| Bill C-31 - What it means |
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INTERDICTION
Bill C-31 and the accompanying announcement aim at reinforcing measures
already in place to prevent "improperly documented travellers" from getting
to Canada. These measures have a particular impact on refugees, who generally
cannot get visas and often cannot even travel on their own passport. Yet
interdiction efforts are applied blindly, blocking refugees and non-refugees
equally.
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The government proposes to increase overseas interdiction by stationing
more immigration control officers abroad. Interdicted refugees are at risk
of being immediately sent back to the country of origin or put into jail
in the country in which they are interdicted.
Although the Act limits the enforcement activities that immigration officers
can undertake in Canada, the whole area of overseas interdiction activities
is left untouched by the bill. Giving a legislated framework to interdiction
would be one way of addressing the impact of these activities on refugees.
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The bill expands the offences related to organizing entry into Canada
or using false documents and increases the penalties for these offences
(S. 110-116). Persons who are found to be refugees are exempted (S. 126).
However, this exemption does not apply to others, for example family members,
who help refugees to escape. The bill says that the courts are to consider
offences committed for profit as an aggravating factor: this implies that
even when the motive is not for profit, it is still an offence. Thus people
whose only motive was compassion for someone fleeing persecution would
be punishable and could face extremely serious penalties.
The exemption for refugees also fails to cover people who are interdicted
on their way to Canada and therefore cannot claim refugee status here.
There are already cases where persons are interdicted on their way to Canada:
when their spouse in Canada subsequently tries to sponsor them, they are
declared inadmissible on the grounds of the crime of travelling on a false
document. Under the bill, the problem is likely to worsen, because of the
increase in both the scope of the offences and the penalties.
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Some of the provisions in the bill reflect the protocols on migrant
smuggling and trafficking in persons currently being negotiated by
Canada and other governments (these are protocols to the draft Convention
on Transnational Organized Crime). These draft protocols call for the criminalization
of smuggling and trafficking offences. So, for example, the bill adds a
new inadmissibility category (S. 33(1)(b)) for engaging, in the context
of transnational crime, in activities such as people smuggling, trafficking
in persons or money laundering. But while the bill includes enforcement
measures inspired by the draft protocols, we do not see reflected in the
bill the provisions in the protocols aimed at protecting migrants and victims
of trafficking. The trafficking protocol is to have a series of provisions
about the rights and treatment of trafficked persons. The migrant protocol
states that the criminalization measures are not to apply to people who
are smuggled into a country, whereas Bill C-31 gives an exemption only
to those recognized as refugees.