Viewing immigration law
through a civil-liberties lens
CHRISTOPHER GULY
In August, a ship carrying
nearly 500 Tamil migrants arrived
off the coast of Vancouver Island,
prompting federal officials to
screen them for potential terrorists and human traffickers as the
government considers measures to
prevent illegal migration and
human smuggling. (However,
numbers recently released by the
Immigration and Refugee Board
of Canada show in the first half of
2010, 345 Sri Lankans—many of
them believed to be Tamils—claiming refugee status were
accepted and only 50 were
rejected.)
Then in September, a new
organization called the Centre for
Immigration Policy Reform was
launched in Ottawa.
The centre, which includes
Martin Collacott, senior fellow at
the Fraser Institute and former
Canadian High Commissioner to
Sri Lanka, and Derek Burney, former Canadian Ambassador to the
United States and current senior
strategic advisor for Ogilvy
Renault LLP in Ottawa, lists
among its objectives a desire for
limiting the scope and duration of
temporary foreign worker programs.
Advocating that short-work
periods, such as those found in the
federal government’s Seasonal
Agricultural Workers Program,
are the “most successful,” it states
that “other countries have found
longer-duration temporary worker
schemes to be problematic in that
many participants come with the
intention of staying permanently
and often remain illegally after
their contracts have expired.”
Yet that position is where the
problem lies, according to Nath-
alie des Rosiers, general counsel of
the Canadian Civil Liberties Asso-
ciation (CCLA), who argues that
Canada’s Temporary Foreign
Workers (TFW) Program— which
is jointly administered by Human
Resources and Skills Development
Canada and Citizenship and
Immigration Canada —is “coming
close to slavery” in the way that it
currently operates.
She says that one change to the
program, which comes into effect
next April, imposes a four-year
cumulative limit on many temporary foreign workers’ employment in Canada and requires
them to wait four years before
they become eligible to temporarily work in Canada, “
commodi-fies” human labour.
“If we let them come to Canada
to meet our labour shortage, we
should allow them to stay here,
integrate into society, have chil-
dren,” says des Rosiers, who is on
leave as a professor in the Univer-
sity of Ottawa’s civil law section
where she was once dean.
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Real Property
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