Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab said the proposed changes in Bill C-12 are designed in part to tackle an increasing misuse of Canada’s asylum system.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Proposed legislation that would restrict access to asylum hearings for foreign nationals who have been in Canada for more than a year could lead to genuine refugee claimants being returned to their home countries, the federal immigration minister was told in separate Senate committee meetings last week.
Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab said the proposed changes in an immigration and border bill now being scrutinized in the Senate are designed in part to tackle an increasing misuse of Canada’s asylum system.
But senators asked for evidence of an increasing misuse. They also raised fears that members of the LGBTQ community and women facing persecution in their home countries could be disproportionately affected by the tightening of asylum rules.
Under proposals in Bill C-12, people who make an asylum claim after living in Canada for more than a year, including international students, would be fast-tracked for deportation. They would no longer be eligible for an asylum hearing at the Immigration and Refugee Board, the independent tribunal that hears refugee claims.
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Canada has seen an increase in asylum claims from international students, who have been the target of immigration restrictions, in the last few years. Over the past year, 17 per cent of asylum claims came from students, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Ms. Metlege Diab answered questions about the asylum implications of Bill C-12 along with Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree on Feb. 9 at the Senate’s national-security committee.
On Thursday, she was questioned by senators on the social affairs committee, which is also studying the bill.
Senators also heard unease expressed from a range of witnesses, including the UN Refugee Agency.
One of the concerns is that the proposed one-year cutoff for asylum hearings would be measured from the first time someone entered Canada. The bill specifies that the one-year period “begins on the day after the day of their first entry.”
Refugee advocacy groups warned senators this could mean that someone who came here on holiday as a child with their parents would be barred from a refugee hearing decades later.
They also hit back at suggestions that foreign nationals claiming asylum, including international students who had been here for more than a year, were more likely to lodge fraudulent claims.
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Gauri Sreenivasan, co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, a non-profit advocacy organization for refugee and immigrant rights, was among those who addressed the Senate committee.
“Suggestions before committees that certain claimants are likely to be fraudulent because they are students or because they have been here more than a year are as unfounded as they are offensive,” Ms. Sreenivasan told senators.
“These blunt measures disproportionately harm the most vulnerable: women fleeing violence, LGBTQIA+ individuals, minors, those with mental health challenges or people from unstable regions.”
CCR vice-president Basel Abou Hamrah told the Senate social affairs committee that many LGBTQ and trans people do not arrive in Canada planning to claim asylum.
“Some arrive as students, workers, and many hope they can simply be safe for a while. I have worked with people who stayed quiet for months, sometimes years, not because they were not at risk, but because coming out once before had already led to arrest, violence, rejection or threats,” he said.
“So when they arrive in Canada, they don’t immediately trust systems, officials or timelines. They wait until they feel safe enough to tell the truth. Bill C-12 turns that survival instinct into a liability.”
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Ms. Metlege Diab told the Senate social affairs committee on Thursday that the proposed asylum changes would help deter misuse of Canada’s asylum system from people who are not genuine claimants.
“In the last number of years, it’s become a real issue and a real challenge to deal with,” she said. “We need to be able to protect and bring people in that are really in need of the asylum protection. So what we are trying to do, frankly, with these is to deter the misuse, and to kind of prevent people from using the system, so that people who really need the protection of it can get it and can get it in a faster way.”
Jason Hollman, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s director general for asylum policy who was supporting Ms. Metlege Diab at the Senate committee, said the changes were in part designed to deter misuse of the system by people “who may be looking to avoid other immigration processes or extend their stay in Canada.”
He said his department had decided to start the one-year cutoff from the date of a person’s first entry to Canada because doing otherwise could incentivize people living here to leave the country for a short period, for example by driving to the U.S., so they could then come back to “reset the clock.”
“It’s a process we have called flagpoling, and it creates some challenges for border officers on both sides,” he said.
Under the C-12 proposals, asylum claimants who have been in Canada for more than a year would be eligible, before being deported, for a pre-removal risk assessment carried out by an immigration department official. They would determine whether someone qualifies for asylum and should be allowed to stay in the country.
Ms. Metlege Diab told senators that LGBTQ foreign nationals, for example, could be allowed to remain following the pre-removal assessment if the department finds they have a genuine refugee claim.