A Few Reasons Why Bill C-31 is Bad for Refugees and Canadians 1) Bill C-31 is expensive.

Under Canadas present system, refugee claimants live in our communities. They are given work permits and access to basic medical care. The system work so well that Australia has just adopted this model for refugee claimants. It is more effective (and cheaper!) than keeping refugee claimants in jail. With Bill C-31, the Harper government plans to jail people making refugee claims who arrived irregularly (for example, they paid someone to help them escape their country) for one year without review. Presently, it costs about $200 per day to keep a refugee claimant in jail. That makes $73,000 per person per year in detention costs alone. With Bill C-31, refugee claimants from countries that the government decides are safe (called designated countries of origin) wont be able to work and pay taxes, as they do now. Canadian taxpayers will have to pay for these additional costs. 2) Placing the power to make life-and-death decisions in the hands of a single person (the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) is a dangerous first for Canada. A list of designated countries of origin flies in the face of the idea of granting refugee status on the basis of individual persecution. Without any expert oversight to designate countries that are safe, Bill C-11 makes Canadas system of independent decision-making for refugees vulnerable to politic whims and international diplomacy. Take the prime ministers recent trip to China as an example. The Harper government insisted that it was raising human rights concerns with the Chinese government behind closed doors. If the Harper government can be pressured to be silent on human rights, what prevents a foreign government from insisting that it be designated a safe country? And if China were to be designated a safe country for refugee claimants, how would this affect certain ethnic (eg. Tibetan) and religious (eg. Muslim or Christian) minorities in China? A previous law passed by Parliament, Bill C-11, would have set up an expert committee to designate safe countries of origin. This will no longer be the case under Bill C-31. Only the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration will have the power to designate safe countries. 3) No true appeal? No justice. In Canada, you can appeal a traffic ticket. In Canada, a refugee claimant cant appeal to correct the details of their story if they receive a negative decision or add new information to avoid being sent back to persecution. Bill C-11, passed in 2010, finally put an appeal in place for refugee claimants. Bill C-31 places limits on the plan from Bill C-11, making any appeal of a refugee claim unworkable. Under Bill C-31, refugee claimants from designated countries would not be allowed an appeal. For refugee claimants from other countries, they would have only 15 days to ask for an appeal and to file new evidence supporting their case. How is this fair? 4) Not enough time: The clock is ticking Under Bill C-31, the Harper government proposes 15 days for refugee claimants to submit their story and then 45 days (one and a half months) for individuals seeking protection in Canada to collect supporting documents, and to prepare and file cases. For some refugee claimants this timeline will be even shorter: 30 days instead of 45. On the other hand, the federal and provincial governments allow 4 months for workers to collect supporting documents and to prepare and file their income taxes. Refugee claimants often have to find and request evidence from abroad to support their stories. The authorities that manage their requests for information and supporting documents dont have to meet any Canadian time demands. In contrast, employers and others are legally bound to give you the documents you require to complete your income taxes within a few weeks. Pressure and deadlines are worse for some vulnerable populations such as sexual minority refugees or women fleeing sexual violence. They will be expected to share personal histories and traumatic experiences that may raise intense feelings of shame and fear. In short, they are allowed 15 days to paint a vivid picture of stories and details they have been trying hard to hide. So we can see how unfair and rigid Bill C-31 is. And consider this: for refugee claimants whats at stake isnt a matter of dollars and cents, but their lives.

5) Name-calling sets a poor example and doesnt represent Canadian values. Bogus or fake refugees cant exist. A person can only be recognized as a refugee after their case is heard and found to meet the international definition of needing protection in another country. Not everyone who makes a refugee claim is found to need Canadas protection, but that doesnt make them abusers. They may have compelling reasons for leaving their country, even though they may not meet the narrow refugee definition. You wouldnt call a medical student a bogus doctor, would you? So why dont we give refugee claimants the same respect? They are waiting for their hearing to determine whether or not they are a refugee. Like medical students, refugee claimants deserve respect regardless of the outcome. 6) Canada is backing down from the international model that it has set. If Bill C-31 passes, Canada will be trading places with countries like Australia and France in their ranking of how they treat refugee claimants. Evidence shows that Australias model of imprisoning refugee claimants on remote islands didnt stop refugee claimants from asking for protection. In fact, Australia is adopting parts of Canadas current system, allowing refugee claimants to live in communities and to work to provide for themselves. Why is Canada backing down from a proven model, replacing it with one that relies heavily on costly detention and social and economic isolation? 7) Canada is attacking its most vulnerable. You can tell a lot about the attitude of a community or a country by looking at how they treat their most vulnerable. Bill C31 destroys Canadas international reputation for tolerance and fairness. How will the new measures proposed by the Harper government affect Canadas reputation? As one refugee claimant put it when she learned about Bill C-31: Why does Canada want to destroy the land of hope and fairness it embodies and represents for people like us around the world? Why!? 8) Bill C-31 gives new powers to the Harper government to remove a former refugees permanent residence status. Bill C-31 contains new powers to strip permanent residents who came to Canada as refugees of both their refugee and permanent resident status. Why is this important? Before Bill C-31 if the government successfully argued that a person no longer needed refugee protection, but that person had received permanent residence, they kept their permanent resident status. Bill C-31 will change this so that if a permanent resident came to Canada as a refugee, the person can lose his or her permanent resident status if Canadian authorities decide it is now safe for the person to return to his or her home country, for example. 9) People coming to Canada temporarily will face new identification rules. Bill C-31 will require the use of biometric identity information: fingerprints and eye scans, for example. People coming to Canada - for work, as tourists or as refugees - will have to give this information to the Canadian government. The federal government will more easily be able to share this information with other countries, exposing refugee claimants to risks in their countries of origin. It also hangs a cloud of suspicion over anyone arriving in Canada, treating them as criminals to be tracked. Is this how we want to welcome people in need of protection, immigrants and visitors to Canada? 10) Who broke the system? Jason Kenney did. Theres a saying that goes if it aint broke, dont fix it. Jason Kenney wanted to create a refugee system after his own political views. So he had to break the existing system first, in order to fix it his way: first in Bills C-11 and C-4, and now in Bill C-31. How did this happen? Shortly after the Conservative Party took power in 2007, there were a large number of vacancies on the Immigration and Refugee Board. At one time nearly 40 of the nearly 120 spots were empty. This meant that many refugee claims werent reviewed in a timely way. The waiting time for a refugee determination hearing rose from about 9 months to nearly 2 years in a short time. And the backlog of cases rose from 0 in 2006 to nearly 45,000 at present. Jason Kenney is blaming the length of time it takes to process a refugee claim on an inefficient system. No system can work well without a competent operator and enough resources. So why blame refugees and a functioning system for a problem created by the Harper government?