“The FCJ Refugee Centre’s overarching concern with the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act is that they undermine important guardrails in Canadian asylum procedures, exacerbate precarity and legal limbo for vulnerable persons, and risk refoulement, contrary to Canada’s domestic and international legal obligations,” said Sharry Aiken, President of FCJ Refugee Centre’s Board of Directors, at the Senate of Canada.

Aiken was speaking on Thursday before the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, on the subject matter of Division 38 (Immigration and Refugee Protection Act – In-Canada Asylum System) of Bill C-69.

She appeared as a witness, along with Amanda Aziz, Co-Chair, Advocacy from the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers; Aviva Basman, President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers; Sarah Marinier Doucet, Associate Legal Officer, UN Refugee Agency, in Canada, from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and Azadeh Tamjeedi, Senior Legal Officer and Head of Protection Unit, UN Refugee Agency, in Canada, also from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

You can watch their full interventions, as well as the questions and answers session, in this video:

And following is a transcription of Sharry Aiken’s opening statement:

For more than 30 years, the FCJ Refugee Centre has established itself as a leading provider of wide-ranging holistic settlement and integration support for all uprooted people. With an open-door and holistic approach, FCJ Refugee Centre helps up-rooted people access justice and overcome the challenges of rebuilding their lives in Canadian society.

We serve and support precarious migrants including refugee claimants, refused refugee claimants, migrant workers, international students, survivors of human trafficking, overstayed visitors, people involved in sponsorship breakdown and others seeking to regularise their immigration status.

The Centre’s daily work includes providing summary advice and information to refugee claimants, helping claimants navigate the process of applying for legal aid, find counsel and to a more limited extent, direct representation by our own staff lawyer. The Centre also provides transitional housing for women and children.

The Centre is a member organization of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) and it’s Co-Executive Director, Diana Gallego, currently serves as CCR President.

The Centre’s overarching concern with the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) is that they undermine important guardrails in Canadian asylum procedures, exacerbate precarity and legal limbo for vulnerable persons, and risk refoulement, contrary to Canada’s domestic and international legal obligations. The Centre endorses the forthcoming brief by the Canadian Council for Refugees on Divisions 38 and 39 of the Budget Implementation Act (BIA) – which will be submitted to this Committee next week – and offers the following supplementary remarks:

1. Senators are being asked to approve significant changes to refugee protection procedures without knowing what the process will look like and whether there will be adequate safeguards to ensure that refugees are protected. The important details on how the proposed changes will actually impact refugees will be included in regulations that the public hasn’t seen.

Recommendation: Accordingly, we ask that the government be requested to table the proposed regulations now – and that hearings and a meaningful opportunity for input be convened by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

2. The Centre is concerned that “streamlining” measures proposed in the interest of efficiency will produce the opposite result (BIA 408, 410 & 411). The new gap between the eligibility and referral stages of refugee determination is likely to lead to backlogs and long delays for some claimants. For example, claimants whose Front-End Security Screening (FESS) is delayed could be in indefinite limbo. While waiting for referral, individuals will not be able to serve as an anchor relative for family members seeking to enter Canada from the US (under the Safe Third Country rules, the anchor relative must have a refugee claim that has been referred to the IRB for determination).

At the same time, many claimants are likely to fall into breach if there are plans to accelerate the timelines for submission of all required information to the portal.

Both of these concerns must be addressed with the introduction of appropriate timelines in regulations.

Recommendation: Regulations must provide for sufficient time on the front end to ensure claimants have adequate time to access counsel. There must be flexibility for claimants, who through no fault of their own, miss a deadline. Conversely, regulations must set a transparent deadline for the government’s opportunity to consider the information and documents – failing which, eligible claims will be deemed referred to the Refugee Protection Division.

3. Relatedly, the Centre is concerned that the aforementioned amendments will result in an unwieldy and unnecessary increase in abandonment proceedings and more precarity for vulnerable claimants in the face of simple mix-ups. For example: not receiving a notice to appear due to a change of address reported after the notice was issued. These are frequent occurrences in the lives of newly arrived claimants who struggle to find adequate supports in their first weeks in Canada. As proposed, the Minister is required to refer every missed deadline or failure to appear (BIA 412).

Recommendation: The Centre recommends that at a minimum the text of s. 102 be changed from the Minister “must” to the Minister “may” consistent with the current framing of the IRB’s own process for abandonment in s. 168(1).

4. The Centre has serious concerns about the inclusion of new provisions in the BIA concerning “Designated Foreign Nationals” (DFNs) – measures introduced in 2012 by the former Conservative government in an unwarranted panic about refugees fleeing war torn Sri Lanka. The DFN regime imposes mandatory, automatic detention on “designated” claimants, denies access to the Refugee Appeal Division for unsuccessful claimants and bars successful claimants from applying for permanent residence and family reunification for five years. While the BIA amendments may be relatively minor, technical “tweaks”, the inclusion of this category in the IRPA is deeply problematic, contrary to the values of equal justice and the Charter of Rights.

Recommendation: All references to Designated Foreign Nationals should be eliminated entirely from IRPA, (replace BIA 401, 403, 404, 405 with deletions of references in IRPA to DFNs), in line with the welcome but long overdue repeal of provisions relating to Designated Countries of Origin (BIA 415).