Advocacy organizations have criticized the federal government’s border security proposal, stating it could infringe on the rights of migrants and should be scrapped. The Migrant Rights Network and the Canadian Council for Refugees, among other groups, held a press conference on Parliament Hill, expressing concerns about the lack of input from affected migrants on Bill C-12.
Karen Cocq, a spokesperson for the Migrant Rights Network, highlighted that despite the complexity of the 70-page bill, only three weeks were allocated for its examination, with no opportunity for impacted migrants to address the committee directly. The provisions in Bill C-12 were initially part of the government’s earlier border security bill, C-2, introduced in June.
The reworked legislation, C-12, encompasses various immigration and asylum-related measures, such as preventing individuals residing in Canada for over a year from lodging refugee applications with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. This restriction could impede individuals from seeking asylum based on evolving circumstances in their home countries, according to Gauri Sreenivasan from the Canadian Council for Refugees.
In response, the government has defended the bill, asserting that those ineligible for standard refugee hearings can still undergo pre-removal risk assessments. Additionally, C-12 would grant authorities the power to halt new immigration applications or revoke existing ones for reasons deemed to be in the “public interest,” a term deliberately left broad to address various scenarios, including public health crises or security concerns.
The bill is currently under scrutiny by House of Commons immigration and national security committees, with a clause-by-clause evaluation scheduled for an upcoming national security committee session. Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner intends to propose amendments, one of which would restrict refugee applications from individuals arriving in Canada from European or G7 countries.
Critics, including Cocq, view these amendments as reminiscent of a prior law from the Harper administration in 2012 that denied appeals to refugees from designated “safe countries,” a measure ultimately overturned by the Federal Court in 2015. Cocq emphasized that blanket bans on specific groups challenge fundamental principles of fairness in the immigration system.