DETENTION STATISTICS 2002

CIC produces a weekly "detention snapshot," which shows how many people were in immigration detention on a particular day..

From these statistics, we can see that on any one day, during 2002:

– an average of 440 people were in immigration detention in Canada.
– of these, an average of 284 people were in provincial jails and the rest (156) were in immigration  holding centres.
– 72% of detainees were in Ontario, 20% in Québec, 3% in the Prairies and Territories, 5% in BC/Yukon and less than 1% in the Atlantic.
– despite its immigration detention centre, Ontario specializes in detention in provincial jails, with an average of 232 in jail, compared to 84 in the immigration centre.
– by contrast, in Québec, there is an average of 18 in jails, compared to 69 in the immigration centre.
– the recently opened short-term holding centre in Vancouver is not seeing a lot of business: there has been an average of just 3 people in the centre over the year.
– there is not enormous variation in the numbers detained over the period covered: the lowest was on 5 September (381 people detained) and the highest was 11 April (496 people detained).
– there were on average 11 minors in detention, most of them accompanied, but on any day there were one or two unaccompanied minors in detention.
– the highest number of minors in detention was found on 11 April (23 minors) and the lowest on 17 January (3 minors).
– of those detained, an average of 5 were detained for security reasons.
– the security cases are divided between those detained before September 11 and those detained after. According to these statistics, of pre-September cases, there are 3 people detained on security certificates in Ontario.  Of post-September 11 cases, the statistics show one person on a security certificate in Québec (since 10 January) and a handful identified as security related, but not on a certificate, and apparently mostly not staying long in detention, in Québec, Ontario and Prairies/Territories.

CIC warns us that that these statistics are manually tabulated and may contain inaccuracies.
 

 6 March 2003