Ottawa's 'Strong Borders Act' hopes to restore faith in the immigration system by fixing the permanent-resident points system.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Well before Donald Trump launched the first tariffs in his war on Canada’s economy, Ottawa had another crisis on its hands: a collapse in Canadians’ faith in the immigration and refugee system.
Record-high immigration in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic was contributing to the housing shortage and overburdened public services, and led to a backlash.
Last fall, for the first time in a quarter-century, a majority of Canadians (58 per cent) said there were too many people coming into the country, according an Environics survey.
The blame for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau. Its radical departure from the tenets of an immigration and refugee system admired around the world threatened to undo the longstanding national consensus that newcomers are beneficial to the country; indeed, that they are critical to Canada’s growth and prosperity.
The new-look Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney this week set out to repair the damage with the tabling of what it calls “the Strong Borders Act.”
Explainer: From increased police power to stricter immigration, here’s what’s in the new border bill
The bill includes steps that, along with an already promised reduction in temporary migration and repairs to the permanent-resident points system, could restore faith in the immigration and refugee system.
Chief among them is a provision, backdated to June 24, 2020, that would prevent anyone who has been in Canada for more than a year from making an asylum claim.
This will stop people here on a visa from making an asylum claim when their visa expires – a move that then allows them to remain in the country for years while their applications work their way through the backlogged Immigration and Refugee Board system.
The backlog in the IRB’s Refugee Protection Division stood at 284,715 cases in April of this year, nearly 29 times the backlog at the end of 2015.
Under the proposed reform, people refused asylum will be allowed a pre-removal risk assessment to ensure they won’t be in danger in their home country.
Another big change would bring an end to a bonkers loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States. Under the STCA, Canada has the right to deny asylum to people entering the country from the U.S. at an official port of entry. But anyone who illegally sneaks over the border has the right to apply for asylum as long as they manage to remain undetected for two weeks.
Plugging that loophole is only fair. Those affected by its closure will also be afforded a pre-removal risk assessment.
The bill contains further provisions to simplify and speed up the application and approvals processes for asylum seekers, which could help bring down the backlog of cases.
There are also measures that would allow Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to share personal client information with other departments and levels of government, and to arbitrarily cancel or pause individual or group applications already in the system “for matters of public health or national security.”
Those proposals raise privacy and due-process issues that will need to be explained by the Carney government as the bill moves through Parliament. The last thing anyone wants is an over-correction.
If there is one nagging problem with the proposed reforms, it is that the government has stuffed them into an omnibus bill that also includes provisions to address border security, fentanyl smuggling, child pornography and money laundering.
It’s a package clearly meant to appease Mr. Trump. But Canada’s immigration problems are not a border security issue the way they are at the U.S. frontier with Mexico.
Other than the anomaly of the Roxham Road crossing, which has been fixed by a renegotiation of the STCA, Canada’s problem has not been a porous border but, rather, the mismanagement of its immigration and refugee system by Mr. Carney’s predecessor.
Lumping in these needed reforms with criminal matters glosses over the Liberals’ failings while doing a disservice to people legitimately fleeing persecution or looking for a new life in Canada.
The government should put the immigration reforms in their own bill. A suggested name would be, “Belatedly Undoing the Incompetence of the Trudeau Government Act.”