Inside Canada’s ‘troubling’ shift on migrant, refugee rights
Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, Al Jazeera, 17/6/2026
When Diana Gallego listened to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s widely touted speech at the World Economic Forum at the start of this year, she couldn’t help but feel a disconnect.
Carney had made an impassioned plea to the world’s “middle powers” to break with a United States-led international order that he said was no longer working, and his words found receptive audiences around the world.
But for Gallego, co-executive director of FCJ Refugee Centre, an organisation that supports refugees and asylum seekers in Canada’s largest city, the prime minister’s statements rang hollow amid his government’s hardening approach to immigration.
“We saw the [prime] minister going to Davos [with] this beautiful discourse, saying we should not copy our neighbours … But internally, the policies are telling us another story,” Gallego told Al Jazeera. “Canada is closing the doors now.”
Gallego is among more than a dozen experts – from lawyers to professors, rights advocates and former government officials – who told Al Jazeera that Canada is at a “troubling” crossroads in its policies towards migrants and refugees.
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