Submission on the Green Paper on immigration
May 1975
Mr. R. R. Tait, Chairman
Canadian Immigration and Population Study
Department of Manpower and Immigration
305 Rideau Street (Room 328)
Ottawa, Ontario
Dear Mr. Tait:
The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association would like to express its grave concern about certain aspects of the recent federal Green Paper on Immigration and to communicate this concern to the members of the Special Joint Committee on Immigration Policy.
A detailed commentary on the Green Paper from the BCCLA is attached, as well a copy of our earlier full submission to the Study (submitted December 1973). I would like to ensure that these materials reach the members of the Special Joint Committee. Can you assure me that they will be reproduced in sufficient quantity and forwarded? If not, may I please have a list of names and addresses of the Joint Committee members so that I may contact each directly?
As the attached material indicates, this Association’s major concerns are opposition to any quota system based on race, creed, nationality, religion, sex or class; and insistence upon inclusion of adequate due process safeguards in the mechanisms adopted under any new Immigration Act.
Respectfully yours,
Dave Robertson
President
BCCLA comments
The three submissions of our organization to the Population Study over one year ago dealt with limited aspects of Canada’s future immigration policy. Our further comments will be subject to the same self-imposed restrictions, dealing not with the broad and essentially political question of how many immigrants Canada should seek, but with the criteria by which those immigrants will be measured and with the processes by which immigrant selection, exclusion, and deportation will take place.
Speaking in very broad generalities our brief proposed the following:
- Our Immigration Act should continue to be non-discriminatory in terms of race, creed, nationality, religion, sex, class, or the like classifications.
- There should be no discretion to refuse admission to Canada of a person fully complying with the Act and the regulations in force for the time being. This is equivalent to saying that a qualified applicant has a "right" to be granted permanent resident status.
- The audi alteram partem principle should be applied more fully, so that just as no person in Canada can be deported without a hearing, no person should be refused a visa on the basis of allegations he or she has not had an adequate chance to dispute.
- Applicants should be permitted access to "guidelines" and interpretive materials an immigration officer may use to determine compliance or non-compliance with the Act and regulations. In short, all criteria to be applied should be available to those affected.
- Appeal procedures should exist to correct any error in 1aw, so that difficult or obscure Immigration Act provisions will be applied consistently, and no field level immigration officer can take unto him or herself the power to ignore even clear provisions.
- Refugees identification should cease to be tied to the hopelessly inadequate U.N. Convention, and realistic regulations for identifying and processing refugees should be substituted.
- In many respects, especially involving "security" matters, the new Act should be rewritten to conform fully with the spirit of Canad’s Bill of Rights.
- The current blunt weapon of deportation, with its subsequent ban on further applications through normal channels, should be discarded whenever the reason for refusing admission is "curable" (e.g., lack of money, lack of a visa, temporary medical conditions, etc.).
- The present ban on persons convicted of, or admitting to "crimes of moral turpitude" should be extensively modified, so that a specified period of good behaviour would entitle a person to apply for permanent resident status.
- Certain grounds of prohibition should be altogether eliminated, e.g., homosexuality, and epilepsy (unless constituting a serious medical condition).
The InquiryHowever, the Act should be further re-written to provide procedures that are fully consistent with the Canadian Bill of Rights; the Act in its substantive provisions should also cease to discriminate against persons for lawful speech, publications and associations that would be within the "guaranteed freedoms" of the Bill of Rights for a citizen of Canada. Our eighth point appears to be embodied on page 69 of Part I and points 9 and 10 may be suggested at pages 65 and 66.
This is a crucial aspect of Canada’s enforcement procedures. It is at the inquiry that officials under the law determine the legitimacy, when this is in doubt, of any individual’s claim to be allowed to enter or to remain in Canada. Since it is the inquiry process that may result in orders of deportation, it is imperative that procedures at this point be conducted with scrupulous regard to impartiality, objectivity, individual liberties and the rights persons in Canada enjoy under the Bill of Rights. The same considerations apply to immigration procedures with respect to arrest and detention.
However, the first six points listed above appear not to be dealt with by the Green Paper and we cannot consider them mere details. The great debate on the ultimate aims of Canadian Immigration policy must not be conducted on so lofty a plane that no provision is made for fair and impartial mechanisms to carry out the policy ultimately adopted.
But if we are disappointed that important safeguards of due process are not explicitly dealt with in the Green Paper, we are aghast that one of the policy options which is set out at pp. 42-46 of Part I is a nation-by-nation quota system. We had assumed that it was hardly necessary to go on record as opposing discrimination in our immigration policy on the basis of race, creed, nationality, religion, sex or class. The concept of setting quotas to cater to Canada’s "demographic policy" is one that appals us, belonging as it does to a past history of consciously racist Immigration policy. We cannot express too strongly our opposition to any form of national, regional or racial quotas, whatever arguments there may be in favour of a quarterly or annual global quota.