Facing the challenges to our refugee system

By Scott Newark
ipolitics.ca

With news of hundreds more assembled Tamils in Thailand awaiting smuggled passage to Canada, the question of why that is and what to do about it, if anything at all, looms once more.
For some people, this is a non-issue as Canada’s role should be to welcome virtually any and all persons who arrive at our borders claiming to be in need of ‘protection.’ For the more extreme in this group, and they do exist, this internationalist approach trumps all other domestic considerations. Hence the revealing names of their organizations like ‘People Without Borders’ and ‘No One is Illegal.’ The fact that the artificial jurisdictions of the world called countries, including Canada, actually have borders and laws makes this approach esoteric at best and ultimately unrealistic.
Conversely, suggestions that we should simply turn the ships around once they enter Canadian waters means we would potentially be sending people to their deaths which, to our credit, is simply not who we are as Canadians.
What’s left is the need for a defined legal mechanism to balance the domestic interests of Canadians with our admirable humanitarian desire to help people in need, which we have formalized in international protocols. It is worth reflecting, however, that we do what we do because we choose to and not simply because of our membership in an organization whose own members produce the refugees that seek our protection.
One other point needs to be emphasized as it appears to have escaped the noisy opponents of any reform to our refugee determination system: although refugee claimants base their claims for admission to Canada upon alleged peril, like other would be immigrants to Canada, they are non-citizens who seek to enter and remain in our country.
Quite rightly, Canada has created a special and supposedly expedited process for dealing with people claiming the risk and thus the refuge but we must obviously acknowledge that some people may perceive the refugee channel as being a better guarantor of what they seek. That’s why in the immigration business…and it is a business…triggering the refugee process by making the claim is actually known as uttering the ‘R’ word.
This point is important because irrespective of the inherent value in discovering and denying false claims, such claims also divert resources from the overall immigration processing system. Additionally, when they’re made by terrorist-linked, criminally organized efforts that create undocumented boatloads of smuggled non-citizens who are deliberately avoiding pre arrival screening, they divert resources from people who are seeking refugee status but are following the existing rules for doing so. In plain speak it’s called ‘jumping the queue’ and it’s a hard reality, whether Justin Trudeau and Olivia Chow understand it or not.
What’s different about these recent criminally organized efforts is that they blatantly are conducted so as to avoid any pre arrival screening and to overwhelm our existing processing capacities. Why else are people paying tens of thousands of dollars for their “trip” to Canada? Last time I looked Thailand (and Sri Lanka) had airports.
Various commentators have noted that fraudulent refugee claimants have historically arrived by air and land seeking admission to Canada and that hasn’t prompted change of the kind contemplated to deal with the recent boatloads. Actually, Canadian visa screening and document security has been significantly enhanced in the past decade and, although it’s still got loopholes, Canada now has a Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S that is aimed at preventing asylum shopping. Quite appropriately, we have adjusted our practices and laws to deal with changed circumstances and that’s clearly what’s called for now.
How do we convert the perceived benefit of such organized, unscreened mass refugee claimant arrivals into a disincentive so that genuine refugee claimants choose the right route and bogus claimants decide the risk isn’t worth it? At the same time, how do we ensure appropriate procedural safeguards for persons that, nonetheless, arrive in this fashion? Finally, legislation aside, how do we better work with foreign governments to prevent the assembly and embarkation of such human smuggling activities in the first place?
On the latter point, the federal government appears to have already had some success with Thai officials reportedly breaking up two such efforts since the arrival of the Sun Sea last year. Further, the recent ‘leak’ of information by unnamed Canadian officials about new people smuggling efforts underway in Thailand is likely part of a similar effort to encourage enforcement action abroad.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has also introduced Bill C-49 with the stated purpose of deterring such human smuggling criminality in the future while preserving the integrity and capacity of our refugee determination process itself. The Bill has been met with an avalanche of objections including from some people who appear to have actually read it. These are difficult issues with legitimately competing interests and thus the fact of disagreement is not surprising. It’s actually a good thing because disagreement should lead to constructive debate, which should produce a better result.
What we don’t want to do is overlook the important issues at stake. Just in case partisan rhetoric has clouded them, let’s remember they include preserving the integrity of our immigration and refugee determination systems and Canadian support for them, preventing horrific abuses of vulnerable people, and denying entry to Canada to people who present serious risk to the safety and security of Canadians including the people who come here to find that better life.
So, ever the optimist, let’s take a pause from attack ads and non campaign tours and get this bill to committee so the informed debate can begin.

Scott Newark is a former Alberta Crown Prosecutor and Executive Officer of the Canadian Police Association who has also served as Ontario’s Special Security Advisor, Director of Operations for the Washington DC based Investigative Project on Terrorism and as an Advisor to the former Public Safety Minister. He is currently Vice Chair of the National Security Group.