This commentary by Prof. Audrey Macklin and Lorne Waldman was first published on the Toronto Star website on Feb. 22, 2012.
Jason Kenney, the minister of Citizenship and Immigration, knows who the real refugees are. Or at least he knows which ones are “bogus”: refugee claimants from Mexico or Sri Lanka or Hungary are bogus. Bogus refugees include those who use smugglers to overcome the barriers to lawfully reaching countries like Canada which, by signing the refugee convention, have promised not to send back persons fleeing persecution.
Kenney’s system-abusing bogus refugees include those fleeing discrimination, oppression and hardship not quite horrific enough to satisfy the standards required by the jurisprudence defining and applying the refugee definition. Kenney does not mention that close to 40 per cent of the claimants were recognized as genuine refugees last year. Like falling crime statistics, that is an inconvenient truth for this government. Kenney manages to convert the fact that the system does not confer refugee protection on all who seek it into evidence of system failure.
The legislation also gives the minister the power to decree certain countries as “safe.” This formalizes in law the presumption that a refugee claimant from one of these countries is a fraud. Many countries are safe for most people most of the time. Refugees are usually people who are marginalized and vulnerable, so designating a country as safe tells us nothing about the risks faced by the people likely to seek refugee protection.
The power that the legislation confers on the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration is broad, unfettered and virtually immunized from judicial oversight. He can throw people in jail, deny them a fair opportunity to present their refugee claim, inflict five years of forced family separation on recognized refugees, and hang the threat of deportation over their heads for many more years. All of this should be unimaginable in a country that respects the rule of law.
Remember, neither the minister nor we know with any certainty if a person is a refugee until that person has had a fair opportunity to present his or her case before an independent and impartial decision maker. The minister has done an excellent job of relentlessly vilifying refugees, and of encouraging us to believe that he “knows” that they are all bogus by the fact of their arrival. Don’t believe it.
