Strengthening Canada's Immigration System and Borders Bill

Honourable senators, I also want to acknowledge the level of debate on this very important bill. In addition, I want to share with you that I have a colleague in the United States who regularly watches the Senate on CPAC because she finds it to be such a great relief. I think that we have something to be proud of here in terms of the courtesy with which we conduct ourselves.

My amendment addresses the transitional provision of Bill C-12 in clause 75, which currently applies the one-year asylum application deadline retroactively to June 2025, which is when Bill C-2, the predecessor bill, was tabled in the House of Commons.

This amendment is based on procedural fairness and the rule of law.

My amendment adds a few words to clause 75 to bring it closer to procedural fairness and international obligations.

To bring this home, I offer this example of how humans would be affected if clause 75 is not changed. Think of a family from a conflict zone. They get through the rigorous Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada review process, and they land in Canada in June 2024 when the deadline currently in clause 75 does not exist. They take the time to find a home, get their kids into school, start language classes and settle into employment and community.

About a year later, let’s say in July 2025 — with still no clause 75 deadline in existence — they file for asylum. The retroactivity in clause 75 would impose a deadline of which this family would have had no knowledge because it didn’t exist. The impact of an unchanged clause 75 would mean that they would receive no notice, creating an obstacle they can’t overcome because the deadline did not exist.

Therefore, they have no chance of making their case in an oral hearing before Canada’s renowned and respected Immigration and Refugee Board — a right that asylum seekers in Canada have had for many years. In other words, this family would be caught by this retroactive clause 75 without ever being given notice of the deadline because at the time they applied, the rule did not exist.

Honourable colleagues, this is contrary to how the law works in Canada. We have notice procedures and gazetting of laws and regulations so that the individuals and organizations impacted are aware of the laws that apply to them. To do otherwise is to act contrary to the rule of law, as well as contrary to Canadian values, and to undermine public trust.

When questioned today, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Dean, referenced the backlog of 300,000 before the Immigration and Refugee Board, or IRB, as a justification for the new parallel pre‑removal risk assessment system aggrandized by this bill. And to Senator Dean’s credit, he did not try to claim that the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada employees who will run the pre-removal risk assessment review are better trained or better qualified than members of the Immigration and Refugee Board, because they are not, and they will not be.

Common sense would see adequate funding to the IRB to increase its capacity to process cases. The current funding to the IRB is for 60,000 cases, but, in fact, the IRB issued 102,000 decisions last year, of which 78,000 were for refugee protection cases. The IRB is immeasurably returning high value for investment, with a 42% productivity increase. If adequate funding were increased to the IRB, the backlog would steadily decrease in compliance with international law and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Spending more money on an inferior parallel system with less qualified decision makers does nothing to address the volume of cases. It just moves the queue. You heard evidence from Senator Simons today that debunked the pre-removal risk assessment as a viable solution.

Senators have raised a concern regarding individuals involved in criminal extortion who then apply for asylum. Extortion is a criminal offence prosecuted under the Criminal Code of Canada, which also applies to asylum seekers. The criminal law system always takes precedence over immigration law, and issues of serious criminality can be raised at any point in the immigration/refugee process.

The current system makes people with “established links to organized criminal networks” inadmissible. There are clear processes in place for addressing criminality and organized crime through the inadmissibility provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. These include powers that the government already has to suspend the consideration of eligibility in order to wait for the determination of inadmissibility or to wait for a court hearing on serious criminal charges; suspend the study of a claim by the Refugee Protection Division of the IRB in order to wait for the determination of inadmissibility or to wait for a court hearing on serious criminal charges; and redetermine eligibility of a claim that has already been referred to the Refugee Protection Division.

The B.C. extortion cases are the ones already being criminally investigated, so the government already has the tools to proceed, and the retroactivity in clause 75 does not add any new powers because they are not needed to deal with criminality.

Honourable senators, I hope you will join me in upholding confidence in our criminal justice system to do its job as well as to uphold procedural fairness and rule of law in Canada by removing the retroactivity in clause 75 and adopting this amendment which, like most laws in Canada, activates the deadline as of the date of Royal Assent of this bill.

Through this amendment, a few words replaced in clause 75 would result in a fair process consistent with the fundamental principles of justice and Charter-protected rights — life, liberty, security — and consistent with the title of the act being amended, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.