations across Canada and immigration lawyers [1, 2, 3] have pointed out is that the government does not need these broad powers to tackle immigration challenges and that Bill C-12 creates more potential harms than it does solutions. What the Liberals are creating with Bill C-12 is the “flexibility” for any federal government, now and in the future, to target large groups of immigrants for any “public interest” reason they care to make a case for.
In the United States right now the violence and terror being unleashed on communities by immigration authorities is being framed as a heroic duty by the Trump administration and its supporters. For the people out there who hold racist and misinformed views about newcomers, terrorizing immigrants, refugees, undocumented people, and their neighbours is in “the public interest”.
Immigration enforcement may not look exactly the same in Canada, as it does in the United States right now. But we have our own loud anti-immigrant voices, we have racist content circulating online about immigrants, and there are recent shifts in public opinion on immigration. These trends can escalate here too.
You can do something.
If you’re horrified by the Trump regime’s escalation of the immigration crackdown in the United States and you don’t want to see abusive power used like that in Canada – please email Senators now and ask them to continue exercising their role as the political body of “sober second thought”.
Let’s make it absolutely clear we do not want to follow in Trump’s footsteps. We want to strike a different path.
Join Migrant Rights Network in calling and emailing all the Senators in the Standing Committee on National Security, Defense and Veteran Affairs. This committee is currently reviewing Bill C-12 line by line. They need to hear from us! Call and email Senators:
Al Zaibak, Mohammad Khair – 613-995-1922 | [email protected]
Anderson, Dawn – 613-947-7570 | [email protected]
Cardozo, Andrew – 613-996-9545 | [email protected]
Carignan, Claude – 613-992-0240 | [email protected]
Dasko, Donna – 613-943-3711 | [email protected]
Deacon, Marty – 613-996-2827 | [email protected]
Ince, Tony – 343-991-5540 | [email protected]
Kutcher, Stan – 613-947-7277 | [email protected]
McNair, John M. – 613-995-5060 | [email protected]
White, Judy A. – 613-996-2433 | [email protected]
Youance, Suze – 613-995-0130 | [email protected]
Yussuff, Hassan – 613-944-1108 | [email protected]
p.s.
Why are you reading about this on Greenpeace Canada’s website? What does the environment have to do with immigration crackdowns?
Because these issues are inseparable. The kind of country that dehumanizes immigrants, refugees and undocumented people, that builds camps to detain the huge numbers of people it plans to round up, is not the kind of country that will stop there. Trump’s version of America is just the latest lesson. The same state power used to target migrants is used to violate Indigenous rights, suppress dissent, and protect extractive industries at the expense of people and ecosystems. Our freedoms and our human rights are all bound up together, no matter our citizenship status. We recognize that the fight for all of our collective humanity and safety, is inseparable from the fight for a liveable planet.
