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Canada’s Liberal government is pushing through sweeping new legislation targeting refugees that observers fear will usher in a new era of US-style border policies, fueling xenophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants.
Bill C-12, or Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, includes many changes around border security along with new ineligibility rules for refugee claimants.
It was fast-tracked and passed through a third reading in the House of Commons on 11 December before members of Parliament rose for the holidays. If it receives Senate approval in February, the bill will become law.
“It’s very regressive in terms of refugee protection,” said Idil Atak, a professor of refugee and human rights law at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Atak said the legislation marks an unprecedented expansion of executive power, in terms of information-sharing about refugees between government agencies and the ability to control, cancel or change immigration documents or processes.
One of those changes is that asylum claims made by more than one year after the claimant arrived in Canada would not be referred to the immigration and refugee board of Canada, but instead
sent to an immigration officer for a pre removal risk assessment.
Such assessments depend on a single officer reading the file and have a high rate of rejection, according to a recent op-ed by 40 lawyers and legal practitioners in the Toronto Star.
The authors argued that the new law evokes some disturbing eras in the country’s history around immigration law, including exclusionary policies at the turn of the 20th century which targeted specific racial groups, including South Asians and those from China and Japan.
Audrey Macklin, an immigration and refugee law professor at the University of Toronto, said there are a variety of reasons why an individual might not claim asylum immediately, for example a student who is a member of a persecuted sexual minority might feel unable to return to their home country after living openly in Canada.
As Canada has placed significant restrictions on international student numbers since 2024, some of those people might need to claim asylum – but would face significant barriers under the new laws.
The pre-removal risk assessment process is one that does not give asylum seekers a fair hearing and really seeks to remove them from the country as swiftly as possible, she said.
“Bill C 12 borrowed ideas from the United States about how to make it more difficult,” she said.
The other element of the bill that has alarmed civil rights groups across the country is that asylum claims made at the land border with the US would also not be referred to the board if made after 14 days.
Under the safe third country agreement between Canada and the US refugees are required to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive in.
But Macklin says the US has never met the requirements of being a “safe” third country. And now, as ICE raids aim to fast-track deportations without any due process, the US is proving to be “flagrantly unsafe for people to seek and obtain refugee protection”. It’s unfair to turn people away simply because they did not feel comfortable seeking asylum in the US, she says.
Syed Hussan, the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, a Canadian migrant rights advocacy organization, says the legislation is the result of the Liberal and Conservative parties pushing rhetoric that migrants are to blame for Canada’s affordability crisis.
“Do you blame CEOs or corporations for their misery, which we should… but we’re all being tricked into blaming migrants,” he said.
The new measures also appear as attempted capitulation toward the Trump administration to “secure” the border, in order to appease the president as Canada has yet to reach a trade deal, said Atak.
But all it really does is erode Canada’s image as a welcoming country and shirk international agreements to help asylum seekers, she said. “We do have an obligation, a moral obligation, to protect refugees.”
English (US) ·