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Liberals must vote no to Harper’s immigration reforms

April 9, 2008

The group No One Is Illegal has issued an action alert asking citizens to contact their MPs (particularly Liberal MPs) to urge them to vote no to a series of amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) that will reverse decades of progress on immigration reform by granting the Minister unreasonable powers to decide who can and cannot enter the country. The proposed changes to the IRPA were slipped into a budget implementation bill in order to avoid Parliamentary and public scrutiny.

The amendments are designed, partially, to strengthen the Security and Prosperity Partnership goal of increasing the use of guest workers in various key sectors like agriculture and the tar sands. These workers will not be granted the same rights as other Canadians and will remain hostage to the whims of their employers when it comes to whether they can stay in the country or whether they will be sent back home.

According to a No One Is Illegal backgrounder, the Harper government amendments place a dangerous amount of power into the Minister’s hands:

• Under existing rules, anyone who meets the already stringent criteria to enter Canada as a worker, student, visitor or permanent resident shall be granted that status. However, under the proposed changes, even if someone meets the criteria, the Minister can arbitrarily reject their application.

• Section 25 of the IRPA currently states that the Minister “shall” examine a humanitarian and compassionate application. Harper’s amendments say the Minister “shall” examine such applications only if the applicant is in Canada, and only “may” examine the application otherwise. Although the government claims this will have no impact on family reunification, in practice humanitarian and compassionate applications are one of the most frequent avenues such action (for example separated refugee children).

• Another proposal will allow the Minister to issue “instructions” to set quotas on the “category” of person that can enter Canada – including quotas based on country of origin.  This unprecedented modification of IRPA would risk putting in place implicit equivalents to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, the Order in Council of 1911 (which prohibited the landing of “any immigrant belonging to the Negro race”), the Order in Council of 1923, which excluded “any immigrant of any Asiatic race,” or the “None is too many” rule applied to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi concentration camps in 1945.

• The Minister would be allowed to decide the order in which new applications are processed, regardless of when they were filed. This means prioritizing immigration applicants based on their ability to fulfill the needs of the Canadian job market, “whether it’s people to wash dishes and make sandwiches, or whether it's the highly skilled engineers,” as stated by Minister Diane Finley. This is a profoundly dehumanizing and racist conception of immigrants as disposable commodities.

• New sections of the IRPA would allow the Minister to simply hold on to, return, or throw out a visa application and deny any opportunity to review that decision in court. This precedent is truly alarming, especially in the context of a deeply flawed appeals process, including the existing lack of implementation of a Refugee Appeal Division, despite being provided for under IRPA.

No One Is Illegal is asking citizens to contact their MPs to demand they vote no to Bill C-50, the budget implementation bill containing the immigration reforms – even if this means toppling the government in the process.

Once again, the Liberals have been put in a position of supporting this amendment or forcing an election. They need to know that Canadians will not forgive them for yet another concession on human rights and civil liberties, simply to avoid heading to the polls.

To read a previous Integrate This post on Bill C-50, ‘Conservatives turn people into cargo with “just-in-time” immigration reforms,’ click here.

For more information, visit www.nooneisillegal.org or email: noii-van@resist.ca.